Linked List: April 7, 2014

Monday, 7 April 2014

Tobias Frere-Jones, resurfacing after the recent unpleasantness with a new blog:

I re-read Maurice Annenberg’s “Type Foundries of America and their Catalogs”, tracked down business directories of the period, and spent too much time in Google Earth. But I was able to plot out the locations for every foundry that had been active in New York between 1828 (the earliest records I could find with addresses) to 1909 (see below). All of the buildings have been demolished, and in some cases the entire street has since been erased. But a startling picture still emerged: New York once had a neighborhood for typography.

(I couldn’t help but take note of Frere-Jones’s own type choices for his site: Benton Modern and Interstate from The Font Bureau — both of which he designed prior to the Hoefler deal.)

Second Best Evidence From Apple-Samsung Trial: Phil Schiller Email Exchange With TBWA/Media Arts Lab ★

Schiller’s “shocked” response to this guy James Vincent is spot-on. Seems bizarre too that Vincent composes serious emails completely in lowercase letters.

Tetris Played on a 29-Story Skyscraper ★

Drexel University:

As part of Philly Tech Week, Dr. Frank Lee’s latest creation — a two-sided game of Tetris on the 29-story Cira Centre — illuminates the Philadelphia skyline.

Update: More, including many technical details, in this great feature by Andrew Cunningham for Ars Technica.

The Verge: ‘Why Amazon’s Fire TV Is a Guaranteed Hit’ ★

David Pierce:

Amazon doesn’t innovate by crafting new product categories, like Apple does. It also doesn’t make much money selling its hardware. Instead, it takes all the data it gathers as the world’s biggest online retailer, breaks down exactly what’s available and what consumers want, then produces a piece of hardware that it can sell cheaply in order to bring consumers into its ecosystem. Just as Netflix created House of Cards to satisfy the particular tastes of its viewers, Amazon made the Fire TV because millions of buyers are already looking for it. To understand the Fire TV is to take one glance at Amazon’s best-selling electronics list: two Roku models, Google’s Chromecast, and the Apple TV are the only non-Amazon devices in the top 10. The world’s largest online retailer just took on all three.

(Via MG Siegler.)

Steve Jobs’s October 2010 Draft Agenda for Apple’s Top 100 Meeting ★

Fascinating email from Jobs to Phil Schiller, entered as evidence in the latest round of the Apple/Samsung patent trial. Makes me wonder, again, whether this legal fight is worth it for Apple. Far more of Apple’s internal dynamics have been revealed through this lawsuit than through unauthorized leaks in the past few years.

It does go to show, though, that Steve Jobs was keenly aware of Apple’s competitive shortcomings. They never show it in public, which leads some to perceive the company as more arrogant than it actually is, and perhaps even out of touch.

Recode has a few other interesting documents and emails that have come to light through this legal battle, but none are as interesting as this one.

Blue Bottle Buys Tonx ★

Mat Honan, writing for Wired:

It’s also a good deal for Tonx, which was attempting to raise more money to purchase its own coffee roaster (it currently has a contract deal where it rents one on the weekends) and open a store front. While neither announced a price, Tonx did abandon a $4 million fundraising round it had been pursuing recently. Presumably, the deal would be on par with that. It’s a big win for the three year-old roaster that’s based in Los Angeles, but lives all over the Internet.

“Tony and I were still bagging and boxing the coffee ourselves last year, spending all day just listening to podcasts” recalled Bauman. “Tony would go in and sometimes would take eight hours or so of just stamping bags. We’d go and just stamp and listen to [John Gruber’s] The Talk Show or This American Life.”

That’s good company. Congratulations to my favorite coffee roaster.

The Fallacy of Android-First ★

Dave Feldman, co-founder of Emu:

We launched Emu for iPhone on April 2, and we’ve pulled Emu for Android out of the Play Store. We hope we’ll return to Android someday, but our team is too small to innovate and iterate on multiple platforms simultaneously. We’ve concluded iPhone is a better place to be:

Our decision to build on top of SMS/MMS involved huge, unanticipated technical hurdles.

Even when you don’t support older Android versions, fragmentation is a huge drain on resources.

Google’s tools and documentation are less advanced, and less stable, than Apple’s.

Android’s larger install base doesn’t translate into a larger addressable market.

A nuanced perspective.

The Vast Discrepancy in User Demographics Between iOS and Android ★

Interesting on two levels. First, the content of the story — these maps and statistics show why simplistic market share comparisons do not even vaguely tell the story of the competitive dynamics between iOS and Android.

Second, it’s an interesting contrast in headline writing. I’m linking to a reprint of the story on Slate. Slate’s headline: “Here’s Why Developers Keep Favoring Apple Over Android”. The original, published on Business Insider: “These Maps Show That Android Is For People With Less Money”. When you look at the web page titles (what you see in your browser tab), the contrast is even more stark: “Apple vs. Android: Developers See a Socioeconomic Divide” vs. “Android Is for Poor People: Maps”.

How Politics Makes Us Stupid ★

Fascinating piece by Ezra Klein, for the newly launched Vox:

Kahan calls this theory Identity-Protective Cognition: “As a way of avoiding dissonance and estrangement from valued groups, individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values.” Elsewhere, he puts it even more pithily: “What we believe about the facts,” he writes, “tells us who we are.” And the most important psychological imperative most of us have in a given day is protecting our idea of who we are, and our relationships with the people we trust and love.

Kahan’s research tells us we can’t trust our own reason. How do we reason our way out of that?

This is one reason why I went to Build last week — I don’t want to fall into this trap. I want to find the best in design and technology, no matter the platform.