Linked List: May 9, 2014

Friday, 9 May 2014

My thanks to Applause for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Applause is an “app quality company” that provides solutions for testing, build distribution, crash reporting, user feedback, and analytics — all of it focused on helping developers listen to users and improve their apps. Applause has tools for web, mobile, and even wearable apps.

Check out their website to learn more about how it works, and the integrated dashboard that brings everything together. Applause gives you insight into how people really use your app, and can help you make better decisions about everything from when to launch to where to steer your product roadmap.

Apple, Beats, and Black America ★

John Herrman, writing for The Awl:

Anyway, has anyone noticed that the loud and visceral reaction to Apple’s multi-billion dollar acquisition of Beats, the headphone and music service company, is kind of racist?

Clearly, some of the reactions may be racially-tinged, but the ones cited by Herrman seem dubious to me. Most of the head-scratching I’ve seen — including my own — is no different than if Apple were purportedly buying, say, Bose or Harman Kardon, for $3 billion.

Apple’s previous biggest acquisition was NeXT, all the way back in 1996, for $400 million. (It’s worth noting that $400 million was an enormous sum of money to Apple in 1996, and $3.2 billion represents just 2 percent of the company’s cash today, but still.) Tim Cook has long said Apple isn’t opposed to large acquisitions, but they’ve never made one. And Apple doesn’t have sub-brands. Apple is the opposite of a conglomerate. It’s new territory for Apple, regardless of any racial component.

If anything, as Micah Singleton argues at The Daily Dot, Beats’s brand stature among black Americans might help explain why this deal makes sense for Apple: 73 percent of black smartphone owners in the U.S. are on Android. Beats has brand appeal that Apple does not.

The other thing Beats has that Apple wants: its relationships in the entertainment industry. $3.2 billion? I still don’t know about that. But I’m no longer confused about what Beats has that Apple would want.

Massimo Vignelli Is Ill ★

Creative Review:

One of the world’s great designers, Massimo Vignelli, is very ill and will be spending his last days at home. His son Luca would like all those for whom Vignelli was either an influence or an inspiration to write him a letter. [...]

According to Pentagram partner Michael Bierut, “Luca said that Massimo would be thrilled to get notes of good wishes from people whom he’s touched or influenced - whether personally or remotely - over the years. Luca has visions of huge mail bags full of letters. I know that one of Massimo’s biggest fantasies has been to attend his own funeral. This will be the next best thing. Pass the word.”

Just dropped mine in the mailbox.

The Illusion of Life ★

Cento Lodigiani:

The 12 basic principles of animation were developed by the “old men” of Walt Disney Studios, amongst them Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, during the 1930s. Of course they weren’t old men at the time, but young men who were at the forefront of exciting discoveries that were contributing to the development of a new art form. These principles came as a result of reflection about their practice and through Disney’s desire to use animation to express character and personality.

This movie is my personal take on those principles, applied to simple shapes. Like a cube.

Wonderfully illustrated. UI designers would do well to study this.

Sure Seems Like Dr. Dre Thinks Apple Is Buying Beats ★

“The first billionaire in hip-hop, right here from the motherfucking West Coast.”

Jon Maples on the Apple/Beats Acquisition ★

Jon Maples:

While music purchases may be falling, it’s still a big business for Apple. So instead of creating another option in iTunes that would potentially cannibalize download sales, why not just buy a service and keep it separate? Streaming blows up: Apple wins. Streaming doesn’t pan out, well, they still have the iTunes store chugging along.

Best take I’ve read so far, and the first to make a case that the separate (and established) Beats brand makes sense as a separate entity from iTunes.

Hachette Says Amazon Is Delaying Delivery of Some Books ★

David Streitfeld, reporting for the NYT:

Amazon has begun discouraging customers from buying books by Malcolm Gladwell, Stephen Colbert, J. D. Salinger and other popular writers, a flexing of its muscle as a battle with a publisher spills into the open.

The Internet retailer, which controls more than a third of the book trade in the United States, is marking many books published by Hachette Book Group as not available for at least two or three weeks.

A Hachette spokeswoman said on Thursday that the publisher was striving to keep Amazon supplied but that the Internet giant was delaying shipments “for reasons of their own.” Hachette is one of the largest New York houses, publishing under the Little, Brown and Grand Central imprints, among many others.

Thank goodness the Obama Department of Justice saw fit to go after the book publishers to protect poor little Amazon.

Classic Joe Nocera ★

New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan:

Mr. Nocera made some serious factual errors in those columns, particularly in the second one, in which he also took Mr. Buffett to task, calling him “cowardly and hypocritical.”

After a complaint from Mr. Buffett, which I was sent a copy of, corrections were appended to the columns, and published in print. [...] But there’s a much bigger problem. The entire premise of the second column is built on a mistake: that Mr. Buffett had changed his tone after “licking his wounds” over the reaction to statements he made on April 23, including Mr. Nocera’s criticism. As Mr. Nocera told it in the second column, after several days of this embarrassment passed, Mr. Buffett decided to “bite back” by going on the offensive in a Fortune interview on April 28.

But that “remarkable interview” with Fortune — the so-called biting back — actually took place the same day as the initial statements, not after five days of wound-licking.

Typical Nocera hatchet job.

ZTE Starts Selling $99 Firefox OS Phone in the U.S., via eBay ★

Ina Fried, writing for Recode:

While Firefox OS remains targeted at first-time smartphone buyers overseas, China’s ZTE said Thursday it will start selling a model in the U.S. via eBay.

The ZTE Open C is listed for the “Buy It Now” price of $99.99.

What the hell, I bought one. (22nd one sold so far, according to the eBay page.)