Linked List: May 14, 2014

Wednesday, 14 May 2014

The Half-Century Anniversary of ‘Dr. Strangelove’ ★

David Denby, writing for The New Yorker:

Kubrick was thirty-six when “Strangelove” came out. It was the last movie directed by the young Kubrick — the ace filmmaker who put emotions right on the surface and moved quickly through charged narratives. He was superseded by the “visionary” Kubrick, the artificer of slow-moving “sublime” movies like “2001,” “The Shining,” and “Barry Lyndon.” Many of us who loved the drive and the sardonic wit of such movies as “The Killing” (1956), “Paths of Glory” (1957), “Lolita” (1962), and “Strangelove” never loved the late films, with their glacial pacing and coldly sarcastic tableaux, in the same way.

You’re going to have to answer to the Coca-Cola Company.

Design Is About Intent ★

John R. Moran:

The opposite of design, then, is the failure to develop and employ intent in making creative decisions. This doesn’t sound hard, but, astonishingly, no other leading tech company makes intentional design choices like Apple. Instead, they all commit at least one of what I term the Three Design Evasions.

Spot-on.

Coda 2.5 and the Mac App Store ★

Cabel Sasser:

Coda 2.5 is essentially complete. But, we’re still encountering sandboxing challenges. So, in the interest of finally getting Coda 2.5 out the door and in the hands of you, our very eager and patient customers, we’ve decided it’s time to move on — for now.

In short: Coda 2.5 will not be sandboxed, and therefore will not be available in the Mac App Store.

Please note that this doesn’t mean Coda 2.5 was rejected by Apple, rather that we’re going ahead and proactively making this call since all Mac App Store apps are required to be sandboxed and Coda 2.5 will not be.

Lots of good news here, too, though. Coda users who bought through the Mac App Store can upgrade to version 2.5 free of charge, and Panic has created their own (free) sync service to stand in for iCloud. But it’s pretty damning for the Mac App Store (and the sandboxing requirement in particular) that a top-tier developer like Panic has to pull an app like Coda.

Update: Daniel Jalkut points out that Apple awarded Coda “Best of Mac App Store” in 2012 and an Apple Design Award (for which only App Store apps are now eligible) last year.

Apple’s iOS Human Interface Guidelines Now on the iBooks Store ★

Federico Viticci:

The 20 MB guide is compatible with iPads as well as Macs running iBooks on OS X Mavericks, and it takes advantage of the app with inline video playback, two-page page layouts, and built-in annotations (plus, of course, font size and color controls for reading settings).

It looks like Apple did a nice job in converting the guidelines to iBooks, and annotations appear to be especially useful for developers and designers learning the principles of the iOS 7 visual language.

Nice work from Apple.

The iPhone and Japan ★

Takashi Amano, reporting for Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. boosted its share of the Japan mobile-phone market to more than a third after the country’s largest wireless carrier started selling the iPhone.

Apple boosted iPhone shipments in Japan to 36.6 percent of the market in the year ended March, up from 25.5 percent a year earlier, according to Tokyo-based MM Research Institute Ltd. The Cupertino, California-based smartphone maker shipped 14.43 million phones in Japan the past fiscal year, the researcher said.

Worth revisiting this vintage 2009 claim chowder: “Why the Japanese Hate the iPhone”.

Update: Worth noting that this is about total mobile phone market share, not “smartphone” market share. Mobile phone share is a much more meaningful number, because very soon all mobile phones will be smartphones. We’ll just call them “phones”. Apple’s smartphone market share has looked bad, and in many cases declined over the first half of this decade, because the rate at which all phones are becoming smartphones has grown faster than the iPhone’s share of all mobile phones. But that focus on “smartphone market share” has obscured the fact that the iPhone’s share of all mobile phones sold has grown ever since 2007.

iMessage Purgatory ★

Adam Pash:

I recently switched from an iPhone to Android, and discovered shortly thereafter that my phone number was still associated with iMessage, meaning that any time someone with an iPhone tried texting me, I’d receive nothing, and they’d get a “Delivered” receipt in their Messages app as though everything were working as expected.