Linked List: September 11, 2014

Thursday, 11 September 2014

Tentpoles 

Horace Dediu:

As in the Revolutionary User Interface story,  the symmetry in approach to the launch is telling, but what I want to note is that the three things which the iPhone was defined as being are no longer things that it is most used for.

Yes, the iPhone is still a wide-screen iPod which gets plenty of use but I don’t think anyone thinks that is a defining feature. It’s also a phone, but the Phone is just an app which, for me at least, is not frequently used. I communicate with my iPhone but the go-to app is iMessage or FaceTime or Skype or maybe Email or Twitter. Phone is something I use so rarely that the interface sometimes baffles me. And yes, it’s an Internet appliance. Browsing is something I do quite a bit but many of the browsing jobs-to-be-done are done better by apps. News, shopping Facebook and maps are “things which were once done in a browser.”

So I wonder whether the tentpole product-defining anchors used to introduce the Apple Watch will be faintly amusing a few years from now.

Timekeeping and fitness tracking, I don’t know. Those could fade in importance after we get a rich ecosystem of apps. But communication seems key to the Apple Watch concept — it’s the only feature other than the home screen with a dedicated hardware button.

Facebook and Politics 

Derek Willis, writing for the NYT:

The “Custom Managed Audiences” tool works like this: A campaign or group uses its own list of potential voters (or buys one from a state authority or private vendor) and uploads it to Facebook. The company then matches the names to its user base through databases managed by companies, such as Acxiom, that specialize in collecting information about individuals. This process effectively combines the electoral information it already knows about voters with their Facebook profiles: likes, group memberships, issues or even favorites. The process anonymizes the users’ personal identifiers but retains enough information to enable campaigns to target well-defined groups.

Eddy Cue on stage on Tuesday: “We’re not in the business of collecting your data.”

Can you even imagine what Facebook Pay would be like?

Apple Watch ‘Too Feminine and Looks Like It Was Designed by Students’, Says LVMH Executive 

The Telegraph:

Jean-Claude Biver, who heads the French group’s luxury watch division, said the US tech giant had made “some fundamental mistakes” designing the Apple Watch.

“This watch has no sex appeal. It’s too feminine and looks too much like the smartwatches already on the market,” Mr Biver said in an interview with daily Die Welt.

“To be totally honest, it looks like it was designed by a student in their first trimester,” added Mr Biver, who heads up the brands Tag Heuer, Zenith and Hublot.

“PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

iPhone 6 and 6 Plus Displays Demystified 

Great visual explanation from PaintCode regarding the new iPhone displays, particularly the clever downsampling used for the Plus.

Tim Cook Interview With USA Today 

Marco della Cava, USA Today:

Apple’s new iPhone 6 and 6 Plus both feature larger screens reminiscent of competitors’ devices. By design, says Cook. “It’s an incredible opportunity for us to switch people from Android to iOS. So yes, this is epic. It is epic,” he says.

That’s an honest take. There’s no use pretending that Apple isn’t last to the big-screen phone game. But now they’re here, and if you bought an Android phone just to get a big screen, now you have a reason to consider switching to iPhone.

How to Hide the Free U2 Album From Your iTunes Library 

Good tip from Kirk McElhearn. Me, I like U2. But I didn’t know you could manage your Recent Purchases list like this.