Linked List: November 2014

Sunday, 30 November 2014

The Talk Show: ‘Like a Butt Crack’ 

Special guest Christa Mrgan joins the show to talk about Yosemite UI design, Apple TV’s aesthetics (and its shitty IR remote control), Apple Watch speculation (including using it as an Apple TV remote), the Watch’s new San Francisco font, bling in icon design, and more. It’s a Thanksgiving week design-focused spectacular.

Brought to you by three great sponsors:

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Friday, 28 November 2014

The New Doxie Go Wi-Fi 

My thanks to Doxie for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote their just-released Doxie Go Wi-Fi: the tiny, rechargeable document and receipt scanner that scans anywhere — no computer required — then syncs wirelessly to your Mac, iPhone, and iPad.

Doxie’s elegant Mac and iOS apps make it easy to go paperless. Doxie handles any workflow — save scans to your desktop, share with your favorite apps, or send to cloud services like Evernote and Dropbox. Their new open developer API lets you build Doxie support into your service, software, or personal paperless workflow.

Even better: just for Daring Fireball readers, get $50 off now until Tuesday (December 2) with this special order link.

Thursday, 27 November 2014

Kevin Drum Is Pretty Thankful This Year 

Kevin Drum:

And one more thing: health care is suddenly a lot more real to me than ever before. Sure, I’ve always favored universal health care as a policy position. But now? It’s all I can do to wonder why anyone, no matter how principled their beliefs, would want to deny the kind of care I’ve gotten to even a single person. Not grudging, bare-bones care that’s an endless nightmare of stress and bill collectors. Decent, generous care that the richest country in the richest era in human history can easily afford.

Tuesday, 25 November 2014

Darren Wilson’s Testimony Is Unbelievable 

Ezra Klein, writing at Vox:

But on Monday night, St. Louis County prosecutor Robert McCulloch released the evidence given to the grand jury, including the interview police did with Wilson in the immediate aftermath of the shooting. And so we got to read, for the first time, Wilson’s full, immediate account of his altercation with Brown.

And it is unbelievable.

I mean that in the literal sense of the term: “difficult or impossible to believe.” But I want to be clear here. I’m not saying Wilson is lying. I’m not saying his testimony is false. I am saying that the events, as he describes them, are simply bizarre. His story is difficult to believe.

The whole thing is absurd. The medical examiner didn’t take photos of Mike Brown’s body because his camera ran out of batteries? The fix was so clearly in.

Android Gradient Screenshot Madness 

Peter-Paul Koch:

It turns out that there are differences between gradients on the various Android devices. This is not a browser thing, but an actual device thing. I compared the same gradient test on different Android devices in Firefox, Android WebKit, and Chrome, and found the same differences between the browsers. It became obvious that there are incompatibilities between these Androids’ graphical ... thingies, and that browsers don’t (can’t?) work around them.

So I thought I’d write a snarky post embellished with some screenshots. It was when I had made those screenshots that the other shoe dropped: the screenshots show different gradients than the screen. In other words, Android screenshots cannot be trusted to show subtle browser differences. Actual external pictures taken with a camera are mandatory.

(Thanks to Alan Hogan.)

Monday, 24 November 2014

Paul Ford on HTML5 and the World of Web Standards 

Paul Ford, writing for The New Yorker:

You might have read that, on October 28th, W3C officially recommended HTML5. And you might know that this has something to do with apps and the Web. The question is: Does this concern you?

The answer, at least for citizens of the Internet, is yes: it is worth understanding both what HTML5 is and who controls the W3C. And it is worth knowing a little bit about the mysterious, conflict-driven cultural process whereby HTML5 became a “recommendation.” Billions of humans will use the Web over the next decade, yet not many of those people are in a position to define what is “the Web” and what isn’t. The W3C is in that position. So who is in this cabal? What is it up to? Who writes the checks?

Ford achieves something extraordinary with this piece — it works well as an introduction to the world of web standards for the uninitiated, but works also as a cogent overview for those of us who are intimately familiar with the W3C (idealistic) / WHATWG (practical) political saga.

Ford is on a roll. It’s amazing how many of my favorite pieces of the last few months have his byline.

iPhone 6 Pixels 

Bryan Jones put the iPhone 6 (regular) display under a microscope:

When the iPhone 5 came out, Apple bonded the display to the glass in an effort to get the pixels closer to the surface and Apple has appeared to make the pixels in the 6 even closer still. Some of what we are seeing with the iPhone 6 may be a polarizing filter underneath the glass, but even so, the glass appears thinner and required less focus distance adjustment to get from the surface of the glass to the pixel on another microscope. I don’t know what that precise distance is in microns between the surface of the glass and the pixels, but it was a shorter distance as judged by rotation of the focus knob in the iPhone 6 vs. the iPhone 5. What this accomplishes is making the display appear to be higher resolution. The blacks are blacker, contrast is higher and colors are more vibrant, even with the same OS.

Retina OS X on the Original Macintosh 

Mike Solomon, writing at The Cleverest:

I saw this great post about how tiny the original Macintosh screen was compared with the current (and enormous) Retina 5K iMac screen.

So I thought I’d take the opposite approach. Below are 1-to-1 pixel mockups of how Mac OSX Yosemite would have appeared on the original Macintosh’s 512×342 pixel screen.

Saturday, 22 November 2014

Desk 

My thanks to John Saddington for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote Desk, his blogging app for the Mac. Saddington has been blogging for more than a decade, but never found a blogging app that stuck. So, he built one for himself, focused on what matters most: writing. It’s called Desk, and it’s exclusively for OS X. (And it has one of the best app icons I’ve ever seen — perfect metaphor, beautifully rendered.)

Desk has a simple, writing-focused UI. It supports both Markdown (of course) and WYSIWYG for editing, and has direct posting support for a slew of popular platforms, including WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Typepad, Movable Type, Facebook Notes, and Squarespace. Visually, though, Desk is utterly minimal — while you’re writing, everything fades away but your prose.

You can purchase a copy via the Mac App Store or check out Desk’s beautiful website. Or, follow Desk’s development through the Desk App Blog (written using Desk, of course).

Friday, 21 November 2014

The Secret Life of Passwords 

Terrific feature by Ian Urbina for the NYT Magazine:

Several years ago I began asking my friends and family to tell me their passwords. I had come to believe that these tiny personalized codes get a bum rap. Yes, I understand why passwords are universally despised: the strains they put on our memory, the endless demand to update them, their sheer number. I hate them, too. But there is more to passwords than their annoyance. In our authorship of them, in the fact that we construct them so that we (and only we) will remember them, they take on secret lives. Many of our passwords are suffused with pathos, mischief, sometimes even poetry. Often they have rich back stories. A motivational mantra, a swipe at the boss, a hidden shrine to a lost love, an inside joke with ourselves, a defining emotional scar — these keepsake passwords, as I came to call them, are like tchotchkes of our inner lives. They derive from anything: Scripture, horoscopes, nicknames, lyrics, book passages. Like a tattoo on a private part of the body, they tend to be intimate, compact and expressive.

Stewart Butterfield on Slack 

Stewart Butterfield, in an interview with Rachel Metz for MIT Technology Review:

I try to instill this into the rest of the team but certainly I feel that what we have right now is just a giant piece of shit. Like, it’s just terrible and we should be humiliated that we offer this to the public. Not everyone finds that motivational, though.

I love that attitude. Rather than be satisfied with Slack’s growth and success, he’s focused on how to make it way better, not just a little better.

Craig Hockenberry on WatchKit 

Craig Hockenberry:

Bluetooth Low Energy must be really low power: the design of WKInterfaceObject means it’s going to be on a lot. Every interaction with the watch has the potential to move actions and data between your pocket and wrist using the radio.

But more importantly, this API design gives Apple a simple way to put a cap on power consumption. We saw this approach in the early days of the iPhone and that worked out pretty well, didn’t it?

One final thought about the API design: your code never runs on the watch.

NY Post: Amazon Planning an Ad-Based Streaming-Video Service 

Claire Atkinson, reporting for the NY Post:

The e-commerce giant will roll out a new ad-supported streaming offering early next year that will be separate from its $99-a-year Prime membership, which includes a video service, sources said.

The ad-supported option — part of an overhaul of its media offerings — poses a serious challenge to streaming rivals such as Hulu and Netflix, analysts said.

When TiVo came out 15 years ago, we began using computers to let us skip past commercials. Now, with streaming, we’re using computers to present un-skippable ads.

Financial Times: European Parliament to Call for the Break-Up of Google 

Alex Barker and Murad Ahmed, reporting for The Financial Times:

The European parliament is poised to call for a break-up of Google, in one of the most brazen assaults so far on the technology group’s power.

The gambit increases the political pressure on the European Commission, the EU’s executive arm, to take a tougher line on Google, either in its antitrust investigation into the company or through the introduction of laws to curb its reach.

A draft motion seen by the Financial Times says that “unbundling [of] search engines from other commercial services” should be considered as a potential solution to Google’s dominance. It has the backing of the parliament’s two main political blocs, the European People’s Party and the Socialists.

Good luck with that.

I’m Sure Apple Will Get Right on This 

John Prisco, president of anti-virus software maker Triumfant, writing for TechCrunch:

Apple had good intentions. It kept everything close to the vest, with a closed off development community and rigorous control over applications. Apple has been brilliant at maintaining the purity of the brand and until relatively recently, that has been enough to provide additional protections against malicious attacks. But the genie is out of the iBottle.

Google, on the other hand, does allow this level of collaboration. With Android, security professionals can conduct analysis where it matters — with operating system-level interrogation and anomaly detection. With the Apple iOS, you can’t do that. You’re blocked off. What is then forced is an approach that requires only looking at the app with the AppWrapper. There is no way to develop a guardian for the operating system, so you will never be protected.

It’s not Apple who is in trouble because iOS doesn’t allow third-party anti-virus/security software to run at the operating system level. It’s the purveyors of anti-virus/security software who are in trouble.

Recode Drops Comments 

Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher:

The biggest change for some of you, however, will be that we have decided to remove the commenting function from the site. We thought about this decision long and hard, since we do value reader opinion. But we concluded that, as social media has continued its robust growth, the bulk of discussion of our stories is increasingly taking place there, making onsite comments less and less used and less and less useful.

A blog without comments?

Thursday, 20 November 2014

The Good Web Bundle 

Full membership on five great web apps/communities — MetaFilter, Mlkshk, NewsBlur, The Toast, and ThinkUp — at half price. A great deal and a great way to support five indie websites.

Wednesday, 19 November 2014

‘Get’ Is the New ‘Free’ 

Juli Clover, reporting for MacRumors:

Apple has changed the wording for free games in its App Store, and the app purchase buttons that once read “Free” for apps with no cost now read “Get” instead. The change has been implemented on both the iOS App Store and the desktop App Store. [...]

It is not entirely clear why Apple has decided to replace Free with Get, but it may have to do with the growing sentiment that apps with in-app purchases are not free. Earlier this year, the European Commission asked Apple and Google to implement changes to the way they sell apps, to avoid misleading customers about “free” games that are not actually free.

Red: A Kubrick Supercut 

90-second supercut of Kubrick’s use of the color red, by Rishi Kaneria.

(Via Coudal, of course.)

David Smith on WatchKit 

David Smith:

Today Apple unveiled WatchKit. I am very pleasantly surprised by how capable it is. In my Expectations for WatchKit article I outlined that I thought we’d see a two phase roll-out of the platform. Starting with pretty limited capabilities that would then be expanded at next year’s WWDC. It turns out that I was only half correct. It is two phase but the first phase is much more capable than I was expecting.

In the first phase we will be able to build Glances, Actionable Notifications and iPhone powered apps. The last of which has me most excited.

iMore’s WatchKit Overview 

Good summary of WatchKit from Serenity Caldwell. Or rather, a good summary of this initial release of WatchKit. As she points out, Apple even stated in its press release yesterday, “Starting later next year, developers will be able to create fully native apps for Apple Watch.” The long and short of this initial WatchKit SDK is that the Watch acts as a remote display, with limited interactivity, for code that runs in an extension on your iPhone. Apple Watch’s system apps are not limited like that — they run natively on the watch itself. Eventually, third-party apps will too.

In a sense, this is like 2007 all over again. The native APIs almost certainly aren’t finished, and battery life is a huge concern. But with the Watch, Apple is ahead of where they were with the iPhone. This initial SDK is limited, but it’s way better than the shit sandwich we got for the original iPhone at WWDC in 2007.

‘Trusted Places’ Feature Allows Location-Based Unlocking for Android Devices 

Ryan Whitwam, writing for Android Police:

Smart Lock in Lollipop encompasses both trusted face and trusted devices, but a new option is joining the party — trusted places. The latest Google Play Services for Lollipop devices is adding this option to the menu automagically. Just choose a trusted place, and your phone will remain unlocked when it’s in that geographic area.

Cool feature. I can’t find it, but I recall suggesting something like this as an iOS feature a year or two ago. Touch ID mitigates the need to some extent, but I still think it’d be nice to have my iPad remain unlocked while it’s in my home. (And it’s going to be a few years until most iOS devices in use have Touch ID.)

Update: Here’s a post from June where I wrote about it, vis-à-vis an Apple patent filing for location-based security.

Tuesday, 18 November 2014

Federico Viticci:

Right now, old tweets can be found in search by switching to the All tab of the Twitter app, and Twitter supports a basic syntax to filter down tweets for users and dates. I was able to use two different search operators for usernames and dates:

  • from:username — load all tweets sent from a user;
  • since:2009-04-20 until:2009-04-21 — load tweets from specific days.

Search operators can be used in the Twitter app and combined with hashtags and text to look more precisely in search results and find a tweet you’re looking for. You can even save advanced searches you come up with and reuse them at any time. And this makes for a convenient way to delete old tweets as well: find the tweet, and use the Delete button in the app to remove it.

What a great feature, and great technical achievement. The entire Twitter archive must be incomprehensibly big.

(Sure would be cool if Twitter made this available to third-party clients.)

1922 Cutaway Diagram of the Washington DC Evening Star Building 

Just gorgeous. This is why they made the iMac 5K Retina Display. (Via Kottke.)

Barbie Fucks It Up Again 

Pamela Ribon reviews the children’s book Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer. You know this book is going to be bad. You know it’s going to contain dreadful, harmful gender stereotypes. But it is so much worse than you (probably) expect.

I’ve been waiting to link to this piece all day, but Ribon’s website (the excellent Pamie.com) has been down all day because this has gotten so much attention.

Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt on Journalists 

Ben Smith, Buzzfeed:

A senior executive at Uber suggested that the company should consider hiring a team of opposition researchers to dig up dirt on its critics in the media — and specifically to spread details of the personal life of a female journalist who has criticized the company.

The executive, Emil Michael, made the comments in a conversation he later said he believed was off the record. In a statement through Uber Monday evening, he said he regretted them and that they didn’t reflect his or the company’s views.

Whose views do they represent then, if not his own or Uber’s?

Over dinner, he outlined the notion of spending “a million dollars” to hire four top opposition researchers and four journalists. That team could, he said, help Uber fight back against the press — they’d look into “your personal lives, your families,” and give the media a taste of its own medicine.

Michael was particularly focused on one journalist, Sarah Lacy, the editor of the Silicon Valley website PandoDaily, a sometimes combative voice inside the industry. Lacy recently accused Uber of “sexism and misogyny.” She wrote that she was deleting her Uber app after BuzzFeed News reported that Uber appeared to be working with a French escort service. “I don’t know how many more signals we need that the company simply doesn’t respect us or prioritize our safety,” she wrote.

I’m sure this will change Lacy’s mind about Uber. She’s probably re-installing the app right now.

At the Waverly Inn dinner, it was suggested that a plan like the one Michael floated could become a problem for Uber.

Michael responded: “Nobody would know it was us.”

There is something very wrong with this company. It’s like Richard Nixon came back from the grave and is running a startup.

Nokia N1 Tablet 

There are shameless rip-offs, and then there are shameless rip-offs. (But my son pointed out that Nokia’s speaker grills at the bottom have three rows of dots, not two, so that’s original.)

WatchKit 

WatchKit has dropped, including the Apple Watch Human Interface Guidelines. There’s much to digest, but a few quick thoughts:

  • The displays of the two watch sizes have different pixel dimensions: 272⁠ ⁠×⁠ ⁠340 for the 38mm Apple Watch; 312⁠ ⁠×⁠ ⁠390 for the 42mm.

  • The system font is named San Francisco. That rings a bell. There are two versions: San Francisco Text, for sizes 19pt and smaller, and San Francisco Display, for sizes 20pt and up. Display is set tighter; Text has bigger punctuation marks and larger apertures on glyphs like “a” and “e”.

  • From the Watch HIG: “Avoid using color to show interactivity. Apply color as appropriate for your branding but do not use color solely to indicate interactivity for buttons and other controls.” Can we get this HIG guideline on iOS next year? Update: Neven Mrgan thinks Apple means “use color not just for interactivity”, not that you shouldn’t use color alone to indicate interactivity.

  • A lot of WatchKit is about offloading processing to the iPhone — the Watch is effectively a remote display for an extension running on your iPhone. This should be good for Watch battery life, but limiting when you’re not carrying your iPhone. This is not going to be a “leave your iPhone at home” device; more like “leave your iPhone in your purse or pocket.”

Monday, 17 November 2014

Sony Announces New ‘Stacked CMOS Imaging Sensor’ for Phone Cameras 

Sony:

Sony Corporation today announces the commercialization of the Exmor RS IMX230 for smartphone cameras and other devices requiring increasingly sophisticated image-capture functionality. With 21 effective megapixels, this stacked CMOS imaging sensor features compact size, higher image quality, and improved functionality. This is the industry’s first CMOS image sensor for smartphones to be equipped with an onboard image plane phase detection AF signal processing function to achieve excellent focus tracking of fast-moving subjects. The High Dynamic Range (HDR) function, which captures both backgrounds and subjects clearly and vividly even in high-contrast scenes such as backlit locations, now supports high-resolution still images and 4K video recording. This new CMOS image sensor will ship in April 2015.

Looks impressive — and Apple has long used Sony sensors for iPhone cameras. (Sony’s specs only list video frame rates going to 120 FPS — the iPhone 6 supports 240. Not sure if that’s only for HDR video, though.)

Sunday, 16 November 2014

Igloo 

My thanks to Igloo for once again sponsoring last week’s DF RSS feed. Most “intranets” suck. They’re ugly, badly designed, and people wind up avoiding them by just emailing file attachments back and forth.

Igloo bills itself as “an intranet you’ll actually like”. I’d say they’re the intranet that doesn’t suck. You get all sorts of cool features, like Twitter-like microblogs, file sharing, comments on everything, and the design can match your brand across all devices. It’s easy to use, and easy to setup, with no technical expertise required.

Still need convincing? They even have a Sandwich video. Amazingly, Igloo is free to use for up to 10 people. Try it for free and see for yourself.

Wholesale Phone Company 

[Update: The site has been taken offline, but there’s a cached version hosted at Fireballed.org, which includes all the good stuff. It’s just missing an image or two.]

I tweeted this yesterday, and still can’t stop laughing about it. It’s a counterfeit iPhone 6 being for $250. So many gems on this web page:

This phone is the same as the Apple iPhone 6 without the Apple logo on the back of the phone or the iPhone 6 text on the white box (sometimes the phone comes with an Apple like logo). The internals of this phone are the same as the Apple iPhone 6.

And:

Do NOT pay $600, $700 or even $800 for the same phone.

The quality, finish & performance of this phone is the same as the Apple iPhone 6.

From the specs list:

  • Video recording: Yes
  • E-book format: Excel, PPT, Word
  • Screen resolution: 854⁠ ⁠×⁠ ⁠480 pixels
  • Gravity Sensing System

Who hasn’t enjoyed reading a good .xls novel? But it gets better: they embed an unboxing video from someone who specifically emphasizes in the video just how bad the performance of the phone is. The people selling this phone chose to embed that.

I think my favorite thing, though, is the photograph of a warehouse at the very bottom of the page. (Ripped-off, of course.) There are no words to accompany it, but the implication is that this enormous, airy, well-lit, clean warehouse is where they’re selling these phones from. Convincing!

I’m half-tempted to buy one of these on a lark.

Saturday, 15 November 2014

The Talk Show: ‘People Are Gay All the Time’ 

Who else but very special guest John Moltz to ring in The Talk Show’s centurial episode. Topics include iPhone display sizes (and in particular, our mutual preference for the old 5S 4-inch size over the 4.7-inch iPhone 6); the new book Moltz co-wrote, The Visual Guide to Minecraft; writing tools, including word processors and Markdown; shopping for gaming PCs as a Mac person; Microsoft Office going free on mobile platforms; Twitter’s stilted strategy statement; President Obama’s statement on Net Neutrality; and Tim Cook’s eloquent essay announcing that he’s gay.

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Friday, 14 November 2014

David Ruddock Compares the Nexus 9 and iPad Air 2 

I really enjoy reviews like this one by David Ruddock at Android Police. It’s often very interesting to read something from the point of view of someone more deeply attuned to another platform. This, from the list of “cons” for the iPad, caught my eye:

  • Is an iPad, will result in some people thinking you’re an Apple sycophant / the kind of person who lingers at coffee shops for 8 hours a day.

I often need reminding just how weird some people’s ideas are about Apple and Apple users.

Substantially, these few bits stood out to me. Battery life:

Standby life on the Nexus 9 isn’t fantastic, either - I’m getting around 15% idle drain quite reliably every 24 hours, which is absolutely at odds with Google’s 30-day standby estimate. Even if you don’t agree with my assessment of the usage time life, Android’s idle drain is still an absolute embarrassment. I could let my first Air sit for a week untouched and the battery gauge would barely budge - maybe a few percent. Android has never been great about this, and it doesn’t seem to be getting much better.

Safari vs. Chrome:

You can throw benchmarks and timed tests at me until you’re blue in the face - mobile Safari kicks Chrome’s ass every day of the week. The smoothness alone is evidence to me that while Google may care about a browser’s technical proficiency, Apple cares at least as much about its usability and consistency, if not more.

Chrome for Android’s usability is a victim of Google’s cross-platform utopian vision, and for now, it’s just not a fantastic touch browser. Safari may not always be faster in every benchmark or timed comparison, but it’s smoother in all the ways that matter.

The feel:

From a smoothness and stability standpoint, iOS 8 feels so much more refined and predictable than Lollipop does on the Nexus 9. Apple is known for obsessing over things like animation draw times and smooth scrolling, trying to create an experience that never feels jarring or rough around the edges. Apple seems to toil indefatigably to ensure those home screen swipes and launch animations are perfect every time. Moving to the more powerful A8X chip with three cores now means that smoothness persists even during app installs or other background operations, an area where the first Air occasionally would have difficulty.

This is such a huge thing, for me, from a UX standpoint. Google has tried to instill these values in Android with things like Project Butter, but it’s never seemed to pan out exactly in the way I think we all hoped would. The obsession with smoothness in iOS is almost religious. In Android, it’s always seemed like an attitude of “hey, if you can keep things at around 60FPS, that’d be great or whatever.” I realize animations and such things are far more aesthetic than functional, but they can have a huge effect on how you perceive performance and feel about a device. Using the iPad just feels nicer, I don’t find myself getting annoyed by it nearly as often as the Nexus.

This ties into one of my recent themes here on DF, regarding Google’s own iOS apps, and the asymmetry of the Google/Apple Android/iOS rivalries. Ruddock is clearly an Android guy, but more so than that he’s a Google guy. He can use an iPad and still have a Gmail app, still have a Google Maps app, still use Google Docs, etc. Google’s wide support for iOS makes it a lot more likely that an all-in Google platform user might prefer an iPad to an Android tablet.

Report Claims iPhone 6 Outselling iPhone 6 Plus by 3-to-1 Margin in US 

Take it with a grain of salt since the numbers don’t come from Apple, but interesting if true. 3-to-1 sounds about right to me. But there was an app analytics report a few weeks ago that pegged the ratio at 6-to-1, and T-Mobile CEO John Legere told Recode it was closer to 50-50.

Update: TV Pro — a TV guide app in Germany — is seeing the same 3-to-1 split.

Reuters: ‘Google Glass Future Clouded as Some Early Believers Lose Faith’ 

Reuters:

While Glass may find some specialized, even lucrative, uses in the workplace, its prospects of becoming a consumer hit in the near future are slim, many developers say.

Shocker.

(Via Abdel Ibrahim.)

Strictly VC on Nest’s Company Culture 

Connie Loizos, reporting for Strictly VC:

Sources who spoke to StrictlyVC and asked to remain anonymous say Fadell has fashioned a hierarchical structure reminiscent of TV’s “Game of Thrones.”

According to one employee, “Almost every decision, no matter how small,” goes through either Fadell or Matt Rogers, who cofounded Nest with Fadell and was previously a senior manager at Apple. (Through a spokesperson, Fadell and Rogers declined to answer questions for this story.)

“It’s always, ‘Tony and Matt want us to do this. We have to hit this deadline because Tony and Matt want us to.’ You definitely see people taking the path of least resistance because they don’t want to upset Tony.”

Another employee calls it a “huge meeting culture, to the point where anyone at the director level or up spends their entire day in meetings, many of them duplicative meetings about the same subject, over and over to the point where a lot of people have complained.”

Sounds like Nest’s acquisition of Dropcam isn’t going smoothly.

Are ‘Green Credits’ a Legitimate Way to Account for Energy Usage? 

Alex Epstein makes the case that Apple’s claim that its “data centers are powered by 100 percent renewable energy sources, which result in zero greenhouse gas emissions” is fraudulent:

Imagine this scenario: Apple CEO Tim Cook wants to take an ocean liner across the Atlantic. He has a problem. Ocean liners run on oil but Cook wants to be “green.”

What can he do?

Well, he could try his luck with a sailboat. But the wind is volatile and unreliable — not to mention that a wind-swept voyage across the ocean would be dangerous.

But then, when all hope seems lost, Apple Board member Al Gore offers an idea. Use an ocean liner, but install sails on top, so that at least part of the time the boat is at least partially powered by wind.

Epstein is the author of a new book titled The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, so he’s clearly coming at this from a certain perspective.

Wednesday, 12 November 2014

More Photos of Comet 67P From ESA 

Glorious.

Twitter’s New ‘Strategy Statement’ 

Twitter:

Reach the largest daily audience in the world by connecting everyone to their world via our information sharing and distribution platform products and be one of the top revenue generating Internet companies in the world.

That’s 220 characters. If any company should be able to fit its strategy into a single tweet, it’s Twitter. So clunky. Worrisome that they can’t express themselves clearly.

I can just see the argument. “Let’s call them platforms.” “No, products.” “Platforms!” “Products!” “Wait, I’ve got it: platform products.”

Benjamin Esham on Twitter:

I’m sure there’s an artful way to use “world” three times in the same sentence, but that ain’t it.

One Star Reviews Flood ‘Monument Valley’ Following Paid Expansion Release 

Eli Hodapp, writing for Touch Arcade:

I don’t know how many of those angry single star iTunes reviewers read TouchArcade... But, seriously guys? It seems like the hive mind of the App Store is continually pushing developers in to this unrealistic corner of demanding absolutely everything but not being willing to pay anything. The fact of the matter is Monument Valley is an amazing game, made by real artists, working in a real studio, getting paid real salaries, with real families they go home to and support. They’re selling their game for a total of six bucks if you buy both the game itself and the expansion. I don’t fully understand what happened to get us on this horrible Biff with the almanac timeline of Earth where this kind of thing is unacceptable to iOS gamers.

Two fucking dollars. I’m going to the App Store to leave a 5-star review; such a beautiful and original work of art, and the App Store rating is being trashed by cheapskate morons.

Landing on a Comet, 317 Million Miles From Home 

These photos from the Rosetta spacecraft and Philae lander are just hauntingly beautiful. Can’t stop looking at them.

ESA Philae Probe Successfully Lands on Comet 

Circa:

The European Space Agency (ESA) Philae probe successfully landed on the Comet 67P, a first in space exploration.

The Rosetta satellite and its probe payload arrived at the Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko Aug. 6 after 10 years, five months, and four days in space. Rosetta traveled 6.4 billion kilometers (3.98 billion miles) on its journey and orbited the sun five times.

10-year mission. 4 billion miles. Landing on a comet traveling 40,000 miles per hour. Science.

Tuesday, 11 November 2014

App as Calling Card 

Dan Provost, Studio Neat:

Tom and I have been reading and thinking about these things for a while, and a few months ago we had a realization. Studio Neat is in a unique position. We are not just app developers, we also sell physical products. Products that are meant to work with the apps in a way that enhances both, as is the case with the Glif and Slow Fast Slow or Frameographer. What if we make apps that are free with “ads”, but the ad is simply for our other products? You know, the products that actually make money?

It was an intriguing enough idea that we decided to try it, first with Slow Fast Slow. As of today, you can download Slow Fast Slow for free. If you are unaware, Slow Fast Slow is our app for manipulating the speed of videos with our interactive timeline. It works amazingly well with the new 240 fps videos on the iPhones 6.

Writer Emergency Pack 

Clever idea from John August: a deck of cards with advice, ideas, and tricks for helping writers get unstuck. Nicely illustrated and designed (including excellent use of Univers). It’s a Kickstarter campaign that aimed small and has exploded way past their original goal. But the coolest thing is they’re donating packs of the cards to youth writing programs, and the more decks they sell, the cheaper each deck becomes to produce, and the more they’ll have to donate.

The project is already funded nine times over, but if they can get a few more thousand backers they’ll enter rarified status as one of the top 1 percent of Kickstarter projects (by backers, not dollars) ever. And you can get in for just $15 — or, just $12 if you want to donate two packs to the youths.

Internet Freedom 

Fred Wilson on Net Neutrality:

This is about something more simple and more important. It is about making sure that the Internet remains open and free for innovation. It is about recognizing that the last mile of the wired and wireless internet is a natural monopoly/duopoly where scale creates massive advantages, just like the electrical grid and the water system. It is about making sure that the massive companies that operate these last mile monopolies don’t use their market power to extract rents from the entrepreneurs, developers, and companies that must go through those networks to reach their customers.

This is about keeping the Internet the way it has been operating for the past twenty years. This is a conservative idea. Don’t change something that has worked so well for so long. Don’t allow the telcos to start inspecting each packet and prioritizing some over others.

Monday, 10 November 2014

Apple Now Has a Self-Serve Site to Deregister and Turn Off iMessage for Your Phone Number 

Solves the problem where people who switched from iPhone to another platform were unable to receive SMS messages from iPhone users, because iMessage still considered their phone number tied to their iMessage account. The trick was always to disable iMessage on your iPhone before switching your SIM card, but no one ever thought to do that.

When they were designing the “use iMessage instead of SMS when texting from one iPhone to another” feature, I don’t think it ever occurred to anyone at Apple that someone might eventually want to switch from iPhone to another phone.

Visual Effects Are Not the Answer 

Stu Maschwitz:

We’re back to the trailer embedded at the top of this post. Maybe you think it’s funny, maybe you don’t. But what I love about it is that someone finally realized that this kind of movie would be not one tenth of a percent better with animated cat mouths.

Why Dr. Drang Likes Daylight Saving Time 

Dr. Drang, back in March 2013:

If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle of May through the middle of July. And if you check the times for civil twilight, which is when it’s bright enough to see without artificial light, you’ll find that that starts half an hour earlier.

This is insane and a complete waste of sunlight. Good for a nation of farmers, I suppose, but of no value to anyone in our current urban/suburban society except those people who get up and go running before work. And I see no reason to encourage them.

Good bit of follow-up to the DST discussion on this week’s The Talk Show.

Kindle Design Quality 

Marco Arment:

I was expecting better after years of Kindles being decontented into flimsier, lower-end devices, but I think it’s clear that Amazon just isn’t willing or able to make a premium, high-quality e-reader.

Amazon first made the Kindle in 2007 — it’s not like they’re new at this. The obvious answer is that they just don’t give a shit about making a truly high-quality product.

Jason Snell Reviews the Kindle Voyage 

Jason Snell:

Amazon’s been headed in this direction for a while now. The original Kindle screen was 167 ppi; the Paperwhite upped that all the way to 212 ppi. The Paperwhite’s screen is actually quite good, but the Voyage’s is still noticeably better. To put it in Apple terms, this is really the first Kindle with a Retina display.

Unfortunately, Amazon has invested all of this effort in improved reading technology only to find itself completely at sea when it comes to typography. The Voyage still only offers six typefaces — many of them poor choices for this context — and still force-justifies every line (with no hyphenation!), creating variable-length gaps between words just so the right margin is straight rather than ragged. A device that’s dedicated to words on a page, one with a screen this beautiful, deserves better type options.

It’s depressing that all my typographic complaints from two years ago still stand. Amazon hasn’t improved the typography of Kindles in any way since then, other than by increasing the resolution of the display. I’ll repeat now what I wrote then:

Amazon’s goal should be for Kindle typography to equal print typography. They’re not even close. They get a pass on this only because all their competitors are just as bad or worse. Amazon should hire a world-class book designer to serve as product manager for the Kindle.

They should either devise or license (from Adobe?) a world-class hyphenation-justification algorithm while they’re at it. I’ll never buy another Kindle device until they fix this.

Update: Numerous readers have pointed out that they could just use the excellent open-source hyphenation algorithm from TeX.

President Obama on Net Neutrality 

President Obama:

I believe the FCC should create a new set of rules protecting net neutrality and ensuring that neither the cable company nor the phone company will be able to act as a gatekeeper, restricting what you can do or see online. The rules I am asking for are simple, common-sense steps that reflect the Internet you and I use every day, and that some ISPs already observe. These bright-line rules include:

  • No blocking. If a consumer requests access to a website or service, and the content is legal, your ISP should not be permitted to block it. That way, every player — not just those commercially affiliated with an ISP — gets a fair shot at your business.
  • No throttling. Nor should ISPs be able to intentionally slow down some content or speed up others — through a process often called “throttling” — based on the type of service or your ISP’s preferences.
  • Increased transparency. The connection between consumers and ISPs — the so-called “last mile” — is not the only place some sites might get special treatment. So, I am also asking the FCC to make full use of the transparency authorities the court recently upheld, and if necessary to apply net neutrality rules to points of interconnection between the ISP and the rest of the Internet.
  • No paid prioritization. Simply put: No service should be stuck in a “slow lane” because it does not pay a fee. That kind of gatekeeping would undermine the level playing field essential to the Internet’s growth. So, as I have before, I am asking for an explicit ban on paid prioritization and any other restriction that has a similar effect.

It saddens me, and almost surprises me, that this issue has become so polarized along party lines.

This tweet from Republican senator Ted Cruz is utter nonsense:

“Net Neutrality” is Obamacare for the Internet; the Internet should not operate at the speed of government.

That’s just word soup. The only similarity to the Affordable Care Act is that Obama supports it. There may well be a rational, reasoned argument against Net Neutrality, but Republicans aren’t making it, and neither are the cable companies or cellular providers. Be wary of the side that can’t express their argument in clear, plain, unambiguous language.

Sunday, 9 November 2014

The Talk Show, Ep. XCIX: ‘The Smoker Channels’ 

Very special guest Merlin Mann returns to the show to talk about Comcast customer service, cable-cutting, Marlins Man (no relation) and his showboating-spectator predecessors, and the state of podcasting today. Also: daylight savings time and Roman numerals. You know, the usual stuff.

Brought to you by:

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Mr. Miller Doesn’t Go to Washington 

Matt Miller ran for Congress in west L.A. this year, and wrote about the experience for Politico Magazine. Fascinating, if depressing, “this is what it’s like” perspective:

Campaign fundraising is a bizarre, soul-warping endeavor. You spend your time endlessly adding to lists of people who might be in a position to help. You enter them on a spreadsheet (dubbed “The Tracker”) and sort the names from high to low in terms of their giving potential. You start to think of every human being in your orbit as having a number attached to them. You book breakfasts, lunches, coffees and drinks at which you make the case for your candidacy … and ask for money. Always money. You call dozens of people a day … and ask for money. When people ask how they can help, you mostly ask them for the names of folks you can … ask for money.

Friday, 7 November 2014

Meh.com 

I’ve been selling weekly DF RSS feed sponsorships since 2007 — just a hair under 400 consecutive weeks. I’ve never had one quite like this week’s. The sponsor is Meh, a new daily deal site from the founders of Woot. Here’s the sponsored RSS entry they wrote, in its entirety:

Fucking Amazon

I sold Woot to Amazon and they made it shitty. So I quit. Then I got bored.

I started A Mediocre Corporation with a few others from Woot. We just launched a classic daily deal site — only one thing for sale each day. Meh.

Oh, and since you seem to be into RSS, we put one together just for you, at meh.com/deals.rss. Of course you can also just go to meh.com.

The headline — “Fucking Amazon” was so bizarre that when it hit the @daringfireball Twitter account, I got about a dozen replies asking if the account had been hacked.

These guys don’t do marketing like other people do marketing. They really do have amazing prices on the products they sell, but the heart of Meh is what made Woot interesting back in the day: the writing. Click through and see for yourself. My thanks to them for sponsoring DF this week. Also: Don’t miss this great profile of Meh/Woot founder Matt Rutledge in D Magazine from earlier this year.

Apple to Sapphire Supplier: ‘Put on Your Big Boy Pants and Accept the Agreement’ 

Kif Leswing, reporting for GigaOm:

Even if you’re uninterested in GT Advanced Technologies, there are a number of details about how much power Apple exercises over its suppliers.

Squiller says that Apple did not ever really enter into negotiations, warning that GTAT’s managers should “not waste their time” negotiating because Apple does not negotiate with its suppliers. According to GTAT, after the company balked, Apple told GTAT that its terms are standard for other Apple suppliers and that GTAT should “put on your big boy pants and accept the agreement.”

GTAT’s take seems to be:

  1. Apple doesn’t negotiate terms.
  2. Apple’s terms were onerous.
  3. We accepted Apple’s terms.
Dan Frakes Lands at The Wirecutter 

One of the best sites on the web just got better.

Amazon’s Echo Chamber 

Dustin Curtis on Amazon’s hardware aspirations:

It’s an echo chamber. They make a product, they market the product on Amazon.com, they sell the product to Amazon.com customers, they get a false sense of success, the customer puts the product in a drawer and never uses it, and then Amazon moves on to the next product. Finally, with the Fire Phone, customers have been pushing back. You can’t buy a phone and put it in a lonely drawer, never to use it again, like you would with a Fire Tablet. You can’t dupe your customers by selling them a shitty phone, because a phone becomes a part of its user’s identity.

Marco Arment on Business Insider 

He’s spot-on about whether there’s actually any evidence of more developers going Android-first (spoiler: no), but the real gem in this piece is his dispassionate delineation of Business Insider’s web page design cruft in footnote 1.

Expectations for WatchKit 

David Smith on the imminent release of the first WatchKit SDK:

So to start with we will be given the ability to implement actionable notifications and Glances. This is what I believe we are getting with the SDK release this month.

It will only be later next year that full apps will be possible. It is not a stretch to think that later next year is code for WWDC next June. Likely along with WatchOS (or whatever they call it) version 2.0. There is a delightful symmetry with the history of iPhone OS, where we didn’t get a full SDK until 2.0 (though I’m sure people will similarly jailbreak to get a head-start).

An Established Product Category 

The lead from James Trew’s Engadget review of the new LG G Watch R:

I think it’s fair to say by now that smartwatches are no longer the “hot new thing.” It’s an established product category. The paint might still be a little wet on the whole idea, and some might argue there are areas that still need improving, but these clever timepieces are officially here to stay.

I find this perspective to be staggeringly shallow, but it’s an accurate reflection of what I find so inane about mainstream tech journalism. To say that smartwatches are “no longer the ‘hot new thing’” boggles the mind. They’ve never been the hot new thing. It remains to be seen if they ever will be. “Some might argue there are areas that still need improving”? You don’t say. This is as silly a thing to say in 2014 about watches as the same paragraph would have been about phones in 2004, or PCs in 1984.

Paul Ford: ‘The Sixth Stage of Grief Is Retro-Computing’ 

Put aside some time to truly savor this piece. So good, in so many ways.

Thursday, 6 November 2014

Microsoft Makes Full Office Suite Free on Mobile Platforms 

Nick Wingfield, writing for the NYT:

But in a sign of the seismic changes underway in the tech industry, Microsoft, the world’s largest software company, said on Thursday that it would give away a comprehensive mobile edition of Office. The free software for iPads, iPhones and Android tablets will do most of the most essential things people normally do with the computer versions of the product.

Just a few years ago, giving away a full free version of Office would have earned a Microsoft chief executive a visit from a witch doctor. Now, the move is following through on the rallying cry coming from Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s new chief executive, who has pushed cloud and mobile computing as lodestars for the company’s future.

Marco Arment:

It seems that Microsoft is finally accepting the reality of Office’s market position on smartphones and tablets. To some degree, Office needs to compete with the free Google Docs and iWork, but for many customers, it’s also competing with the idea of simply not using office apps (or using them far less often).

EFF: ‘Which Messaging Technologies Are Truly Safe and Secure?’ 

The EFF:

The scorecard includes more than three dozen tools, including chat clients, text messaging apps, email applications, and technologies for voice and video calls. EFF examined them on seven factors, like whether the message is encrypted both in-transit and at the provider level, and if the code is audited and open to independent review. Six of these tools scored all seven stars, including ChatSecure, CryptoCat, Signal/Redphone, Silent Phone, Silent Text, and TextSecure. Apple’s iMessage and FaceTime products stood out as the best of the mass-market options, although neither currently provides complete protection against sophisticated, targeted forms of surveillance. Many options — including Google, Facebook, and Apple’s email products, Yahoo’s web and mobile chat, Secret, and WhatsApp — lack the end-to-end encryption that is necessary to protect against disclosure by the service provider. Several major messaging platforms, like QQ, Mxit, and the desktop version of Yahoo Messenger, have no encryption at all.

I’ve never heard of any of the six apps to which they awarded all seven stars.

On Dropbox and Apple 

My pal Anil Dash served up a dose of his own two-year-old claim chowder.

Amazon Echo 

A wireless speaker with an always-listening Siri/Google Now-style voice-driven AI agent named Alexa. $199, or $99 for Prime members.

Update: It took me a few hours to collect my thoughts on this. First, I think it’s problematic that Echo is anchored in a room. How will anyone get in the habit of using this instead of Siri or Google Now when they can only use it in one room? In their demo video, the family seemingly bought three or four of these things, because they have one in their living room, kitchen, and bedroom. Your phone is in your pocket all the time. And if it is anchored in a room, why not combine it with the Fire TV? I want fewer gadgets in my living room, not more. If Apple did this it’d be a feature of Apple TV, not yet another standalone gadget. (And I think it’d be a great idea for Apple to add “Hey Siri” listening to Apple TV.)

Wired Interviews Google Designers on Material Design 

Kyle VanHemert, writing for Wired:

There’s also the risk that material design’s stringent rules could make for an unrelentingly homogenous ecosystem. Nicholas Jitkoff, one of the project’s lead designers, says Google is cognizant that it needs to leave room for third parties to express their own personalities. At one point in the development of material design, Google designers even made mock-ups of third-party apps themselves to see if they felt sufficiently unique.

In case that name doesn’t ring a bell, Jitkoff is the genius who created Quicksilver back in the day.

Wednesday, 5 November 2014

Uber’s Web App 

This is kind of amazing — it’s the full Uber app running as a web app. Really well done. I discovered this via this Designer News comment from Brock Whitten; he’s under the impression that this is what the Uber mobile app is using behind the scenes, that the mobile app is just a thin webview wrapper around this mobile web app. It might be for some platforms, but I don’t think that’s true for iOS — there are a lot of little things that are subtly different between the iPhone app and this website, even when running on an iPhone.

Rip-Off of the Week: Lenovo S90 ‘Sisley’ 

You expect things like this from Samsung and Xiaomi, but not from Lenovo. Just shameless. (The comment thread on this one is worth a skim too, but don’t start reading them with a beverage in your mouth.)

CNN Election Commentators Used Microsoft Surface Tablets to Prop Up Their iPads 

You can’t just expect people to switch to an altogether unfamiliar device because of a corporate sponsorship. iPads are essential tools for many people. Familiarity matters. Microsoft needs to focus on getting people to want to use Surface tablets, not use them because of a corporate sponsorship. This is just embarrassing.

It’s Really Alex King’s Share Icon 

I knew this, but at some point forgot — that sideways-V-with-three-nodes share icon was created by my friend Alex King back in 2007, released under four different open source licenses.

Google Maps Updated With Material Design 

Other than the status bar differences, it pretty much looks exactly the same on iOS and Android. Same colors, same fonts, same icons. New features include OpenTable and Uber integration.

Matias Duarte on Google’s ‘Share’ Icon 

Matias Duarte, “one year ago” (that’s the actual granularity of the time stamps in Google Plus), on why Google’s iOS apps use Google’s share icon:

The share icon Google uses in its properties (and the share icon that Android endorses) is a popular opensource icon and one that we feel well describes the connective nature of sharing. In a sense you could say we believe it’s part of our brand and that Google’s brand is to embrace the open and universal standard.

I keep wanting to say “Android’s share icon” instead of “Google’s share icon”, but the more I think about it, the more clear it is that Google is pushing a meta platform UI style, and Android is just one outlet for it. I don’t think they see their iOS apps as being Android-style, but rather Google-style.

Tuesday, 4 November 2014

Do as We Say, Not as We Do 

Here’s a video from last year, with three guys from Google talking about how to properly design apps for Android. Starting around the 6:00 mark, their specific example is about sharing icons. They recommend against using the iOS arrow-coming-out-of-a-box sharing icon when designing for Android, and instead using Android’s standard sideways-V icon. So far so good, right? “Follow the idioms and standards of the platform you’re writing for” is good sound advice.

But Google is doing just the opposite with nearly all of their iOS apps. They’re not adhering to iOS design idioms — they’re adhering to their own Material Design style. Look no further than the “sharing” button in the iOS YouTube app — it’s Android’s.

Nexus 9 Tablet Already on Sale for 50 Percent Off 

Ron Amadeo, writing for Ars Technica:

We’ve seen widespread complaints about the new “premium” pricing strategy for the new Nexus devices, and to make matters worse, the Nexus 9 didn’t really live up to the “premium” price. With a price cut this deep just a day after launch, we have to wonder if the Nexus 9 is really worth $400. On Google Play, the device is still going for $400, but this is definitely an eyebrow-raising move by HTC.

J2ObjC: Google’s Shared Logic for iOS and Android Apps 

J2ObjC is a “Java to iOS Objective-C translation tool and runtime”. Google uses it to maintain a cross-platform shared codebase for its mobile apps; internal logic is written once (in Java) and ported to Objective-C using this tool. But it’s only for non-UI code. Here’s why, from creator Tom Ball:

It’s regularly asked why J2ObjC purposely avoids translating UI code; after all, wouldn’t it be wonderful if a tool existed where a developer can drop in Android source and out pops an iOS app? Our usual response is that world-class apps need user interfaces that are tightly integrated with each platform, and that common-denominator attempts to span platforms provide degrades user experiences. As I found when working on Swing many years ago, customers notice the smallest deviations from a platform’s UI standards and generally find them off-putting. But non-compromising UIs are just one of the reasons we focus on translating shared logic.

I wasn’t aware of this; my thanks to Google’s Ray Cromwell for bringing it to my attention. What I find interesting is that Google is (wisely, in my opinion) hand-crafting their iOS UI code for performance reasons and to avoid all the well-known pitfalls of cross-platform UI code, but they’re using their cross-platform “Material Design” visual style. That is, they’re writing native iOS code to create Google-styled apps.

‘Fearless Genius’ 

Photographer/filmmaker Doug Menuez is excerpting some fantastic work from his new book, Fearless Genius, on Storehouse this week. Stories and photographs from Silicon Valley in the ’80s and ’90s. Right at the top, a fantastic photo of Steve Jobs. (Via Om Malik.)

Update: A whole page of Steve Jobs photos from the early days at NeXT.

Dan Cederholm on Refining the Dribbble Logo 

Dan Cederholm:

At small sizes, few will even notice the change, but it feels good having a more refined version in place now, knowing that’ll it hold up to whatever it needs to going forward. Also, the nice thing about refining as opposed to redesigning is that the old and new can easily coexist (temporarily of course).

So subtle, so nice. (Via Brand New.)

Monday, 3 November 2014

Left Hand, Meet Right Hand. Right Hand, Meet Left Hand. 

New promotion from Nokia:

Starting this Friday, if you purchase a Lumia 830 — our affordable flagship phone equipped with the latest version of Windows Phone 8.1 — through AT&T, you’ll get the Fitbit Flex activity tracker for free.

The Lumia handset division is now a Microsoft subsidiary. Microsoft, of course, being the company that released its very own fitness tracking wristband last week.

CNet Launches Quarterly Print Magazine 

That’s adorable.

Saturday, 1 November 2014

Midroll 

My thanks to Midroll for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Midroll is an ad network that represents more than 140 podcasts, including The Nerdist, WTF with Marc Maron, Comedy Bang Bang, The iMore Show, Relay.fm, and Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Star Talk Radio. (And yes, that makes this an ad for ads, which sounds funny, but is actually pretty clever if you ask me.)

Midroll’s illustrated whitepaper is full of interesting stats showing how effective podcast advertising is. Here’s one: 63 percent of their surveyed listeners say they bought a product or service after hearing it advertised on a podcast. Here’s another: 97 percent of first-time Midroll advertisers come back again. Podcast ads really do work, and Midroll is a great way to reach a large and diverse audience. Mention Daring Fireball when you contact them, and they’ll take 10 percent off your first campaign.

Jony Ive Talks About Apple Watch at SFMOMA Event 

Nellie Bowles and Dawn Chmielewski, writing for Recode:

“Obviously, you’re not going to read War and Peace on your wrist. But for lightweight interactions, for casual glancing, it’s absolutely fabulous,” he said. “And I think this is the beginning of a very important category. With every bone in my body I know this is an important category, and this is the right place to wear it.”

And because it’s a new product, he said there’s “a childlike awe and curiosity” about what the Apple Watch might do. As an example, he spoke about its alarm-clock function.

“Just yesterday, somebody was saying, ‘Wow, do you know what I just did? I set the alarm in the morning, and it woke just me by tapping my wrist. It didn’t wake my wife or my baby,’” he recounted. “Isn’t that fantastic?”

How exactly is that going to be useful if you need to charge it nightly?

Tim Cook’s Moment 

Lovely piece by Kara Swisher at Recode:

With his CEO status now as firm as it has ever been, and the company pretty unassailable, Cook seemed completely ready, criticizing his home state of Alabama in a speech there about its failures in the civil rights arena. “As a state, we took too long to step toward equality,” he said. “We were too slow on equality for African-Americans. We were too slow on interracial marriage, and we are still too slow for the equality for the LGBT community.”

That was this past Monday. At a dinner I attended earlier this week, what he said came up in conversation, and someone wondered what he was up to. With no idea about what he was about to do, I had only one response: “I think we are finally about to meet the real Tim Cook.”

And, while we might have known it all along about him, it’s nice to finally be able to say hello to the entire man.