Linked List: January 15, 2015

Thursday, 15 January 2015

Monument Valley in Numbers 

Fascinating look at the download and revenue numbers for Ustwogames’s fantastic game, Monument Valley. iOS positively dominates Android in terms of sales and revenue.

Touché, Xiaomi 

Ben Thompson noted Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun mocking the iPhone 6’s camera bump during his introduction of the bump-less Mi Note. Ouch. (The Mi Note is 6.95mm thick; the iPhone 6 Plus is 7.1mm thick.)

I’d wager a handsome sum the iPhone 6 Plus takes better photos than the Mi Note, but it’s rare for Apple to leave an opening like this for design mockery.

See Also: Thompson’s full live event coverage.

Amazon Debuts 13 New TV Show Pilots 

Speaking of Amazon Instant Video, Jacob Kastrenakes reports for The Verge:

Riding off of some huge news — its first Golden Globes win and a major commitment from Woody Allen — Amazon is debuting its next set of TV pilots for viewers to watch and vote on. As usual, there are a lot of options here and a lot of big names. The favorite so far appears to be an adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s alternate-history Nazi novel The Man in the High Castle, which has Ridley Scott producing. The Civil War drama Point of Honor is another interesting pilot, with Lost showrunner Carlton Cuse behind its script. The other immediate standout is The New Yorker Presents, which is a mixture of fiction, documentary, and poetry all mashed up that tries to replicate the experience of reading the magazine.

Amazon Instant Video and Apple TV 

Jenelle Riley, writing for Variety: “Golden Globes Winner Amazon Is Hollywood’s ‘New Best Friend’”:

With two major wins at the Golden Globes, Amazon Studios is now a contender in Hollywood. The digital network earned its bona fides as a competitive force in TV by landing trophies for best comedy for its critically praised “Transparent” and actor for series star Jeffrey Tambor.

Like its SVOD rival Netflix, Amazon has been surprisingly quick to field awards-bait fare. The ecommerce giant only ramped up its original programming activities in late 2013 with the launch of comedies “Alpha House” and “Betas.”

“Transparent,” which bowed as a series in September after its pilot debuted in February, has been the most talked-about and critically praised entry from Amazon so far. Tambor’s no-holds-barred portrayal of a transgender person ensured the show would get attention at a time when transgender issues are gaining prominence in mainstream media.

With their just-announced untitled project by Woody Allen, Amazon is set to have an even better line-up of shows. Which makes me think about how Amazon Instant Video is conspicuously missing from the “channels” on Apple TV. I realize Amazon is one of Apple’s corporate rivals, but so too is Google, and YouTube is on Apple TV. You can watch Amazon Instant Video on Apple TV over AirPlay, but that’s a second-rate experience.

I had no idea. I had been under the impression for years that “Google Now” was the catch-all name for all of Android’s “talk to your phone” stuff, much like how “Siri” encompasses things like dictation.

Google Glass ‘Graduates’ From Google Labs 

Google Glass:

As we look to the road ahead, we realize that we’ve outgrown the lab and so we’re officially “graduating” from Google[x] to be our own team here at Google. We’re thrilled to be moving even more from concept to reality.

As part of this transition, we’re closing the Explorer Program so we can focus on what’s coming next. January 19 will be the last day to get the Glass Explorer Edition. In the meantime, we’re continuing to build for the future, and you’ll start to see future versions of Glass when they’re ready. (For now, no peeking.)

What would they have had to do to flunk?

Mobile Platforms and Technical Debt 

Another solid piece by Benedict Evans (he’s been on fire recently):

But the underlying philosophies remain very different - for Apple the device is smart and the cloud is dumb storage, while for Google the cloud is smart and the device is dumb glass. Those assumptions and trade-offs remain very strongly entrenched. Meanwhile, the next phases of smartphones (messaging apps as platforms and watches as a dominant interface?) will test all the assumptions again.

Resetting the Score 

Great piece by Benedict Evans, comparing the iPhone to the HMS Dreadnought, the first modern naval battleship:

The Dreadnought also created a problem. The Royal Navy had been funded since 1889 on the ‘Two Power’ rule — that it would not only be the strongest in the world but that it would also be stronger than the next two largest navies combined. Hence, the day before the Dreadnought was launched it had 32 battleships where Germany had 11 — a huge lead. The day after, it effectively only had one. It had to start again. The naval supremacy question was reset.

This is rather what the iPhone did, to both the mobile business and the entire consumer technology industry. All the existing parameters and entrenched advantages went away and the whole market was reset to zero.

The Siri Standard 

Daniel Jalkut:

A world in which every group at Apple somehow achieved the standard of apparent progress that Siri has achieved would be a very good world indeed.

Michael Tsai on Siri Reliability 

Michael Tsai:

Mostly what I have noticed is that Siri is a lot more reliable than it used to be. I had stopped using it because for years it would essentially throw away what I’d said. It was either unavailable (most of the time) or it didn’t understand me properly (less often). Now I regularly use it to make reminders while driving, and it pretty much always works.

Same for me with speech-to-text translation (which isn’t part of Siri per se, but which Siri depends upon for input). I mostly gave up on it a few years ago, because too many times, I’d dictate something, the purple spinner would spin for a few seconds, and then nothing. I can’t remember the last time that happened to me now, though — and I find myself dictating texts all the time while walking through the city.

On OS X 10.10 DNS Problems 

Iljitsch van Beijnum, writing for Ars Technica:

For 12 years, the mDNSResponder service managed a surprisingly large part of our Mac’s networking, and it managed this task well. But as of OS X 10.10, the mDNSResponder has been replaced with discoveryd, which does the same thing. Mostly. Here are some strange networking problems we’ve observed since installing 10.10:

He has a good rundown of the networking related problems people are seeing on Yosemite, and I think these bugs in the new discoveryd daemon are a common source of the recent “functional high ground” frustrations.

But his advice at the end of the article — step-by-step instructions for replacing discoveryd with the old mDNSResponder from OS X 10.9 — is insane. Or at least, you’d have to be insane to follow his instructions on a machine you want to do production work on, and which you want to work properly with future OS updates from Apple. (It’s interesting though, that he claims Handoff and AirDrop still work after making the switch.)

Swift’s Remarkable Rise in the RedMonk Programming Language Rankings 

Stephen O’Grady:

As was said during the Q3 rankings which marked its debut, “Swift is a language that is going to be a lot more popular, and very soon.” Even so, the growth that Swift experienced is essentially unprecedented in the history of these rankings. When we see dramatic growth from a language it typically has jumped somewhere between 5 and 10 spots, and the closer the language gets to the Top 20 or within it, the more difficult growth is to come by. And yet Swift has gone from our 68th ranked language during Q3 to number 22 this quarter, a jump of 46 spots. […] Given this dramatic ascension, it seems reasonable to expect that the Q3 rankings this year will see Swift as a Top 20 language.

Not sure if Swift could be gaining in popularity more quickly than this.