By John Gruber
WorkOS — Agents need context. Ship the integrations that give it to them.
Linked List: February 5, 2015
Thursday, 5 February 2015
- Bill Carter on Covering ‘SNL’ and Lorne Michaels ★
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Longtime NYT TV beat writer Bill Carter, now writing for The Hollywood Reporter:
That’s one reason Michaels is given so much personal credit for the phenomenon of Saturday Night Live. He conceived a supremely effective formula, perhaps the only one that successfully could have sustained a live sketch-comedy/music show inside a landmark skyscraper, housed in a retrofitted radio studio originally built for a symphony orchestra. Even today, if you hang out in the narrow hallway outside Studio 8H when the show is in progress, you take your life in your hands from all of the castmembers, makeup artists, wig fitters, technicians and stagehands flying by, as well as the hulking sections of sets being shoved past you on dollies. And that has nothing to do with supervising the writing and performing and the periodic demands of recasting the thing. The show was, and is, a production marvel. “That’s Lorne as Einstein — the formula was his E = MC²,” says Jimmy Fallon, one of the dozens and dozens of breakout stars and writers Michaels has birthed.
And:
But if there is now a somewhat gentler version of the driven young visionary of the ’70s, that does not mean writers and performers do not still experience the intimidation factor. Tina Fey felt it. “It was like The Paper Chase,” she says. “People endowed Lorne with all this power. People wanted his approval in a personal way, but you literally needed his approval to get airtime — and many people lost their minds in pursuit of it.”
How The Times let Carter walk away is beyond me.
- Why Google Glass Broke (Spoiler: It Was Sergey Brin’s Fault) ★
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Well-reported Nick Bilton piece going behind the scenes on the disaster that was Google Glass:
From its unveiling in 2012, it was considered the Gadget, yearned after by everyone from nerds and chief executives, to chefs and fashionistas. It was the must-have toy that was going to set the gold standard for a new class of wearable computers.
It certainly captivated a lot of attention, but many people who follow technology saw it for what it was all along: early prototype hardware and software touted by socially inept nerds.
Bilton’s sources place the blame for both problems — that it was revealed far, far too early, and that it was a privacy and fashion disaster — on Sergey Brin:
At the time, unknown to anyone outside X, an impassioned split was forming between X engineers about the most basic functions of Google Glass. One faction argued that it should be worn all day, like a “fashionable device,” while others thought it should be worn only for specific utilitarian functions. Still, nearly everyone at X was in agreement that the current prototype was just that: a prototype, with major kinks to be worked out.
There was one notable dissenter. Mr. Brin knew Google Glass wasn’t a finished product and that it needed work, but he wanted that to take place in public, not in a top-secret lab. Mr. Brin argued that X should release Glass to consumers and use their feedback to iterate and improve the design.
- Apple’s Promotional Page for Photos for Mac ★
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New (I think).
- Yours Truly on Photos for Mac Back in June ★
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From the DF archive, back in June:
One of the things I heard at WWDC is that the new Photos app for Mac was started under the name “iPhoto X”. I think they abandoned that name because it carried too much baggage. The whole situation had gotten too complicated. iPhoto for iOS was ambitious but ultimately a failure — too complicated, too fiddly.
Post-WWDC, the way I hope Photos for Mac plays out is not that Apple offers a “pro” upgrade, but rather that extensions allow for third-party developers to improve image editing in Photos for Mac in a similar way to how they will for Photos on iOS. Photos for Mac will likely never be a true professional tool like Aperture was or Lightroom is, but it could be much, much more than a simple library. It could — and should — be something that works well for serious enthusiasts (a.k.a. “prosumers”) in a way that iPhoto never did.
No third-party editing extensions yet, but given that they exist for iOS, they’re inevitable for Photos for Mac. As for Photos for Mac starting life as “iPhoto X”, the ever-intrepid Steven Troughton-Smith found this while spelunking through the developer beta today.
- Jack March on the iPhone 5C ★
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Jack March, responding to a segment on this week’s The Talk Show in which MG Siegler and I talk about the purpose of the iPhone 5C:
I almost feel like the 5C was meant to fail, in fact, every time it was purchased was a failure for Apple. The phone was created to encourage people to buy the phone that gave Apple the bigger margins.
The biggest victory for Apple would’ve been to sell zero iPhone 5C’s, only made as a trap to get people to buy the more expensive model, and that’s a genius business strategy.
Selling zero of them being good for Apple is (vastly) overstating things, but I think it’s almost indisputable that one reason why the 5C debuted in 2013 was to differentiate the mid-tier model from the then-new high-end model. If Apple had followed their pattern from previous S-model years (3G to 3GS, 4 to 4S), they would have unveiled the iPhone 5S and simply moved the year-old iPhone 5, unchanged, $100 lower in price. That’s the same sort of strategy that led them to this year’s 16/64/128 storage tiering instead of 32/64/128.
But I still think this year, 2015, is the year the 5C was really made for. It gives Apple a lowest-tier (typically, free-with-contract) iPhone model that looks cool but still looks like it should be cheaper than the other phones in the lineup.
- What if the iPad Ran iPad OS? ★
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Rene Ritchie:
Imagine instead, like the Apple Watch, the iPad ran its own distinct version of iOS: iPad OS. Rather than stripped down version for smaller screens and batteries, imagine it ran an amped-up version that really took advantage of bigger screens and batteries, with a Home screen, interaction methods, and capabilities optimized for a tablet.
It’s an interesting thought experiment, but my gut feeling is that it wouldn’t be a good idea. If anything, I think the iPad and iPhone versions of iOS should become more similar, not less. (Why no built-in Stocks and Weather apps for iPad, for example? Why does the SD Card adapter only work on iPads and not iPhones?) To me, as the iPad has gotten smaller (with the Mini) and the iPhone has gotten larger (with the 6, and especially 6 Plus), iOS feels like a single software platform on a continuum of display sizes.
- Why the iPad Became Federico Viticci’s Main Computer ★
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Federico Viticci, MacStories:
The iPad is my main computer and iOS is my operating system of choice. […]
The iPad, for me, is a product of intangibles. How its portable nature blurs the line between desktop computers and mobile. How a vibrant developer community strives to craft apps that make us do better work and record memories and enjoy moments and be productive and entertained. The iPad, for me, is a screen that connects me with people and helps me with my life’s work anywhere I am. Transformative and empowering, with the iPad Air 2 being its best incarnation to date. Not for everyone, still improvable, but absolutely necessary for me. And, I believe, for others.
Liberating. The iPad is a computer that lets me work and communicate at my own pace, no matter where I am.
For all the handwringing over the decline in sales of the iPad, it’s worth keeping in mind that iPads are, price-wise and screen-size-wise, equivalent to laptop PCs. Even selling “only” 21.5 million iPads last quarter, add in the 5.5 million Macs they sold and you get 27 million PC-class devices. Imagine going back in time 10 years and convincing someone (a) that Apple would sell 27 million PC-class devices in a quarter in 2014; and (b) that this number was a decline from the year prior. You’d get locked in a loony bin.
Viticci’s details on how and why he chooses to use an iPad Air 2 as his primary computer show the wisdom in Apple’s forked product lineup, with iPads and MacBooks as wholly separate products and software platforms. Me, I feel like a fish out of water every time I try to use an iPad to do my daily work here at DF. But the things I love about the Mac are things that would overcomplicate the iPad.
- Every Frame a Painting: ‘Drive’ and the Quadrant System of Framing ★
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As part of his excellent Every Frame a Painting series on film analysis, Tony Zhou has a wonderful three-minute look at the framing techniques used by Nicolas Winding Refn in his excellent 2011 film Drive.
If you like Zhou’s work as much as I do, do what I just did and sign up at Patreon to kick in a few bucks for each new video in the series.
- The Design Evolution of Audio Hijack ★
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Christa Mrgan takes us on a visual history of Rogue Amoeba’s years-in-the-making Audio Hijack 3. I love these sorts of posts.
- Photos for Mac Built Using New ‘UXKit’ Framework ★
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Jason Snell:
For a while, iOS developers have complained that the UIKit framework they use to develop apps isn’t available on the Mac, making it harder to apply the same tools and techniques and code they build for iOS to Mac apps.
Today Apple dropped Photos for Mac via a developer release, and some developers are reporting signs that Apple has built this new app using something called UXKit, which sits above the Mac’s familiar AppKit frameworks and strongly resembles UIKit on iOS.
Very interesting.
- David Pogue on the Developer Preview of Photos for Mac ★
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Apple is releasing a developer preview of Photos for Mac today. David Pogue got an advanced look. Seems like a good start, at least as a replacement for iPhoto.
See also:
- Geoffrey Fowler Reviews the Amazon Echo ★
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Geoffrey Fowler:
The Amazon Echo has a few good ideas about how voice control might be useful in our homes. But I can’t recommend the Echo to more than the curious. (Amazon makes customers join a waitlist to buy an Echo, and doesn’t let owners post reviews.)
Interesting comparison of trivia question answers, pitting Alexa against Cortana, Siri, and Google Now.
- Seth Weintraub: ‘10 Reasons Why Google Should Buy the Remains of RadioShack’ ★
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Seth Weintraub:
In one swift move, Google could immediately have a bigger retail presence than Apple with almost 5,000 US stores, a rejuvenated workforce (at least to start with) and a somewhat lucrative business model selling carrier Android devices and accessories.
Over the first year, Google could manage continuing losses while training up current and new staff on Google products, redesigning the stores to be more inviting, and switching product lines to become more valuable. Apple and Tesla have both proven that high tech companies can prosper in retail. Microsoft and Amazon are both making efforts to get into retail as well.
It’s an interesting thought experiment, and the price — $50 million — is truly pocket change for a company like Google. But I don’t see how any company could go from 0 to 4,000 retail stores in the snap of a finger. Has any company new to retail ever successfully pulled off something like that?
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Speaking of The Talk Show, Bob Sherron transcribed an interesting point made by Ben Thompson on the previous episode:
“That’s what’s so brilliant about Instagram as a social network: there was a reason to use Instagram from day one even if you didn’t have any friends. That’s what’s so hard about getting any social network off the ground is just finding people, discovering people. Even Twitter today has this problem…”
In technology, this is called The Blank Slate, but it is not limited solely to screens. Anyone who has ever purchased a wallet has felt the disappointment when their sleek new acquisition bulges beyond recognition when filled with the garbage of their life. I’ve never designed leather goods but I have made a few web apps in my day, and those lessons can definitely be applied away from the keyboard.
- The Talk Show: ‘How Many Keys?’ ★
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New episode of my podcast, featuring special guest MG Siegler, reporting from London. Topics include last week’s blockbuster earnings report from Apple, the increasingly imminent Apple Watch, phone display sizes, the impact of China on sales, rethinking the intended purpose and success of the iPhone 5C, speculation on Apple’s 2015 product roadmap, and whether Bluetooth is the future for mass market earbuds and headphones.
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