Linked List: September 16, 2015

Wednesday, 16 September 2015

Satya Nadella Uses iPhone in Onstage Demo ★

Eugene Kim, writing for Business Insider:

During the keynote speech at Dreamforce Wednesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella was put in a situation where he had to use Apple’s iPhone to do a demo — a sight that would’ve been unimaginable just a few years back.

“I’m going to first start on this iPhone, and it’s not my phone, but it is an iPhone,” said Nadella, smiling, as he walked to the podium to show Microsoft’s email app Outlook on mobile.

“It’s a pretty unique iPhone. In fact, I’d like to call it the ‘iPhone Pro’ because it’s got all of the Microsoft software and applications on it,” he quipped, apparently referencing Apple’s introduction of the iPad Pro last week.

Steve Ballmer is rolling over in his iPhone coffin.

Manton Reece: ‘Every Device Needs the Web’ ★

Manton Reece:

Apple has 4 major platforms now: iOS, tvOS, watchOS, and the Mac. It’s a dangerous precedent for 2 out of those 4 to not have access to the open web. Web services are only part of the story; HTML and the hyperlink are also both fundamental components of web access. A platform is too shut off from the rest of the world without them.

Not every platform needs the web. A watch certainly does not. The screen interface for a car doesn’t either. (That could be the third straight new platform Apple ships without a web browser.) TV seems in between. I think it’s ridiculous to think about a wrist-worn web browser. It’s not ridiculous to think about a TV web browser — but I don’t think the user experience would be good. It’s time to move on. “Every device needs the web” sounds like an updated version of “every device needs a command-line terminal”.

It could be that Apple plans to add WebKit to Apple TV in the future, but that they’re withholding it now simply to make it impossible for developers to create Apple TV apps that are merely thin web view wrappers — in the same way the original Macintosh, which shipped without any sort of command line, forced developers to write true native Mac apps.

Or it could be that Apple has decided never to open WebKit to developers on Apple TV. I’ve never seen a TV-connected device with a good interface for web browsing. Just leave it off, I say.

But either way, it won’t affect Apple TV’s success, and everything will be OK.

Subscription iPhones ★

Benedict Evans on Apple’s new iPhone Upgrade Program:

So what happens to the old phones? When you take that upgrade, you have to hand in your old one. They go into the secondary market, which is rather the dark matter of the industry - we know it must be large and we can get some sense of that from survey data, but we don’t have a solid number. One illuminating data point is the fact that for the last several years the number of iPhones that seem to be in China (if you look at data from companies like Baidu) has been rather larger than the number of iPhones that Apple’s financial reporting implies could have been sold there. Second-hand closes some of the gap.

The reason the whole thing makes financial sense is that you have to give them back your old phone when you upgrade to the new one, and those old phones are worth a few hundred bucks.

Apple’s ‘Move to iOS’ App Hits Google Play Store ★

So if Google made a similar “Move to Android” app, would Apple allow it in the App Store? They’d sure look like hypocrites if they didn’t — but App Store Guideline 3.1 states:

Apps or metadata that mentions the name of any other mobile platform will be rejected.

Rene Ritchie’s iOS 9 Review ★

Rene Ritchie:

After the radical redesign of iOS 7, which gave us a cleaner, more flexible experience, and the functional revolution of iOS 8, which extended and continued that experience between apps and devices, iOS 9 takes a moment to solidify and round-out everything that’s come before, and start us towards everything that’s coming next.

This includes making Siri and Search broader and more proactive, expanding Apple Pay, rebuilding Notes, adding transit to Maps, launching a News app, enhancing the QuickType keyboard and bringing multi-app multitasking to the iPad, amping up performance, extending battery life, tightening up security and privacy, and making the update process much more efficient.

Absent the radical and the revolutionary, then, iOS 9 has to deliver on the promise not of more but of better. After the giant leaps, it has to stick the landing.

Book-length and comprehensive, in the spirit of Siracusa’s Mac OS X reviews.

Stephen Colbert’s Stealthy Humanism ★

Megan Garber, writing for The Atlantic on Tim Cook’s appearance on Colbert last night:

Cook’s interview was, say what else you will about it, not fluff. It was funny, at points, but it was, more than anything else, serious. It had a distinct whiff of humanism in it — one that has been showing up in other Colbert interviews, as well. Which might indicate, just a little bit, what The Late Show is going to become as it settles into itself. Because when you hear a guest uttering the phrase “human rights” — multiple times! — on a late-night comedy show, that says as much about the show as it does about the guest.

‘Because of Apple’ ★

Nilay Patel on Twitter:

Gotta say that @gruber sounds way too smug about the pain coming to small publishers like The Awl because of Apple. http://daringfireball.net/linked/2015/09/16/johnston-block-party

Two points:

The coming reckoning for publishers is not “because of Apple”. It’s because of the choices the publishers themselves made, years ago, to allow themselves to become dependent on user-hostile ad networks that slow down the web, waste precious device battery life, and invade our privacy. Apple has simply enabled us, the users who are fed up with this crap, to do something about it. If aggressive content blocking were enabled out of the box, by default, I could see saying the result is “because of Apple”. But it’s not. What’s about to happen is thus because of us, the users.
Perhaps I am being smug. But I see the fact that Daring Fireball’s revenue streams should remain unaffected by Safari content-blocking as affirmation that my choices over the last decade have been correct: that I should put my readers’ interests first, and only publish the sort of ads and sponsorships that I myself would want to be served, even if that means leaving (significant) amounts of money on the table along the way. But I take no joy in the fact that a terrific publication like The Awl might be facing hard times. They’re smart; they will adapt.

Hide & Seek ★

Hide & Seek is one of my aforementioned two favorite Safari content blockers:

With both Google and Microsoft, if you’re logged into one service, you’re logged into all of them. For example, if you use Gmail on the browser, you become automatically logged in when you use Google search. This means that Google can (and does) associate your search query with your Google account. To counter this, you can use Hide & Seek to hide your identity in Google search, while still staying logged into Gmail.

Before using Hide & Seek, you’ll have to decide which Google and Bing services you’d like to use logged out. Then, configure Hide & Seek to hide your identity in those services. After that, you can search as usual and your searches will be performed as a logged out user. You can simultaneously use other Google or Microsoft services (like Gmail or Outlook) in other tabs as a logged in user.

Note that Hide & Seek has nothing to do with “blocking ads”. It is simply about maintaining your privacy and anonymity while using Google and Bing for web search. In my testing, it works like a charm.

A List of Content Blockers for iOS 9 ★

Dave Mark is compiling a list.

WatchOS 2.0 Delayed, Will Not Ship Today ★

Last night, writing about the expected release of iOS 9 today, I wrote: “iOS 9 probably ships tomorrow.” A few people questioned my use of probably, given that Apple had announced today as the ship date at last week’s event. Probably did read a little odd — in hindsight I would have written “is scheduled to ship tomorrow”.

But the thing is, I believe in Murphy’s Law, and in not counting unhatched chickens. And, lo, WatchOS 2.0, which was also scheduled to ship today, has been delayed. Here is the statement I received from an Apple spokesperson:

“We have discovered a bug in development of watchOS 2 that is taking a bit longer to fix than we expected. We will not release watchOS 2 today but will shortly.”

Tim Cook on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert ★

If you want to skip ahead, Cook’s segment starts around the 27:00 mark. He and Colbert were both great. Unless I’m forgetting something, Steve Jobs never appeared on a live audience talk show.

Update: On the Mac, CBS’s video player requires Flash Player — it doesn’t even work with the Develop menu trick of changing your user agent to that of an iOS device. That’s absurd in 2015. It works fine on iOS, but if you’re stuck on a Mac, here’s a clip they released on YouTube where Cook talks about why he came out as gay.

CBS: get your shit together.

Welcome to the Block Party ★

Casey Johnston has a interesting piece for The Awl on the reckoning that’s coming when ad-blocking goes mainstream with iOS 9:

The Awl’s publisher Michael Macher told me that “the percentage of the network’s revenue that is blockable by adblocking technology hovers around seventy-five to eighty-five percent.”

They better move fast. iOS 9 probably ships tomorrow.