Linked List: November 10, 2015

Tuesday, 10 November 2015

‘The Little Hamburger They Use on the Top’ ★

Matthew Panzarino spoke to Eddy Cue about the launch of the Apple Music public beta for Android:

Apple Music is a beta on Android, which means it’s missing a couple of features. Music Videos are not available on Android, and neither is signing up for a family membership within the app. If you already have a family plan purchased elsewhere, you can log in with an authorized Apple ID to get access.

Cue says they decided to go with the standard Android conventions when designing Apple Music.

“It’s a full native app, so it will look and feel like an Android app. The menus will look like Android, you know the little hamburger they use on the top. It’ll definitely feel very much like an Android app,” says Cue.

He makes the case that the best experience for an Android user would be to feel familiar with Apple Music right on launch. “We wanted customers on Android to naturally be able to use it — what they’ve learned and how they interact is common. Things as simple as [that] the share icon looks like an Android share icon; the menu structure being where it is; these are things that most Android customers are familiar with. We wanted to make sure that they felt very familiar with Apple Music when they sat down to use it.”

Trying it out on my Moto X, it feels more like a native Android app than Google’s apps feel like native iOS apps, but that just could be that I’m so keenly attuned to idiomatic iOS UI conventions. I wouldn’t be surprised if Android UI-super-tasters see Apple’s Music app the way I see Google’s iOS apps: foreign. But for example (in addition to the sharing icons and hamburger menu): Apple Music for Android uses Roboto, the Android system font; Google’s iOS apps use Roboto, the Android system font.

Mobile, Ecosystems, and the Death of the PC ★

Great piece by Benedict Evans, attempting (and I say succeeding) to define just what we should mean by “mobile”:

You can’t use the screen size or the keyboard to define ‘mobile’ as distinct from a ‘PC’.

It certainly isn’t the performance - at least, not for much longer. An iPhone 6S beats the Macbook on some benchmarks, an iPad Air beats Surfaces from prior years and it seems pretty likely that the iPad Pro will be close enough to a Surface for there not to be much point arguing about it.

If I were a betting man, I’d wager that the iPad Pro will outperform the x86-based Surface Pro 4 in most benchmarks — at least the Core-m3 and Core-i5 models that have already shipped. (The $1599 Core-i7 Surface Pro 4 isn’t shipping until December.)

The lines on the Moore’s Law chart are converging for anything with a battery. The same applies to the visible differences in the software. Saying that a PC is distinguished by multitasking and multiple windows is pretty short-sighted. It’s just software. It changes.

Meanwhile, most of the form factor differences seem to me to have little to do with the essence of the device. They’re a matter of superglue. If I superglue a keyboard onto an iPad and install Office, have I made a laptop? How many of those 1.5bn PCs are running applications that I cannot run on this iPad - and, to my earlier point, how many people will always need to run those specific applications? If I hack Android onto a Surface, and install Office, what exactly have I lost, or gained? Is the difference between a ‘smartphone’ and ‘tablet’ any more meaningful than the difference between a PC with a large or small monitor?

So well said. I would go so far as to say that this piece by Evans is essential reading before you read any reviews or analysis of the iPad Pro. If you don’t understand what Evans is pointing out here, you have no chance of understanding the purpose and potential appeal of the iPad Pro.

New York Attorney General Tells Daily Fantasy Sports to Stop Taking Bets ★

The New York Times:

The New York State attorney general on Tuesday ordered the two biggest daily fantasy sports companies, DraftKings and FanDuel, to stop accepting bets in New York, saying that their games constituted illegal gambling under state law, according to people with knowledge of his investigation.

The cease-and-desist order by the attorney general, Eric T. Schneiderman, is a major blow to a multibillion-dollar industry that introduced sports betting to legions of young sports fans and has formed partnerships with many of the nation’s professional sports teams. Given the New York attorney general’s historic role as a consumer-protection advocate, legal experts say the action will most likely reverberate in other states where legislators and investigators are increasingly questioning whether the industry should operate unfettered by regulations that govern legalized gambling.

You can argue about whether sports gambling should be legal, but it’s silly to argue that these fantasy sports outfits aren’t “sports gambling”.

Juli Clover, writing for MacRumors:

An app developer from Peppersoft downloaded InstaAgent — full name “Who Viewed Your Profile - InstaAgent” — and discovered that it reading Instagram account usernames and passwords, sending them via clear text to a remote server - instagram.zunamedia.com. […]

While InstaAgent isn’t particularly popular in the United States, it is currently the number one free app in both the United Kingdom and Canada, with thousands of downloads that puts a huge number of Instagram users at risk of having their information stolen. In the Google Play store, the app had between 100k and 500k users, and the install numbers could be similar for iOS.

Hats off to “David L-R”, who uncovered this.

Joanna Stern’s BlackBerry Priv Review ★

Joanna Stern, writing for the WSJ, has a more positive take than Bohn:

A few performance issues aside, the Priv is the first BlackBerry in years that I have loved using — and that I can recommend. […]

Typing on real keys with a phablet-sized 5.4-inch screen towering over them is odd at first, but once I found my acrobatic balance, my fingers were scurrying around at up to 60 words per minute. That’s about 20% faster than I type on my iPhone (though still 15% slower than on the BlackBerry Classic’s larger, wider, backlit keyboard).

The sculpted plastic keys were great when I had to write a lengthy email and make edits to a story. The keyboard also doubles as a touch-sensitive trackpad, allowing you to move the cursor. But even I, a former physical keyboard addict, ended up using the on-screen keyboard most of the time. It’s more convenient and easier to use one-handed. Our broad on-screen keyboards with smart predictive text have rendered BlackBerry’s classic keyboard the smartphone equivalent of a Colonial butter churn.

Switching to Android is probably the way to go, since the developer ecosystem for BlackBerry’s own BB10 never got off the ground. I’m not sure hanging their hat on a hardware keyboard is the way to go in 2015, though, even for BlackBerry. Like Joanna says, if they’d come out with this phone four or five years ago, maybe they could have kept their existing users. But today, almost everyone has moved on.

Introducing Six Colors Subscriptions ★

Jason Snell:

I love doing Six Colors. I’ve been doing it for 14 months now, and I want to keep doing for the rest of my career.

Our weekly sponsors allow me to assign Six Colors a big chunk of what I do with my overall work week (in addition to all the podcasting and freelance writing). But to keep the site thriving, it needs even more of my attention. That requires the support of readers like you. The more support Six Colors has, the more time I can devote to it, rather than taking on more outside work to make ends meet.

So today I’m introducing Six Colors subscriptions. This is a way for you to support Six Colors, either on a monthly or annual basis.

I’m in.

Dieter Bohn Reviews the BlackBerry Priv ★

Dieter Bohn:

Therein lies the beginning of the true story about the Priv. This thing is chock-full of really good ideas, badly executed.

Turn out the lights.

New ‘Star Trek’ Series Premieres in January 2017 ★

Star Trek PR:

CBS Television Studios announced today it will launch a totally new Star Trek television series in January 2017. The new series will blast off with a special preview broadcast on the CBS Television Network. The premiere episode and all subsequent first-run episodes will then be available exclusively in the United States on CBS All Access, the Network’s digital subscription video on demand and live streaming service.

Are they putting it on CBS All Access because it isn’t good enough to be a regular CBS show? I find that hard to believe, given how much complete garbage CBS airs. So I guess they’re putting it on CBS All Access because they think it’s appealing enough to get people to actually sign up for CBS All Access.

Will it have commercials? I’d find that unconscionable.

Update: Sounds like not only does CBS All Access have commercials — it has tons of them, and the streaming quality is crap. Terrible news for Star Trek fans if this is the only legit way to watch.

‘Steve Jobs’ Tanks, Pulled From Theaters ★

Luke Dormehl, writing for Cult of Mac:

Aaron Sorkin and Danny Boyle’s Steve Jobs movie had another disastrous showing at the box office over the weekend. With earnings declining more than 69 percent from the previous weekend to just $823,000, the movie was dumped from 2,072 screens — more than any other film.

By comparison, the new Bond movie Spectre took $73 million in its opening weekend.

Should have gone straight to home video.