Linked List: December 15, 2016

Thursday, 15 December 2016

The Elephant in the Smartwatch Room ★

Neil Cybart:

There have been only three legitimate players in the smartwatch industry.

Apple

Garmin

Samsung

Combined, these three companies have represented 78 percent of smartwatch shipments over the past two years. Even more remarkable, no other company has come close to these three in terms of unit sales. Since the beginning of 2015, only seven companies have shipped more than 200,000 smartwatches in any given quarter. Out of those seven, one will soon be broken up in a fire sale (Pebble), another just announced it was getting out of smartwatches (Motorola), and two have shown little interest in releasing new smartwatches (Huawei and LG). This leaves Apple, Garmin, and Samsung.

Super Mario Run Is Out ★

Nice FAQ by Jeffrey Parkin and Dave Tach at Polygon.

I played for a bit today. I’ve always been terrible at side-scrolling games, even back when I used to play a lot of games. I’m still bad. Super Mario Run is fun enough for me to have blown an hour or so on it, and I happily coughed up the $10 to unlock the whole game.

The first-run on-boarding process is clunky though. You have to pick your country, and the United States is way down at the bottom of a long alphabetically sorted list. I’d rather be asked to grant access to my location — my phone knows where I am. And there was some confusing shit about creating a Nintendo account.

Bottom-line:

The game looks and sounds and I think even feels like a real Mario game.
Nintendo and Apple are going to make a ton of money on this.
Now my thumb hurts.

Zinc ★

Zinc is a terrific “watch later” video bookmarking service from Stunt Software. I’ve been using it for months and love it. It’s become part of my daily life.

You install a Safari extension (or a bookmarklet if you use Chrome or Firefox) on your Mac, and buy the app for your iPhone and Apple TV. It’s just $3 — cheap! Then whenever you encounter a web page with a video you want to watch later, you just click the button or bookmarklet, or, on your iPhone, tap the Zinc action in the sharing sheet. Boom: whatever videos are on the current web page are added to your queue. It always works with embedded video from YouTube and Vimeo, and works with many other embedded players as well.

Then, when you’re in the mood to watch videos, fire up the app on your iOS device or Apple TV, and there they are. I do most of my Zinc watching from the couch on Apple TV. Zinc’s a great example of a video-based indie app that’s perfect for Apple TV. In fact, if it wasn’t for the Apple TV app, I don’t think I’d use Zinc — it’s the lynchpin of its appeal for me.

Steve Wozniak, Fifth Grade Computer Teacher ★

Syambra Moitozo, writing for Motherboard:

Thinking back to that class, I remember looking out the classroom window on our first day. It was raining and Steve walked across the playground wearing a red, white, and yellow umbrella hat — indicative of his love for quirky innovations. He walked in, took off his hat, and asked us to gather around. Then he pulled a floppy disk out of his pocket and proceeded to take it apart to show us what each piece did. In the back of the room were 30 brand new Apple Macintosh PowerBooks (1400c) on loan to us. He said that those who mastered the concepts would get to keep theirs at the end of the year.

Managed Apple IDs and the 5 GB iCloud Storage Limit ★

Frustrating thread on Twitter from Fraser Speirs, who runs a 1:1 deployment of iPads in a secondary school in the U.K.:

Our new deployment has been running for about 18 weeks now and kids are starting to run out of iCloud space again on their new Apple IDs.

School Apple IDs still only get 5 GB free space…. Hard to believe this is an ongoing problem.

No idea how anyone is doing a serious Shared iPad deployment with this kind of limitation.

Especially in a world where iPads shoot 12MP/4K/60 FPS.

According to Speirs, they can’t even buy their way out of the problem, because you can’t buy more storage for managed Apple IDs.

This 5 GB tier is just untenable. I shot a 6-minute video last night at a school event, at 30 FPS and 1080p, and it was 750 MB.

Video Captures Uber Self-Driving Car Running Red Light in San Francisco ★

Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez, reporting for the San Francisco Examiner:

The cab pulls up to a red light on Third Street in South of Market, by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. A pack of cars flies through a yellow light, and one even drives through the first moment of a red light.

About three seconds after the light turned red, an Uber self-driving car can apparently be seen traveling through the red light at moderate speed as a pedestrian walks across the intersection on the right side of the intersection.

In its blog Wednesday, Uber wrote it launched self-driving vehicles in California without self-testing permits from the DMV because it has drivers in the vehicles. “We have looked at this issue carefully and we don’t believe we do (need permits),” Uber wrote.

Earlier Wednesday, a social media report spotted another self-driving vehicle running a red light near the Marina District.

Maybe they ought to look at the issue even more carefully. Uber’s institutional arrogance is astounding.

Twitter’s ‘Branded Emojis’ ★

I wrote yesterday, with regard the Trump campaign’s spat with Twitter over what the New York Times described as “Twitter had killed a #CrookedHillary emoji”:

I can’t believe the Times didn’t put quotes around that hashtag. And whatever it is they’re talking about, a sticker or whatever, is not an emoji.

I stand by that — I think the word emoji should be used exclusively for the icons in the official Unicode spec. Something that is like an emoji but not in the spec is a sticker or an icon or whatever, but it’s not an emoji.

Obviously, others disagree, because Twitter is selling these hashtag icons as “Branded Emojis”. I think that’s a gross misuse of the word. (This is another one of those Twitter things about which I was unaware because they’re only visible in Twitter’s first-party clients, which I almost never use.)

Richard Sherman: ‘Why I Hate Thursday Night Football’ ★

Seattle Seahawks cornerback Richard Sherman, after comparing a regular week in the life of an NFL player to a week when they play on Thursday night:

Like I’ve said before, the NFL is a bottom-line business. As long as fans are tuning in and advertisers are paying to be featured on Thursday Night Football, it’s not going anywhere. So I don’t know what the solution is. Maybe the league should take away one preseason game and add a second bye week for each team, which would occur before its Thursday game. That way, at least teams would have a full week to recover and prepare. (Or we could get rid of the preseason altogether … but that’s another issue for another day.)

I guess this is what happens when you have people in suits who have never played the game at this level dictating the schedule. I’d like to put Roger Goodell in pads for a late game on a Sunday, in December, in Green Bay, on the frozen tundra — then see what time he gets to the office on Monday morning, knowing that he would have to suit up again on Thursday.

Then maybe he’d understand….

I’ve often thought that the abbreviated weeks for Thursday night games must make a big difference in how the players feel. Sherman confirms it. Interesting too to see an active player calling out Goodell by name.

Yahoo Says 1 Billion User Accounts Were Hacked Before Those 500 Million Accounts Were Hacked ★

Vindu Goel and Nicole Perlroth, reporting for the NYT:

Yahoo, already reeling from its September disclosure that 500 million user accounts had been hacked in 2014, disclosed Wednesday that a different attack in 2013 compromised more than 1 billion accounts.

No wonder Yahoo was in no rush to come clean about the 2014 hack — it was small potatoes by their standards.

Transcript of the Introductory Remarks at Trump’s Tech Exec Meeting ★

At the start, everyone in attendance went around the table introducing themselves.

Tim Cook: “Tim Cook, very good to be here. And I look very forward to talking to the president-elect about the things that we can do to help you achieve some things you want.”

Two things. First: Cook is the only executive who didn’t say what company he worked for. Sort of like how the Apple stores just have the logo, and iPhones are the only phones (other than Google’s lookalike Pixels) that don’t have anything printed on the front — he didn’t have to.

Second: “some things you want”. That’s not an accident.

Larry Page: “Larry Page, Alphabet and Google, probably the youngest company here.”

Donald Trump: “Looks like the youngest person.” [Laughs]

Mr. Page: “Really excited to be here.”

Page was sitting right next to Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook, which was founded in 2004 — six years after Google. I suppose “Alphabet” is technically the younger company, but come on — it’s just a new name, not a new company. (Update: Palantir (2004), Tesla (2003), and SpaceX (2002) were also all founded years after Google. If only there were some website where Larry Page could search for the founding years of companies, perhaps he wouldn’t have said something so goofily wrong.)

The Wall Street Journal also had this intriguing tidbit, which The New York Times (and a few other reports I’ve read) missed:

After Wednesday’s meeting, Mr. Cook of Apple and Mr. Musk of Tesla stayed at Trump Tower to meet privately with Mr. Trump.

The Journal also had a seating chart (reproduced, without permission but not behind a paywall, at 9to5Mac, along with a photo where Tim Cook looks absolutely delighted to be there).

Trump’s Meeting With Tech Executives ★

David Streitfeld, reporting for the NYT:

Even after the press was ushered out, the meeting continued its genial way. Among the topics discussed, according to several corporate executives and a transition official briefed on the meeting, who asked for anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly, were vocational education and the need for more of it, the promise and peril of trade with China and immigration (Mr. Trump wants “smart and talented people here”). The president-elect also asked the executives to see if they could not apply data analysis technology to detect and help get rid of government waste.

Vocational education is one of Tim Cook’s issues. He has often stated that vocational training, not wages, is the primary reason nearly all Apple products are assembled in China. Given the attendees at this meeting, I’m not even sure who else would have brought this up. Elon Musk, perhaps.

Some tech companies were also notable for their absence. Twitter, the president-elect’s medium of choice for communication, was not invited.

Twitter declined to comment on why it was not included. A campaign official complained last month in a Medium post that Twitter had killed a #CrookedHillary emoji. On Wednesday, Sean Spicer, a spokesman for Mr. Trump, said that Twitter had been left out of the meeting because of space considerations in a gathering that many other technology executives were “dying to get into.”

I can’t believe the Times didn’t put quotes around that hashtag. And whatever it is they’re talking about, a sticker or whatever, is not an emoji.

The meeting lasted more than 90 minutes, longer than expected. Mr. Trump was seated next to Peter Thiel, the tech investor who is a member of the president-elect’s transition team. In another sign of Mr. Trump mixing family, business and government hats, three of his adult children — Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric — also attended.

So there wasn’t room for Jack Dorsey but there was room for three of his children. I’m not saying Dorsey should’ve gotten a seat, but if you’re not deeply bothered by the fact that Trump is treating the presidency of the United States as a family business, you’re not hooked up right.