The Daring Fireball Linked List

Tuesday, 18 Jun 2013

Second Least-Surprising Tidbit From the Apple-DOJ E-Book Price-Fixing Trial 

Peter Kafka:

The “page curls” in the iBook app, which show up when you flip an iBook’s page? That’s Steve Jobs’s idea.

You can see that he liked the page curl from his demeanor during the demo, starting around the 3:15 mark.

New 13-Inch MacBook Air Runs for 15 Hours in PCMag Battery Test 

Joel Santo Domingo, reviewing the new 13-inch Air:

Road warriors and jet travellers rejoice, we’ve found a laptop that will last all day and well into the night. The newest Apple MacBook Air 13-inch (Mid-2013) lasted an astonishing 15-and-a-half hours on a battery test that makes most current mainstream ultrabooks and ultraportables cough and die after four to six hours. The fact that the system gives up very little if any day-to-day performance is astounding.

Not bad.

Persuading David Simon  

Maciej Ceglowski:

The security state operates as a ratchet. Once you click in a new level of surveillance or intrusiveness, it becomes the new baseline. What was unthinkable yesterday becomes permissible in exceptional cases today, and routine tomorrow. The people who run the American security apparatus are in the overwhelming majority diligent people with a deep concern for civil liberties. But their job is to find creative ways to collect information. And they work within an institution that, because of its secrecy, is fundamentally inimical to democracy and to a free society.

Remarkably thoughtful essay; if you read only one thing this week, make it this.

Designers on iOS 7 

Week-old roundup of day one designer commentary on iOS 7. I was right about one thing: it’s polarizing. Two remarks I very much agree with:

Craig Mod:

What was outlined today looks like a very rational base on which to extend the OS — somewhat timeless, far more timeless than what we had before.

Justin Rhoades:

I think the design had to be reset so that newer interaction models could surface. More gestures, more animations. They added a physics engine to the SDK. It’s like a pendulum swinging from obvious visual affordances to engaging kinetic ones. The parallax effect, the physics of the messages bubbles and I’m sure many other ‘kinetic’ behaviors are new to devs in iOS7. Apple wants apps to use more motion and less visual design.

Fargo 0.80 

Dave Winer:

A few minutes ago we flipped the switch on smallpict.com and now all the sites there are being managed by a new content management system Kyle and I have been working on for most of this year.

What this means is this: you can publish from Fargo to a blogging system that understands outlines at its core.

Dave Winer, outlining, blog publishing systems — that’s a story as old as the web itself, but the technology here is all new. (Includes Markdown support, too.)

iTunes Radio 

Tyler Hayes on iTunes Radio:

The design and goal is clearly focused on listeners purchasing music — but even so, iTunes Radio feels like the first truly modern take on what terrestrial radio wishes it could be. Radio was always meant to be a promotion tool, a way to sell more music, but without being built directly on top of the world’s biggest music retailer, it was always too distant from the marketplace to be more effectual. Now a “buy” button lives next to every song, or a wish list one for those hesitant, and it feels like this is how modern radio should function.

Agreed; iTunes Radio is well-done and well-designed. I’m a little surprised Apple is making everyone wait for iOS 7 to get it.

Huawei ‘Considering’ Nokia Acquisition 

ZDNet:

According to the Financial Times of London (paywall), Richard Yu, chairman of Huawei’s consumer business group, said at the launch of its latest smartphone offering, the Ascend P6, in London: “We are considering these sorts of acquisitions; maybe the combination has some synergies but depends on the willingness of Nokia.”

“We are open minded,” Yu told reporters.

‘Of Course, They’re Trying to Kill Me.’ 

Speaking of interviews with Simmonses, Dave Hamilton at The Mac Observer talked to my Q Branch colleague Brent Simmons last week during WWDC regarding the development of Vesper.

Nexus 7, One Year In 

Dustin Earley:

I can’t find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn’t seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps.

I tried the basics at first, like a factory reset. I then moved onto drastic measures, like rooting and installing CyanogenMod 10.1 (which I thought would surely fix everything, since I’ve used faster devices with lesser hardware, and performance problems were merely a lack of software optimization). And nothing seems to work.

My first-generation iPad from 2010 works just as well as the day I bought it. Actually, even better, because iOS has gotten better.

Chatology 1.0 

New from Flexibits (makers of Fantastical): Chatology, a $20 Mac utility for searching your iChat/iMessage archives.

Update: Brief interview with Flexibits’s Michael Simmons from Lex Friedman at Macworld.

Least Surprising Tidbit From Apple-DOJ E-Book Trial 

Brian X. Chen, reporting for the NYT from the e-book price-fixing trial:

Both parties showed their evidence on a projector screen. Apple’s legal team used a MacBook to shuffle between evidence documents, stacking them side by side in split screens and zooming in on specific paragraphs.

In contrast, the Justice Department’s lawyers could show only one piece of evidence at a time. One video that Mr. Buterman played as evidence failed to produce the audio commentary needed to make his point.

Get Rid of the App Store’s ‘Top’ Lists 

Marco Arment:

The race to the bottom. Deceptive low-now, high-later pricing. Scam and clone apps. Shallow apps with little craftsmanship that succeed, but many high-quality apps unable to command a sustainable price. The “top” list encourages all of these — we’d still have them without the list, but to a substantially lesser degree.

Monday, 17 Jun 2013

Vintage 2007 Nokia Claim Chowder 

Alistair Croll, writing for GigaOm in November 2007:

But in the end, we know how this story plays out: iPhone is Compuserve; Nokia is the Internet.

Apple Statement on Customer Privacy 

Unsigned statement from Apple:

Apple has always placed a priority on protecting our customers’ personal data, and we don’t collect or maintain a mountain of personal details about our customers in the first place. There are certain categories of information which we do not provide to law enforcement or any other group because we choose not to retain it.

For example, conversations which take place over iMessage and FaceTime are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can see or read them. Apple cannot decrypt that data. Similarly, we do not store data related to customers’ location, Map searches or Siri requests in any identifiable form.

That last sentence separates Apple from many other companies.

Apple’s Signature 

Darby Lines, on Apple’s new “This Is Our Signature” campaign:

In my opinion this has been, from the return of Steve Jobs at least, the singular goal of Apple. Not to make all the moneys, not to dominate markets, not to impress bloggers but simply to make products that enhance our lives.

Apple spent nine months in complete silence — from the release of the iPad Mini through last week. The only thing they announced in that interim was the ouster of Scott Forstall and corresponding reshuffling of executive responsibility. No new products, no new designs. And the business and tech media lost their shit over this, declaring an end to Apple’s ability to innovate. Apple’s “This Is Our Signature” mantra is in defiance of this superficial demand for an endless stream of new new new. Apple is saying they’re above the churn of the news cycle, and if you don’t understand that yet, they don’t care. You’ll either get it through your head eventually, or you will never understand Apple.

Don’t Worry About iOS 7 

Jim Dalrymple:

Judging from my inbox, Twitter and Messages, people are losing their minds over iOS 7 and some of the changes Apple introduced at WWDC last week. Here is my advice to you — sit back, take a deep breath and relax.

There are a few things you need to remember about iOS 7. First, it’s nowhere near finished in terms of design or functionality. Apple engineers stopped adding or changing the operating system before WWDC so they had a stable build to show during the keynote. It’s not done.

iOS 7 is so far from done that maybe there is a story here, in that Apple has a mountain of work ahead to get iOS 7 ready for actual release this fall (presumably, coincident with the release of new iPhone and iPad devices). But to judge iOS 7 beta 1 as you would a release version is silly.

Sunday, 16 Jun 2013

Squarespace 

My thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Squarespace puts world-class design in your hands and provides everything you need to create your own website in minutes. Squarespace websites are different. They’re designed to be simple, modern, and to look great on every device. With Squarespace, your personality, products, or content are always the focus.

The best part: you can try Squarespace for free.

Friday, 14 Jun 2013

Requiem for a Back Button 

Khoi Vinh:

If you ask me, that back button, the one that has been with us since the iPhone debuted, was the best back button design of all time.

Fertile Ground 

Marco Arment:

Apple has set fire to iOS. Everything’s in flux. Those with the least to lose have the most to gain, because this fall, hundreds of millions of people will start demanding apps for a platform with thousands of old, stale players and not many new, nimble alternatives. If you want to enter a category that’s crowded on iOS 6, and you’re one of the few that exclusively targets iOS 7, your app can look better, work better, and be faster and cheaper to develop than most competing apps.

The Talk Show: ‘Code 47: Live From WWDC 2013’ 

Recorded earlier this week in front of a live audience in San Francisco, I was joined on stage by Guy English, Scott Simpson, and a cavalcade of very special surprise guests. I’m pretty happy with how this show turned out.

Brought to you by three excellent sponsors:

  • Windows Azure Mobile Services: makes it fast and easy to build connected mobile apps that scale. Try for free.

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Thursday, 13 Jun 2013

‘Start Updating Your Apps for iOS 7. Now.’ 

Entropy:

The key takeaway we’ve reached (after two less than 24 hours playing with the iOS 7 Beta release) is this — every App must consider even basic updates to its UI to survive in a post-iOS 6 world.

‘Making a Difference, One App at a Time’ 

Have to think Apple made this to show during the WWDC keynote, but that it got dropped for time. It’s so great.

Wednesday, 12 Jun 2013

Been There, Done That 

Craig Hockenberry:

I think it’s useful to look at the history of Aqua while thinking about the future of iOS 7.

Some designers are saying that the new look is “over the top.” The same thing was said about Aqua over a decade ago. And in succeeding years, that original UI has continuously been refined to what we see today.

I wish I wrote this. So spot on.

Photos From The Talk Show Live at WWDC 2013 

Great photos from last night’s show by Randy Stewart. My thanks to everyone who attended; it was a blast.

Update: Great shots from Patrick Gibson, too.

‘Semi-Roboto’ 

Droid Life, “That Moment When iOS 7 Became Android”:

We’ll have so many more thoughts on the way related to iOS 7, but we thought we’d start with the eerily similar lock screens. Floating bubble live wallpaper, minimal clock, fading on the actionable icons, semi-Roboto font, etc.

Helvetica Neue Ultra Light, “semi-Roboto”. OK, then.

Tuesday, 11 Jun 2013

Ben Thompson on Tim Cook 

Ben Thompson:

The truth about the greatest commercial of all time — Think Different — is that the intended audience was Apple itself. Jobs took over a demoralized company on the precipice of bankruptcy, and reminded them that they were special, and, that Jobs was special. It was the beginning of a new chapter.

“Designed in California” should absolutely be seen in the same light. This is a commercial for Apple on the occasion of a new chapter; we just get to see it.

‘Designed by Apple’ 

“There are a thousand ‘no’s’ for every ‘yes’.”

Generosity of Perspective 

Thoughtful critique of iOS 7 from Frank Chimero:

This morning, I watched the videos of the iOS 7 interface again, and I saw a bunch of rushed designers unable to stabilize an uneven interface. It’s worth remembering that Ive took over Human Interface only 7 months ago, and they redesigned the whole phone in that time. Straight up: seven months is a ridiculous deadline.

iOS 7: Instead of Flatness, We Got Depth 

Astute take on iOS 7’s design by Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan, writing for Gizmodo:

The predicted rebirth Susan Kare’s original black-and-white OS design, it ain’t. Actually, let’s just ban using the term “flat” altogether for this post. The iOS 7 we met today was full of what Jony Ive called “new types of depth.” Alongside a poppy, neon-and-pastel color scheme, the icons, apps, and homescreen of iOS 7 are full of layering and dimensionality. There are also entirely new types of animation: from a screen that uses the accelerometer to adjust in parallax, to beautiful new animated weather icons.

All the Apple News (In Brief) 

Great overview of yesterday’s news, useful both if you were busy yesterday, or if you just need a reminder of everything that was announced.

Monday, 10 Jun 2013

City Notes: San Francisco 

Perfect timing for WWDC.

Sunday, 9 Jun 2013

Edward Snowden: The Whistleblower Behind the NSA Surveillance Revelations 

The Guardian:

The 29-year-old source behind the biggest intelligence leak in the NSA’s history explains his motives, his uncertain future and why he never intended on hiding in the shadows.

Robots and Pencils 

My thanks to Robots and Pencils for sponsoring last week’s DF RSS feed. Robots and Pencils make iOS apps, including Spy vs. Spy and Primeval DFX (Hollywood style CGI dinosaurs, inserted into your own videos) last year.

Their company name reflects their philosophy, with programmers and designers working in tandem. If you’re looking for someone to build an app for you, get in touch with Robots and Pencils.

Mos Espa 

Duncan Davidson:

After spending two nights at an outpost near the Algerian border on our madcap trip across Tunisia, we paid a visit to one of the Star Wars sets that still stands out in the desert.

Google Executive Takes the Stand in Apple E-Book Price-Fixing Trial, Doesn’t Do So Well 

Greg Sandoval, reporting for The Verge:

Things went downhill from there. Under Snyder’s questioning, Turvey acknowledged that he couldn’t remember a single name of any of the publishing executives who had told him Apple was the reason the publishers were switching their business model. He conceded that the publisher’s move to the agency system was important to Google’s own fledgling book business, yet Turvey couldn’t remember any details about the conversations with publishers. By the end of the interview Turvey had gone from saying the publishers had told him directly, to saying they had merely told people on his team, to finally saying the publishers had “likely” told someone on his team.

It was a topsy Turvey moment for the increasingly unsure Google exec. For Snyder and Apple it was one of those rare times when a trial opponent is practically defenseless. Mercifully, Cote adjourned saying “Let’s allow Mr. Turvey to escape so he can enjoy his Thursday.”

Analyzing Yahoo’s PRISM Non-Denial 

Christopher Soghoian:

Below, I have carefully parsed Yahoo’s statement, line by line, in order to highlight the fact that Yahoo has not in fact denied receiving court orders under 50 USC 1881a (AKA FISA Section 702) for massive amounts of communications data.

Saturday, 8 Jun 2013

Google’s Chief Architect on PRISM 

Yonatan Zunger:

If it had, even if I couldn’t talk about it, in all likelihood I would no longer be working at Google: the fact that we do stand up for individual users’ privacy and protection, for their right to have a personal life which is not ever shared with other people without their consent, even when governments come knocking at our door with guns, is one of the two most important reasons that I am at this company: the other being a chance to build systems which fundamentally change and improve the lives of billions of people by turning the abstract power of computing into something which amplifies and expands their individual, mental life.

Strong statement. And here’s Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond:

We cannot say this more clearly — the government does not have access to Google servers—not directly, or via a back door, or a so-called drop box. Nor have we received blanket orders of the kind being discussed in the media.

‘Don’t Believe His Lies’ 

Lander Brandt, on making good use of Vesper. It’s the tag that sells it.

‘All the Leaks Are Wrong’ 

Special guest John Moltz joins me for a pre-WWDC episode of my podcast, The Talk Show. We start with WWDC speculation: Will there be new Macs? Might Apple release an SDK and App Store for Apple TV, and if so, would it require a new remote control? All that and more, including this week’s allegations that the NSA is spying on US citizens’ cell phone usage and Internet data. You’re going to love the ending.

Brought to you by two excellent sponsors:

  • An Event Apart: The design conference for people who make websites.
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Friday, 7 Jun 2013

Hoagies vs. Subs 

We have a different name because we make a different sandwich. A true Philly hoagie is so much better than a “sub”, it’s not even funny. We’re famous for the cheesesteak, but the Philly hoagie is just as great. (Sarcone’s is the best; Primo’s are excellent too.)

Marco Arment on Vesper 

Marco Arment:

From the outside, then, it’s easy to be dismissive or even resentful: How can these guys launch a relatively expensive text-note app that’s missing so many features of competing text-note apps?

Balls.

It takes balls to release an iOS app in 2013 for $4.99.

It takes balls to enter this extremely crowded category.

It takes balls to release a note-shoebox app in 2013 that has no sync, import, or export.

It takes balls to name your note-shoebox app after a cocktail nobody has heard of, then to age-rate the app “12+ for mild alcohol references” just so the cocktail’s recipe can be included in the Credits screen.

Federico Viticci on Vesper 

An astute review of the app, and an interview with yours truly at the end:

Federico Viticci: In a talk you gave at Macworld in January 2009, you mentioned how you didn’t work well with other people in a team. Fast forward to 2013, you have teamed up with Brent and Dave for Vesper. What’s changed?

John Gruber: Great question. I’m not sure what my exact words were then, but the way I’d put it now is that I don’t work well with people I don’t like, or with people who don’t seem to get what I want. […] The three of us make a good team, that’s the difference. The big thing is that all three of us are willing to try anything, and to take however long it takes to get it right. Iterate, iterate, iterate; over, and over, and over. Dave designed certain elements of Vesper dozens of times. Brent implemented many of the features and animated transitions numerous times, just so we could try different designs and see what they really felt like each way. And not only did neither of them mind this, they loved it. Brent even devised a custom framework for the app to provide us with CSS-like tweaking for things like layout, color, and animation timings.

Jason Snell on Vesper 

Jason Snell:

It’s simple enough not to get in my way with a lot of fiddly organizational features, but provides me with more structure than something like the Notes app. Tagging notes made a lot of sense — I immediately made Work, Writing, and Recipes tags. I commingled work notes, ideas for my novel, a favorite recipe for buttermilk biscuits, and an idea for my podcast without any trouble. Once I started treating it as the iPhone equivalent of a small paper notebook tucked into a pocket, it all began to fit.

Yours truly, in an interview with Snell:

“Bond’s gadgets have always been at the intersection of utility and elegance,” Gruber said. “That’s as good a motto for a software company as any.”

LaunchBar 5.5: Introducing Snippets 

Nifty new feature in one of my all-time favorite Mac apps.

Verizon and the NSA: The Problem With Metadata 

Jane Mayer:

The gist of the defense was that, in contrast to what took place under the Bush Administration, this form of secret domestic surveillance was legitimate because Congress had authorized it, and the judicial branch had ratified it, and the actual words spoken by one American to another were still private. So how bad could it be?

The answer, according to the mathematician and former Sun Microsystems engineer Susan Landau, whom I interviewed while reporting on the plight of the former N.S.A. whistleblower Thomas Drake and who is also the author of Surveillance or Security?, is that it’s worse than many might think.

“The public doesn’t understand,” she told me, speaking about so-called metadata. “It’s much more intrusive than content.” She explained that the government can learn immense amounts of proprietary information by studying “who you call, and who they call. If you can track that, you know exactly what is happening — you don’t need the content.”

President Obama’s Dragnet 

The New York Times:

The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.

Google Glass Banned From Google Shareholder Meeting 

Matt Clinch, CNBC:

Tight security restrictions at Thursday’s Google shareholder meeting led even the company’s much-hyped Google Glass technology to be banned, infuriating a consumer watchdog group who accused the tech giant of hypocrisy.

Eric Schmidt, back in 2009:

“If you have something that you don’t want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place.”

Washington Post Backtracks on Claim Tech Companies ‘Participate Knowingly’ in NSA Data Collection 

Jon Russell, writing for The Next Web:

The Post previously claimed that Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, PalTalk, YouTube, Skype, AOL and Apple ”participate knowingly”. The phrase that stood out in the report (it has been repurposed by numerous tech blogs and news sites across the Web) since it suggested that US firms willingly agreed to a process that — at best — could violate the rights of millions in the US if their data is accidentally monitored by the NSA.

Hours after the news broke, and every company bar PalTalk and AOL denied any knowledge of the program and allegations of their involvement, the Post has changed its stance. The phrase ”participate knowingly” has been removed from the article, a new passage suggests the firms were unaware of PRISM.

How Q Branch Works Together 

Brent Simmons:

Since I’m always interested in hearing what other teams use to work together and ship their software, I figure I should list what we use to work together on Vesper.

The short answer: Mercurial, Bitbucket, Glassboard, Lighthouse, and HockeyApp.

I’ll add one more: iMessage. Brent didn’t use it, but Wiskus and I exchanged thousands of messages to collaborate on the design.

The Talk Show, Live, Next Week in San Francisco 

Speaking of podcasts, I’m doing a live episode of The Talk Show this coming Tuesday in San Francisco, during WWDC. The first batch of tickets sold out, but we just put another 150 on sale. Grab them while they’re hot.

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The Daring Fireball Linked List is a daily list of interesting links and brief commentary, updated frequently but not frenetically. Call it a “link log”, or “linkblog”, or just “a good way to dick around on the Internet for a few minutes a day”.

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