I'm spending a few days in China, and it's proving surprisingly hard to get reliable internet access at the moment. It's interesting seeing which services are completely inaccessible (eg. Twitter), which are very slow (iCloud photostreams), and which are just fine (Squarespace, thank heavens). I wonder how hard it is for the average company or individual to do online international business here, but then I guess China has plenty of home grown services that work just fine. Is that sustainable in the longer term? We'll see.
UK Smartphone Market "Disrupted"
From the department of click-bait headlines:
The data from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech further showed that the Moto G has attracted a very specific consumer profile, at least in the UK. Almost half of owners are aged between 16 and 24, 83% are male and generally they come from lower income groups with 40% earning under £20,000.
"With virtually no existing customers to sell to in Britain, the Moto G has stolen significant numbers of low-mid end customers from Samsung and Nokia Lumia," said Sunnebo.
So, despite the Moto G disrupting the low to mid end smartphone market, in which Apple doesn't yet operate, and despite no evidence whatsoever to base it on, the article leads with this:
The dominance of Apple and Samsung in the smartphone market is being potentially challenged by Motorola's new budget model which has gained a respectable share in the UK in just six months.
Second Life Revisited
Gulp.
Zuckerberg said Facebook was not interested in becoming a hardware company and did not intend to try to make a profit from sales of the devices over the long term. Instead, he said Facebook's software and services would continue to serve as the company's underlying business, potentially generating revenue on Oculus devices through everything from advertising to sales of virtual goods.
Advertising. Just what virtual reality needed.
Bill Campbell Knows A Good Thing When He Sees It
Interesting insight into the development process for the iPhone.
For several months, Mr. Christie made twice-monthly presentations to Mr. Jobs in a windowless meeting room on the second floor of Apple's Cupertino, Calif., headquarters. Only a handful of employees had access to the room; cleaning people weren't allowed in.
The day after Mr. Christie's team finally impressed Mr. Jobs with its vision of the iPhone software, it had to repeat the presentation for Bill Campbell, an Apple director and close Jobs confidant. Mr. Christie recalled Mr. Campbell saying the phone would be better than the original Mac.
High praise indeed. He was right too.
The iPad as Clinical Diagnostic Tool
This new profile on Apple's "Your Verse" iPad case studies site highlights something that often gets overlooked when talking about health applications: The ability of great software to turn an iPad into the equivalent of specialist diagnostic equipment costing many thousands of dollars.
A concussion isn’t like a broken arm. It doesn’t show up in an X-ray or even an MRI. So to accurately monitor the injury, you need to visualize its effect on a person’s cognitive and motor performance. The C3 Logix app uses a hexagon-shaped graph to represent the multiple symptoms associated with concussion. The athlete's normal level of function is shown on the perimeter, with postinjury results inside. During recovery, the inner graph moves out toward the perimeter.
Last year we did some work on ways of using iPad for clinicians to run routine patient tests, but this goes much further. Inspiring stuff.
The Birth Of The PDF
Interesting insight from some of the people who ought to know.
John Warnock had the idea that every document that was ever printed, or ever would be printed, could be represented in a document. This was not an unreasonable idea since Postscript was designed for this purpose and Adobe also had some code from Illustrator that would handle the fonts and graphics and code from Photoshop to display images. So, Warnok started a project (the Carousel project) on his own initiative to pursue his idea that eventually the whole Library of Congress could be represented in an archival electronic format.
PDF really was a breakthrough technology at the time, and it's hard to over-estimate the difficulty we had dealing with file formats for print before it.
Footnote: Back in the mid-90's I was excited enough about the PDF to launch a whole website devoted to gathering together interesting creative uses of the format. PDFheaven (the site no longer exists, and the blogspot site using the same name is unconnected) had origami, art projects, beautifully-designed brochures, calendars, and so on.
Singaporeans Fear Muggings For Google Glass
Google's Glass product isn't available in Singapore, yet this research indicates demand, tempered by fears over personal safety.
Personal safety was another factor, with 38% feeling they would be more at risk from being mugged if they wore Google Glass in public. This proportion was significantly higher in the UK where 46% had such fears.
I've not been to Singapore for over a decade, but when I travelled there regularly I felt safer than I've felt anywhere on Earth. I suspect that if you left your wallet on a park bench you'd find someone running after you to return it.
How Steve Jobs Got 50% of WriteNow
Great story from Heidi Roizen. I'm glad Heidi made this deal work: WriteNow was amazing, and was one of the reasons I stuck with the Mac through the dark times.
Shortly into my pitch, Steve took the contract from me and scanned down to the key term, the royalty rate. I had pitched 15%, our standard. Steve pointed at it and said, “15%? That is ridiculous. I want 50%.” I was stunned. There was no way I could run my business giving him 50% of my product revenues. I started to defend myself, stammering about the economics of my side of the business. He tore up the contract and handed me the pieces. “Come back at 50%, or don’t come back,” he said.
New York Magazine On 100 Years Of NY Music
Fabulous, wide-ranging article on the eclectic sounds of NYC and the city that gave them life. I really must try to pick up this issue in print.
New York is a place of splendor and squalor, and its music reflects those extremes. The city’s leanest times have produced some of its most opulent music. Think of Cole Porter’s Depression-era ballads, songs like “Night and Day” (1932) and “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” (1936), gleaming Deco objets d’art that sound like they were airdropped from Porter’s suite at the Waldorf. Or think of Chic’s luscious “Good Times” (1979), written by Nile Rodgers and Bernard Edwards at the height of the disco era and the depth of the city’s 1970s unraveling, as a deliberate callback to another Great Depression hit, “Happy Days Are Here Again.” New York’s deprivations have driven music in other ways. Punk was not just a stripped-down revolt against the excesses of corporate rock, but a reflection of local woes, an ascetic response to ’70s stagflation and crime. As for hip-hop, it, too, grew out of scarcity, and triumphed over it. Hip-hop was music of junkyard recycling: The original South Bronx hip-hop street parties were powered by plugging sound systems into the base of street lamps, and the music ingeniously repurposed cheap technologies, turning vinyl records and turntables from musical-playback devices into musical instruments.
Here's a great cover (I think there's a variety) for the magazine, featuring a young Robert Zimmerman.
Pentagram On What Makes A Great Late Night TV Show Logo
Some of the criteria seem a bit vague ("clean, classic, and simple") or downright subjective ("whether or not you can imagine the president on a given show just by looking at the logo"), but there are some useful observations in there too.
Oberman says that the best late night logos in history have usually been clean, simple, and strong designs that could act as vessels for whatever content a host wants to fill it with. As such, a talk show logo can also too closely adhere to the idiosyncrasies of its host, because a talk show isn't just a showcase for one person's personality. It needs to also feel broad enough to accommodate the personalities of the guests, and be something that a number of celebrities with very different styles can associate with, from Kim Kardashian to the president of the United States.
This Was The First Computer I Used
When my school's first Commodore PET was stationed at the back of my form classroom, I managed to find myself a seat where I could get to it before anyone else and spent breaktimes and hours after-school figuring out how it worked. Since the manual was next-to-useless I had to rely on BASIC program listings in home computer magazines to figure out how to get it to do stuff (the school had a few games on cassette but we were forbidden from playing them). Initially the things I wrote were all simple branching text adventures ("You see a corridor running west to east. Which direction do you want to go?"), but eventually I figured out enough to be able to POKE ASCII character codes into screen memory locations without crashing it. I made some very basic arcade-style games that way, and I still think fondly of those terrible square keys and that green screen.
The first time is the one you remember: first crush, first kiss and first BASIC program. These are the ones that stick in your mind long after those involved are no longer around, and the Commodore PET was the first computer that many people actually touched. Before the PET, computers were big, impersonal things that people worshipped from afar. After the PET, the computer became personal.
Single Serve Coffee Pods Are Evil
I've long admired the ease-of use of systems like the Nespresso, whilst hating how it takes a bulk commodity like coffee beans and packages it up into heavily packaged single servings. Turns out it's even worse than I thought.
Journalist Murray Carpenter estimates in his new book, Caffeinated, that a row of all the K-Cups produced in 2011 would circle the globe more than six times. To update that analogy: In 2013, Green Mountain produced 8.3 billion K-Cups, enough to wrap around the equator 10.5 times. If Green Mountain aims to have "a Keurig System on every counter," as the company states in its latest annual report, that's a hell of a lot of little cups.
Sony Enters The VR Market With Morpheus
Long rumoured, now at least at dev kit stage.
Like the Oculus, Sony's Morpheus project has been a long time coming as well; the company said it has worked on facets of the system for three years. Although the Oculus Rift is already in the hands of beta testers, Sony may have the upper hand in getting its HMD to market first as the company holds substantial sway in the gaming industry. To that end, Sony has already enlisted the help of big-name game devs like Epic and Crytek to work on pilot products that explore Morpheus' capabilities.
I'm still unconvinced. It feels to me like dedicated gaming devices are content to become more specialist and more niche. No matter how light and responsive this kit gets I just can't see it appealing to a mass audience. Nothing wrong with that, and it doesn't mean it can't be a success in certain markets, but it most likely won't grow the current audience for games consoles.
On another note, I notice Appleinsider has this all wrong:
There have been VR analogs in the past, including Nintendo's ill-fated Virtual Boy accessory for the original Game Boy, but a truly responsive HMD with serious developer support has yet to hit market.
I have a Virtual Boy, and it definitely wasn't an accessory but a standalone platform with its own (limited) range of games. Maybe an accessory for the already-huge GameBoy platform would have been a better idea.
iPad 2 Is No More, iPad 4 Is Back
Good move on Apple's part. The iPad 2 was looking rather old as the 'education' model.
CUPERTINO, California—March 18, 2014—Apple® today announced iPad® with Retina® display replaces iPad 2 as the most affordable 9.7-inch iPad at $399 for the 16GB Wi-Fi model and $529 for the Wi-Fi + Cellular model.
I bought a refurbished iPad 4 at Christmas for my daughter, and it's a big improvement on the third-generation model, let alone the pre-retina models. Much happier running the latest apps, and we don't need to keep old dock-connector cables around the house anymore. I'd have no hesitation in recommending the fourth-generation model for schools looking to buy a bunch of iPads and make a saving.
Prototyping Animated Apps In Your Browser
I've not come across Framer before, but I got my head around it in about 10 minutes. There's an easy route to leverage Photoshop mockups, but you can do it from scratch without too much trouble (and there's a plug-in for Sketch if you–like me–avoid Photoshop).
Many people already prototype in the browser. It's simple and quick. But while html/js/css/jquery gets a lot done it has some downsides:
- It can get pretty complicated mixing all the different technologies
- It can be hard to get the pixel perfect control you want
- It's not always performant, especially on mobile
- It's pretty far from how it will be actually implemented if you prototype for native
Framer tries to solve some of these problems by providing a very lightweight framework modeled after larger application frameworks. The basic idea is that you only need a few simple building blocks like images, animation and events to build and test complex interactions.
Some useful additional background also in this case study of building Potluck.
One Laptop Per Child Is Over
I have to admit, I'd completely forgotten about this once high-profile initiative.
With the hardware now long past its life expectancy, spare parts hard to find, and zero support from the One Laptop Per Child organization, its time to face reality. The XO-1 laptop is history. Sadly, so is Sugar. Once the flagship of OLPC's creativity in redrawing the human-computer interaction, few are coding for it and new XO variants are mostly Android/Gnome+Fedora dual boots. Finally, OLPC Boston is completely gone. No staff, no consultants, not even a physical office. Nicholas Negroponte long ago moved onto the global literacy X-Prize project.
Google Glass's 45-Minute Window For Snooping
I've heard of bugs being spun as features before, but this takes the biscuit.
Although Glass might look like the ultimate X-ray specs for spying, Starner argues that Google has intentionally designed it to prevent snooping by limiting its battery life. Whereas your phone can surreptitiously record audio and video for extended periods of time, Glass will conk out after about 45 minutes (and get hot in the process). Starner insisted to conference-goers that this was a design feature meant to protect privacy, not a flaw.
The Genius Of ReCAPTCHA
Mind utterly blown. Incredible.
Von Ahn watched the work on CAPTCHA and decided it had potential beyond distinguishing humans from robots — the extra 10 seconds people were taking to access their email and other accounts could be put to use. In 2006, von Ahn launched reCAPTCHA. Unlike its predecessor, reCAPTCHA challenged users with two distorted words to decode, and looks something like this:
The brilliant twist is that this test isn't just verifying your humanity; it's also putting you to work on decoding a word that a computer can't. The first word in a reCAPTCHA is an automated test generated by the system, but the second usually comes from an old book or newspaper article that a computer scanner is trying (and failing) to digitize. If the person answering the reCAPTCHA gets the first word correct (which the computer knows the answer to), then the system assumes the second word has been translated accurately as well.
Thanks to The Loop for the link.
Who Are The UK's Best Designers?
Some great choices here, including Apple's Jonathan Ive, Bowie's designer-of-late Jonathan Barnbrook, and Wayne Hemingway. I've had the pleasure of meeting Barnbrook and Hemingway, and consider them fitting company for Jony Ive, each distinguished by their principled and passionate approaches within their different fields. Voting is open until Friday 14th.
Of the Designerati choices, The Drum editor, Gordon Young, said: "We've been keeping a close eye on the design industry and we're bowled over by the amount of talent in all of the various fields. Design touches everything nowadays so our list includes everyone from illustrators, creative and art directors, fashion designers, product designers, champions of the design industry and academics.
Encryption Isn't Perfect, But It Works
Edward Snowden's message to SXSW is that end-to-end encryption is–along with public oversight–a crucial part of ensuring our future privacy.
Many people believe that the N.S.A., if it decides to do so, can crack any encryption method. Soghoian, an expert in online security, said that this was generally true, but he nonetheless agreed with Snowden that the widespread adoption of end-to-end encryption would be a good thing. Breaking encrypted messages takes a lot of time and effort, he explained. If all online messages were encrypted properly, the N.S.A. would find it difficult to monitor large numbers of people. “Encryption makes bulk surveillance too expensive,” Soghoian said. Snowden, for his part, was even more optimistic about the promise of encryption. “The bottom line is that encryption does work,” he said. In support of this argument, he pointed to his own use of secure communications. Since he revealed to the world the inner workings of the N.S.A., the U.S. government has had a huge team trying to track him and his work, he said, but as far as he knew they hadn’t succeeded.
Also relevant to this: How Apple secures your iCloud keychain even from itself.