Your DSLR Vs. The Camera In Your Phone

Whilst we're on the subject, this DPReview look at how far camera phones have come as serious photographic tools is worth a read. Astonishing to think that the 2007 EOS 40D languishing in my drawer isn't significantly better than the latest phone-sized sensor. 

Ironically, as dedicated cameras, prime lens compacts remain niche products with no aspirations to popular appeal. They're aimed squarely at discerning users. But as phones they’ve become the tool of choice in everyone’s hands. We accept their limitations as the price of extreme convenience.

But many of their limitations will disappear in a few short years with zippier processing. Only their fixed lens remains as an Achilles’ heel, with no obvious technology on the horizon to rescue it. Yet.

That "Yet" is important. Look to advances like this one to begin to move lenses into the realm of software.

On Technological Shifts, Discomfort, And The End Of Cameras

Craig Mod manages—again—to articulate what many of us have been struggling to express about the future that we can see, and the past that we're letting go. 

What’s fun about straddling these technological shifts is that it automatically places you in an uncomfortable position. This is exactly where you want to be though, because discomfort is where potential lives. Potential rarely rests on a chaise lounge by the beach. Potential almost never lives in the systems cradled by the incumbents.

In fact, discomfort and change go hand-in-hand. That’s why there are those able to extract crazy, seemingly unfair wealth from change — they’re willing to postulate and endure great discomfort (high-risk) for potential payouts. They look forward, objectively beyond nostalgia.4 It’s not magic. They’re just not complacent.

It's a long read, and wide ranging, touching on many aspects of photography from why we take pictures to our fascination with the mechanics. In the end though, Craig expresses what every photographer I've ever know feels in her heart:

The shift to a smartphone for photography scares me because I love the boxes. Love their purpose. Their simplicity. So dearly love knowing I’ve captured all that detail. Love their constraints and all the potential packed within them. But in the end, for me, photography has never been about a box. The box was always a means.

 It's lovely, important stuff. Go read it. 

How To Deal With Backdoor Requests From The FBI

Fantastic response to what would appear to be an increasingly routine request. More power to Nico and technology company leaders like her. 

At a recent RSA Security Conference, Nico Sell was on stage announcing that her company—Wickr—was making drastic changes to ensure its users' security. She said that the company would switch from RSA encryption to elliptic curve encryption, and that the service wouldn't have a backdoor for anyone.

As she left the stage, before she'd even had a chance to take her microphone off, a man approached her and introduced himself as an agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He then proceeded to "casually" ask if she'd be willing to install a backdoor into Wickr that would allow the FBI to retrieve information.

China Ends 13-Year Console Ban

The markets are seeing this as good news for the big three console manufacturers. Sony & Microsoft have had successful launches in the last few months, but the overall trends still make it look like consoles are losing ground. I should imagine that Chinese companies have their own plans afoot too. With the China Mobile deal really opening up China to iOS gaming, things are getting really interesting.

China’s ruling State Council temporarily suspended the ban and may allow consoles to be made in the Shanghai free-trade zone, it said in a statement Jan. 6. Hardware manufacturers such as Nintendo Co., Microsoft Corp. and Sony Corp. (6758) could benefit from entering a $10 billion market dominated by online and personal computer games.

China took the step as computer games have proliferated well beyond consoles to smartphones and the Internet, so people who want to play games already can in many cases. China had announced last year that the ban would be lifted within the Shanghai free-trade zone, which opened in September.

The First Explorers Of Glass

Theodore Ross over at Medium meets Google's Glass Explorers, and tries to figure out what it's actually for.

One useful comparison for the Explorer program would be the 1979 release of what Mohanbir Sawhney, a marketing and technology professor at Northwestern University, called the first piece of wearable technology: the Sony Walkman. (The watch, of course, might dispute this, but I take his point.) “It was not an instantaneous success. Sony really struggled with it,” Sawhney told me. As with Google and Glass, Sony didn’t understand how consumers would use the Walkman. “It was supposed to be a social music-listening device,” he said. People were expected to listen to music together on a single, shared set of headphones. “Turned out to be the opposite.”

This line of reasoning, however, seemed only to lead me back to the beginning: Nothing I’d seen from the Explorers indicated they could help Google fill Glass’s empty vessel with market-ready usefulness. Which, all the experts assured me, was correct. They couldn’t. But no one expected them to, either.

Smoking Technology Gets Serious

I'm seeing increasing numbers of my smoker friends move to electronic cigarettes, and while the health implications may still be unclear, we know precisely how bad smoking tobacco is for us. I think the odds are on the side of anything that moves people away from regular cigarettes.

In the early days, e-cigs merely attempted to simulate smoking. That’s no longer the case. The e-cig of the future may look nothing like a paper cigarette, and will likely be very different from the e-cigs of today. The big players in the industry are working on an experience that is better than smoking. Future e-cigs will be Bluetooth-enabled so that only the owner can use them, while tracking personal statistics on usage and nicotine levels (one early effort is Smokio, the "connected electronic cigarette"). RJ Reynolds is exploring the possibility of adding tiny gyroscopes in order to enable gesture recognition. Vapor Corp introduced a prototype vaporizer that doesn’t work until it’s unlocked with a fingerprint scan, so the kids can’t vape while mom and dad are away.

How A Moral Panic Became A Witch Hunt

If you weren't around at the time, the two-decades-old panic over "satanic ritual abuse"—on both sides of the pond—will seem ridiculous. It was however, very real, and we need to understand how these things start, and how they get out of control. Our own contemporary moral panics might be about the threat of fundamentalist terrorists, about immigration, about Internet predators, but they're no less damaging to the individuals caught up in them.

“It sounds laughable,” says Debbie Nathan, an investigative reporter who co-wrote Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt about the panic and is now a director for the National Center for Reason and Justice, which took up the Kellers’ cause. But there is certainly historical precedent, going back even further than the Salem witch trials: Ancient Romans, for example, claimed that Christians ate babies; Christians later claimed that Jews used Christian babies’ blood in religious rituals.

“Children symbolize the good things about culture, the innocence and purity, the future of the culture,” says Nathan. When a culture feels under threat in some way, fear and anxiety focus on the safety of children. America was experiencing upheavals in gender roles, child-rearing practices, and social expectations, and more and more people were embracing fundamentalist religion and belief in the devil. The fear of satanic ritual abuse was perpetuated by both ends of the political spectrum. “In the right wing, you had that kind of preoccupation with Satan, and on the left, you had a lot of concern with the well-being of children, and women going back to work, and I think it was a perfect storm of fear and anxiety,” says Nathan. Most if not all of those involved believed they were acting in the best interests of the children—which meant that any healthy skepticism was interpreted as anti-child.

Miniature Electric Guitar For iOS

Best thing out of CES so far, for my money. This could be a perfect complement to the compact studio or iPad-based live set-up. Sorry, it doesn't yet seem to work with those other tablets that  Carphone Warehouse thinks musicians should buy.

Chris Heille, music product specialist with JamStik maker Zivix, said the the company's miniature electric guitar is scheduled to ship in March and retail for $299.99. The device uses both infrared and piezo sensors to detect fretting, strumming and picking while users play.

By featuring real strings that can be pressed, strummed and bent, the JamStik aims to offer users an authentic guitar feel, while still providing a compact and portable design. The accessory is a network MIDI controller that will work with iPhone and iPad, as well as Mac, meaning it will sport out-of-the-box compatibility with existing music applications, such as Apple's own GarageBand.

Apple Would Be "Insane" To Build A Cheap iPhone

So says Charlie Wolf at least, and he goes into detail to show why. Thing is, he's right as far as he goes: For Apple to try to build iPhones the way it currently does and sell them on low-or-no contracts would be preposterous.

This, however, is the same kind of thinking that led people back in 2004 to say Apple couldn't make and sell a low-cost flash-memory-based iPod (shortly before the iPod Shuffle appeared). It's also why Apple said it didn't know how to make a $500 computer that wasn't "a piece of junk", but could build the iPad.

Apple has a way of rethinking what's needed at a particular price point and building the right product to meet those needs. 

Wolf's thesis was presented on Wednesday in a note to investors, a copy of which was provided to AppleInsider. In it, the analyst went as far as to say that building a cheap iPhone to capture the low end of the smartphone market would be an "insane idea" for Apple, destroying the company's gross profits seen in its current strategy.

For example, to hit the so-called "sweet spot" of smartphone pricing in emerging markets, Apple would have to price a hypothetical cheap iPhone at around $350 without a carrier contract subsidy. If Apple were to target a hypothetical 40 percent gross margin with such a product, Wolf's estimates suggest the cheap iPhone would need a bill of materials at around $90 — or less than half the bill-of-materials cost of high-end iPhones.

Mother, I've Turned The Cooling Back On

You'd think we'd know better than to name our devices after sci-fi computers. Nevertheless, I like the sound of Mother. Reminds me a little of the Nabaztag rabbit devices of a few years back, though much more sophisticated. 

Mother’s potential use is intriguing: Each Mother unit talks wirelessly to a set of smaller tracking devices, dubbed cookies, that can sense motion and temperature. You can put cookies on things and people – on your body to gather data about how much you walk, on your coffee machine to track many espressos you drink, on your front door to track whenever it is opened, on your toothbrush to see how often and how long you brush … and so forth.

For Better Or Worse, E-Books Change Everything

Erica Sadun is right: There's no going back.

I also did something I had never done before. As I was reading the book, I stumbled across an unfamiliar word and, rather hilariously, ended up tapping the printed page until it finally occurred to me that the book wasn't going to offer me built-in dictionary and Wikipedia access.

It's odd how three years or so changes you. Although the Kindle debuted in 2007, it wasn't until 2010 that I really jumped on the e-book bandwagon. My entry was due to the iPad. In fact, it was the iPad 2 even more than the original that firmly grounded me into the e-book world. Between the light, thin design of the tablet and my aging eyes, the iPad with its built-in iBooks app and the add-on Amazon Kindle reader app, I have become a devotee.

What Does Apple Have Planned For 2014?

 Expect Apple to iterate, because that's what Apple does. Refreshingly sensible Apple commentary from Ars Technica.

It would certainly be great for tech journalists if Apple put out a completely redesigned iPad every six months, or if it introduced some new iPhone that only cost $100 unlocked. Those kinds of moves would be a significant departure from the company's current strategy, though, and Apple isn't a company that rushes to fix what isn't broken. Incremental change is normal, and Apple's refreshes generally keep its products ahead of or in step with what its competitors are doing.

Siri Vs. "Her"

Siri seems to have learned about Spike Jonze's "Her", and doesn't like it. Wonderful.

The general sentiment among moviegoers is that this is an uber-advanced version of the iPhone’s Siri, the virtual assistant that more often functions like a bumbling intern. Siri — or her programmers at Apple — clearly got wind of this comparison, and seemingly decided to have some fun with it. Or, Siri is actually really smart and is super mad about the bad publicity. Either way, her responses to questions about the movie Her are a real treat.

Nikon Df: Fusion, But Not Quite "Pure Photography"

Nikon's new classically-styled DSLR is undoubtedly beautiful, but it strikes me that in striving for the perfect blend of old and new what's emerged is something that isn't quite either, and a design that's essentially compromised by trying to keep a foot in both camps. Design is about choices.

The Nikon Df is, at first appearance, the camera that many people have been asking for, for years - a classically styled DSLR with traditional external controls. But, for all Nikon's talk of a return to 'Pure Photography,' an awful lot of what's under the Df's confidently retro skin is pretty familiar. The Df is built around the 16MP full frame sensor from the company's flagship D4 with the processor and AF system borrowed from the comparatively affordable D610.

The camera's appearance is inspired by a much earlier generation of film cameras. In fact, from the front the Df looks like an oversized Nikon FM (and not dissimilar to Canon's F1N). And, as well as the styling and dedicated external controls, the Df's other nod to the company's history is the inclusion of a retractable meter coupling tab, allowing the use of pre-1977 non-AI lenses.

For those of us raised on film SLRs the effect is rather intriguing. We understand that the Df has been at least four years in the making, and the glee of its creators is almost palpable in the many specific design cues obviously taken from earlier SLRs including the FM/2 and the long-lived professional-targeted Nikon F3.

PJ Harvey's Today Programme Reviewed

For what it's worth, I thought it was magnificent. 

In a statement about her editorship, Harvey said that she wanted to highlight "people who challenge us and move us to examine our deepest beliefs and feelings". Her last, Mercury prize-winning album, Let England Shake, was about the UK's involvement in war; many of her chosen speakers seemed to spring from her research into this. She made the Today editors agree not to edit their contributions.

When Furbys Attack

I love robotic toys. I think it makes me love them even more to know that they can be possessed by demons.

And then, in the middle of Mira trying to teach it to dance, something very bad happened. It started to shake back and forth, it made weird noises, and it’s LED eyes were flashing like strobe lights. I thought it was either having a grand mal seizure or we broke the damn thing.

Then it stopped. All was silent for a moment. And then what was in front of us was a Furby who no longer had the high-pitched girly voice, but instead a deep, growling voice with angry looking eyes.

Mira’s Furby was suddenly possessed by a new personality who was mean. It growled at her, it snapped at her with an angry voice if she tried to pet it, and it made retching noises when she tried to feed it, as if the iPad foods weren’t good enough for it. Occasionally it showed little flames in its eyes.

Netflix's Micro-Genres Revealed

Utterly fascinating account of reverse engineering Netflix's recommendation system. The rabbit hole goes deeper than I had even dreamed, and Perry Mason is at the bottom of it.

So, after I'd secured my data, I called up Netflix's PR liaison, a Dutch guy named Joris Evers who keeps a miniature windmill on his desk. I told him we had to talk.

After I filled him in on what we'd done, I waited to hear his reaction, wondering if I was about to have my Netflix account permanently canceled. Instead, he said, "And now you want to come in and talk to Todd Yellin, I guess?"

Yellin is Netflix's VP of Product and the man responsible for the creation of Netflix's system. Tagging all the movies was his idea. How to tag them began with a 24-page document he wrote himself. He tagged the early movies and guided the creation of all the systems.

Yes, of course I wanted to meet Yellin. He had become my Wizard of Oz, the man who made the machine, the human whose intelligence and sensibility I'd been tracking through the data.

At our interview, Yellin turned to me and said, "I've been waiting for someone to bubble up like this for years."

Guidelines For Using The New Mac Pro on Its Side

From the horse's mouth. Some of these are pretty funny. 

When using multiple Mac Pro (Late 2013) computers, do not direct the exhaust at the top of one Mac Pro towards the intake of another system. Place the computers side by side with a gap of at least several inches between them.

When on its side, secure the Mac Pro (Late 2013) to be sure that it doesn't roll.

Shameless Guardian Carphone Warehouse Advertorial Masquerades As Article On "Tablet" Music Production

So I thought this was going to be a reasonable take on how tablets are being used in music production. I'll be honest, I've never met anyone who's using anything other than an iPad, but I'm prepared to believe they exist. So the "article" launches straight into a sales pitch:

A good choice would be a high-end tablet such as a Sony Xperia Tablet Z, which has a quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro processor which, he says, will "eat for breakfast" powerful apps like the well-respected FL Studio Mobile. FL Studio Mobile is an app which lets you compose and save multitrack studio projects, whether you're inputting MIDI notes with a step sequencer or adding effects.

I've never heard of the "well-respected FL Studio Mobile" but, hey, I don't use Android. I was looking forward to reading about some of the other apps on the platform. Apparently there aren't any. Not a single mention of another app, on any platform. No mention of iPad or iPhone at all, despite there being hundreds of sequencers, drum machines, synthesisers, effects processors, composition tools and so forth on iOS. No mention of the high end studio and live mixing desks designed specifically for iPad. No mention of the guitar effects pedals, microphones and digital instrument interfaces that proudly tout iOS-compatibility.

Then we get this:

Carphone Warehouse has launched a short film, as part of its Smarter World campaign, to inspire people by showing the possibilities of smartphones. The film reveals how musicians are using tablets and smartphones to improve their performances. Music producer Darren Sangita, the DJ who worked on a collaborative track for the campaign, says tablet technology is a "dream" to work with.

"I used to work in studios with huge 48-channel decks and two-inch tape machines that cost £150,000. That technology has now been shrunk down to a touchscreen – so you've got everything from synthesis to drum machines, real-time effects and modulations, multi-track recording capabilities and playback."

Sounds good, and Sangita goes on to gush about how "tablets" and "touchscreen" are revolutionising the music industry. Strangely, he doesn't mention any platform, nor any apps. I followed the link to the short film Carphone Warehouse has made, showing Darren in action. Full of iPads (and other devices). The app he specifically talks about is named on screen: Sugar Bytes Turnado —Only on iPad.

Well done CW, you've managed to write an article about music production (which, in mobile, is  dominated by iPads) and only mention the devices you specifically need to flog. Perhaps you're getting paid handsomely to shift them. You didn't even have to find more than a single Android app to talk about, and you couldn't be bothered to find a producer who prefers it.

And in The Guardian, masquerading as a proper article? You should be ashamed of yourselves.

Design For The Four Percent Colour Blind

I didn't realise the percentage of people with colour blindness was so high. That's a lot of people to ignore when you're designing for a mass audience (and probably one or two even when you're designing visual material for a class). 

Businesses cause problems for colour blind people when they use colour alone to convey information. This mistake is most frequently made in relation to the design of maps, diagrams, graphs, charts and other types of infographic.

These problems seem to be made worse when the coloured items are small. That is, some colour blind people report that they can only distinguish certain colours if they have sufficient “mass” (for example, they might perceive a thick coloured line as being red, but a thin version of the same line as being black). This is a possibility rather than a confirmed trait, but it’s worth bearing in mind.

Interactive digital systems providing ticketing are common culprits in using colour alone to convey information. These typically provide seating plans to help their customers choose the best available seats for the event or service that they are booking.