Nicely coinciding with Apple's iOS and OS X security fixes–if you haven't downloaded them yet stop reading and go do it right away–and with Samsung's own questionable implementation of fingerprint scanning, Apple's released a pretty detailed PDF outlining iOS security. It's fairly readable–you could skip the more technical sections and still get a good idea of what's going on–and it provides more information than we've had before on how Touch ID and the A7's Secure Enclave works. Pretty nice.
Dear Apple: Please Build This Into Siri.
Amazon Doesn't Need A Device To Make A Dent In TV
Wired makes the case that Amazon wants its own device to take Instant Video to a broader market, and to get around Apple's cut without the kludgy workarounds it's had to use so far.
You might not even need cable. As a cord-cutter, I’m using Instant Video to watch the latest season of Justified on my iPad. They’re available hours after they air on traditional TV. Amazon’s understandable refusal to let Apple take a cut of its content business means I must pay for episodes in the browser before watching them on the iPad’s Instant Video app. But I still think the overall experience is better than iTunes. Streaming is so much faster than downloading and doesn’t take up any space on my device. I’ve watched Breaking Bad, The Americans, and the awesome Luther the same way, and I’ve never felt like I’m missing out on some mythical TV experience. Yes, I’m not tweeting along to the show in “real time.” But that’s way less important to me than paying for only what I want and nothing I don’t.
I'm not so sure having a device (which Amazon's bound to sell at a loss) is any threat to other platforms like Apple TV. They want their content on as many devices as possible, and if Netflix is able to make subscriptions to streaming video work on the Apple TV then Amazon certainly could. Paying 30% to Apple for individual shows might be painful (perhaps less so for recurring subscriptions initiated through an iTunes account), but I'm sure that Netflix has a different arrangement for getting its channel right up there on the Apple TV.
Samsung S5 Fingerprint Sensor
Maybe they should have copied Apple's design.
Less successful is Samsung’s take on the fingerprint-unlock system made popular by Apple with the iPhone 5S. Like the 5S, the S5’s home key features an integrated fingerprint scanner, which can be used to unlock the phone or authenticate purchases online (Samsung is partnering with PayPal to enable this feature, though it doesn’t validate purchases from the Google Play Store). Samsung’s version requires a vertical swipe over the home button to activate the scanner, and we found it to be quite unreliable and virtually impossible to activate when holding the phone in one hand. It can store up to three different digits, but it was very particular about the speed and orientation of the swiping motion used — if we weren’t doing a perfectly straight swipe down, it would refuse to unlock the phone.
Speaking of Apple's iPhone 5S, that Touch ID home button is holding up pretty well for me. I get the occasional rejection, but nothing that detracts from the convenience of not having to type my (long and pretty secure) passcode. I like the idea of integrating with PayPal, though I'm guessing Apple has its own idea about how it'd like to do payments.
Powering The Earth For The Next Thirty Million Years
The ITER project is astonishing in the scale of its ambition: A hundred-feet-tall machine weighing twenty-three thousand tons and generating ten times as much heat as the Sun's core.
No natural phenomenon on Earth will be hotter. Like the sun, the cloud will go nuclear. The zooming hydrogen atoms, in a state of extreme kinetic excitement, will slam into one another, fusing to form a new element—helium—and with each atomic coupling explosive energy will be released: intense heat, gamma rays, X rays, a torrential flux of fast-moving neutrons propelled in every direction. There isn’t a physical substance that could contain such a thing. Metals, plastics, ceramics, concrete, even pure diamond—all would be obliterated on contact, and so the machine will hold the superheated cloud in a “magnetic bottle,” using the largest system of superconducting magnets in the world. Just feet from the reactor’s core, the magnets will be cooled to two hundred and sixty-nine degrees below zero, nearly the temperature of deep space. Caught in the grip of their titanic forces, the artificial earthbound sun will be suspended, under tremendous pressure, in the pristine nothingness of iter’s vacuum interior.
The Car Is The Next UI Battleground
Matthaeus Krenn's slick UI concepts for an in-car touch dashboard are getting some attention. Touch-screen facsimiles of existing physical buttons certainly aren't a good fit, but I wonder if there's an approach that requires less relearning for drivers. Voice control perhaps?
Several automotive companies have begun replacing traditional controls in their cars with touch screens. Unfortunately, their eagerness to set new trends in hardware, is not matched by their ambition to create innovative software experiences for these new input mechanisms. Instead of embracing new constraints and opportunities, they merely replicate old button layouts and shapes on these new, flat, glowing surfaces.
So even controls for air condition and infotainment - which are commonly used while driving - now lack any tactile feedback and require the driver’s dexterity and attention when operated. Considering that distracted driving is the number one cause for car accidents, this is not a step in the right direction.
How To Email
For what's pretty much the oldest form of online communication, you'd think we'd have gotten the hang of it by now. There's some excellent advice here.
Nothing drives people crazier than an email where someone sends over a lot of information but doesn’t say what they’d like you to do. I often respond to those immediately by asking: What do you want me to do?
Do you want me introduce you to someone? Do you want me read your blog post and give you feedback? Do you want me to respond with whether I’ll be able to attend an event? Be clear and say it explicitly up front.
The Fragility Of Brands
I think there's a lot of misunderstanding about what makes a brand. It's very often talked about entirely in terms of image, marketing, and target audience, and the actual product and customer experience gets left out of the picture. That this isn't a sustainable position is neither new, nor a product of the rise of the Internet.
For established brands, this is a nightmare. You can never coast on past performance—the percentage of brand-loyal car buyers has plummeted in the past twenty years—and the price premium that a recognized brand can charge has shrunk. If you’re making a better product, you can still charge more, but, if your product is much like that of your competitors, your price needs to be similar, too. That’s the clearest indication that the economic value of brands—traditionally assessed by the premium a company could charge—is waning. This isn’t true across the board: brands retain value where the brand association is integral to the experience of a product (Coca-Cola, say), or where they confer status, as with luxury goods. But even here the information deluge is transformative; luxury travel, for instance, has been profoundly affected by sites like TripAdvisor.
Hypercard Was The Right Idea, Ahead Of Its Time
My love for Hypercard is no secret, and I like the card metaphor, though I've no desire to see it applied to everything. I suspect we're going to see at least as many poor implementations as good ones.
But as I look around the mobile landscape, I see cards everywhere. Benedict Evans wrote a good post about this trend a few weeks ago. Google is pushing cards as a UI inside Android and their Google Now UI is the best example of that. Twitter has had cards inside of Tweets for several years now, although I wish they would display them by default in my timeline. The Facebook mobile UI looks like a series of cards, although you can’t really do anything with them, yet. And, of course, my favorite example are theKik Cards that are mini mobie web apps that run inside of Kik’s messenger. I’ve blogged about them a number of times here at AVC as Kik is a USV portfolio company.
It feels like the Hypercard metaphor has arrived as the atomic unit of content in mobile, both inside of native apps and, if Kik is going in the right direction (I think they are), as the default mobile web atomic unit (cards instead of pages).
Luxi Turns Your iPhone Into An Incident Light Meter
Anyone who knows anything about studio photography knows that taking an incident light reading is the best way of getting accurate exposure metering, without having to adjust for the reflective qualities of your subject (that means you, snowmen and black cats). This is a really-neat accessory that clips right over your iPhone's front-facing camera and turns it into an incident light meter. $30, plus an extra $9 to ship to the UK (I make that about £23 at time of writing).
Serious photographers sometimes spend hundreds of dollars on an incident light meter–a small handheld device that measures the light falling on the subject. Luxi is a $30 iPhone accessory that promises to do the same job using just your existing phone.
Kinsa Smart Thermometer Opens The Way For Home Medical Devices
This looks like a great product, and if it was available in the UK right now I'd order a bunch for my family. I like Kinsa's vision too. One to watch.
Kinsa has revolutionized the world’s most common medical device, the first device anyone uses to confirm an illness: the thermometer. The Kinsa Smart Thermometer is a mobile-connected thermometer that allows us to communicate with someone who has just fallen ill, give them the information to get better faster, and collect the data we need to map human health.
Could Facebook Turn Into The Anti-Google Of Mobile?
Facebook's purchase of the staunchly ad-free Whatsapp network certainly raises some interesting questions, and plays nicely into the growing narrative that Google's ads-everywhere culture has had its day.
“I don’t personally think that ads are the right way to monetize messaging systems,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said today on a conference call about the acquisition.
Facebook certainly does a tidy business selling ads to display in its apps for iPhones, iPads, and Android devices. Still, the company faces tough challenges as it tries to grow from here. Mobile ads are still less valuable than the ones seen by Facebook users on their PCs. And simple geometry dictates that mobile devices have less space for advertising than the expansive desktop web.
But there’s something else, more fundamental: a disquieting suspicion that, in the long run, advertising simply might not work for the mobile web.
Play Pokemon Red With 75,000 People
Fascinating experiment in social gaming:
TwitchPlaysPokemon is stream that lets you play Pokemon with a lot of other people by typing commands into chat. It's running a romhack of Pokemon Red that has all 151 Pokemon obtainable without trading.
It was created as an experiment to test the viability of this format, the way people interact with the input system and the way they interact socially with each other.
It's also worth reading the commentary over at Digg, which examines the strange emergent mythologies of the experiment.
Mythology within the Twitch community grew outward. The Helix fossil — an item which players often found themselves checking in the inventory by chance — has become a totem which Red 'consults for advice' and the representation of all that is good, while its counterpart, the Dome fossil, the source of evil. Accidents are attributed to the latter and victories to the former and both are referred to by the community as gods. Monsters active in significant moments become aligned with these two deities, e.g. Flareon "The False Prophet," who was part of a major setback and is therefore ecumenically linked to the Dome Fossil.
What's The Perfect Mobile Writing Computer?
Short version: It's the iPad Air. Well worth reading Julio Ojeda-Zapata's reasoning though, along with a nice trawl through the technology he's used along the way.
In recent weeks I’ve reached for a different kind of computer when heading out of my newsroom on a reporting assignment — the iPad Air. This came as a surprise to me. The iPad, is, at least for me, an unexpected choice for mobile journalism.
Historically, I’ve leaned more toward the Mac than the iPad. Given a hard choice between a MacBook Air and the iPad Air for personal (not professional press) use, I would choose the former every time. And yet, when I’m preparing to head out for field reporting, I’ve ended up picking an iPad almost every time.
Sheet Music That Listens In And Follows Your Performance
Fabulous use of the iPad as a performance tool, and more indication of how we can go from using tablets as replacements for paper, and towards augmenting and extending tasks.
Like dozens of other apps, it offers digital sheet music, so musicians can keep their libraries on one device rather than several fraying pamphlets. But unlike its competitors, Tonara takes advantage of the astonishing power packed into an iPad, for which it is specifically designed, and in doing so sets a model for app development well beyond the world of music.
Tonara doesn’t expect its users simply to follow the tempo they set. Instead, it uses the iPad’s built-in microphone to listen to the music, even if there are multiple instruments playing, showing the musician where she is at any given time—and where she should be.
Physical Objects As Tokens For Digital Media
Over at Quartz there's an interesting story about Ozenge's Qleek system:
Not so long ago, every act of consumption began with a ritual. We pulled records from sleeves and perched them on turntables, slid books from shelves, watched as VHS tapes were ingested with a soft ca-chunk. Qleek, from Paris-based startup Ozenge, aims to return our digital media to a state in which they can be collected, stored, handled, played and shared in the same way that physical media were, once. The makers of Qleek want you to pick up a wooden hexagon printed with, for example, the artwork for an album or mix, place it on a reader, and hear the corresponding tracks play on your device of choice.
I'm rather ambivalent about this notion. On the one hand I'm of the generation that grew up collecting physical LPs, cassettes, and CDs, and who thought we'd never quite adapt to a world in which music wasn't attached to a physical format. On the other hand, when iTunes made the whole process of ripping my discs slick and easy–and when the iTunes Store made finding and buying new stuff just as easy– I adapted just fine.
So I'm unconvinced that, long term, there's any basic human requirement for something as ephemeral as music to be embodied in a physical, fileable and collectible, format. I'm tempted to suggest that our fetishisation of a physical form for music is in fact merely that: a fetish, and one that's been encouraged and manipulated by commercial interests in order to profit from something that's otherwise notoriously difficult to control and sell. That the de-materialisation of music has stripped away profits and control from the companies which invented the physical forms should surprise no-one, and shouldn't worry us at all.
Of course, as a designer of sorts, I adore what's possible in terms of music packaging, and I have no doubt that as long as there are designers who treasure music there'll be ways and means of collecting, cataloguing, experiencing and showing off the music that adds meaning to our lives. I just don't think it's a pre-requisite that it needs to be in a form that mimics pre-digital artefacts.
Netflix Found The House Of Cards Binging Champion
Great article on Netflix's approach to launching new seasons of a hit show, including this lovely nugget:
The engineers can tell, in real time, how many people are streaming the show on these devices, where they are, and who’s binging. Edberg said the last time House of Cards launched, the engineers figured out that the entire season was about 13 hours.
"And we looked to [see] if anybody was finishing in that amount of time," Edberg said. "And there was one person who finished with just three minutes longer than there is content. So basically, three total minutes of break in roughly 13 hours."
Thanks to @iamsteadman for the link.
The Size Of A Pixel
I remember when my Mac Plus's 72-pixels-per-inch display seemed like it would be all we'd ever need.
The size of a pixel had remained pretty much constant for 10 years. We had spent so long knowing that our pixel was roughly the smallest dot we could see at arms length, that we took it for granted. We used it as a unit. We used it all the time. We used it in our raster graphics for logos, we used it for buttons and icons in our software. We used it to get perfectly aligned layouts in websites. We used it to decide the size of our text. We knew we shouldn't but we did it anyway.
Amazing Illustrated Pictorial Alphabets
An excellent collection over at io9. Fascinating how many letterforms have been based on the human body, but there are plenty of other beautiful approaches too.
These incredible pictorial alphabet designs look like artistic madness, but they were actually used historically as mnemonic devices to help people memorize their letters. If you are a font fiend, or simply love weird imagery, you must check out these demented illustrations of the ABCs.
Designing Fake Video Games For "Her"
Fascinating interview with the designers of the two video games in the imagined-near-future world of Spike Jonze's "Her". I'd pay to play "Perfect Mom". Nintendo should option this stuff.
Spike wrote all the Perfect Mom stuff, including the messages that pop up (“You’re Failing Your Children!”). He was really open to suggestions though, and we came up with some visual gags he liked, like the kid dumping the cereal on his head or the HUD in the corner of the screen that monitors the kids' love for their mom.