This iDownloadBlog post is doubly useful:
Nice job by Joaquim Barbosa. Clever and well written.
Jean-Louis Gassée, Monday Note:
By declining Steve Jobs’ proposal to make the original iPhone CPU in 2005, Intel missed a huge opportunity. The company’s disbelief in Apple’s ambitious forecast is belied by the numbers: More than 1.8 billion iOS devices have been sold thus far.
And:
One may wonder why then-CEO Paul Otellini didn’t make Apple an offer they couldn’t refuse: Access to Intel’s superior silicon manufacturing technology. At the time, Apple had nothing; Intel held all the cards.
And:
A few years later, after the dramatic rise of ARM-powered smartphones, Intel execs’ faith in Wintel was unshaken: “The temporary advantage these less sophisticated, Windows-less ARM chips are enjoying will be erased by the superior silicon manufacturing process of the x86. It’s nothing…”
Fantastic take on Intel’s Apple hubris. Now Intel is fighting for its very existence.
Steve Jobs gave a very informal talk to a class at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, back in 1992. I’ve not seen this one before.
I have to say, seeing Steve so young and vibrant both thrills me and fills me with sadness. [Via @EggFreckles]
When you ask Siri, Alexa, or Google a question, you have to say the trigger phrase, “Hey Siri”, “Alexa”, or “OK Google”. When you want to follow-up, you have to repeat that trigger phrase.
But that is about to change.
Amazon has rolled out a beta of something it calls Follow-up Mode. From this Amazon Help page:
When you turn on Follow-Up Mode, you can make more requests without repeating the wake word. Follow-up mode is available on all hands-free Alexa-enabled devices. The blue indicator light on the Echo device remains on for a few seconds, letting you know that Alexa is active and ready for your next request.
The idea is, after you say “Alexa”, Alexa keeps listening for a follow-up query until it times out. Notably, follow-up mode does not kick in when:
I’d think this would be relatively simple for Apple to implement for Siri. There’s certainly value when you want to do a sequence of things. But I also think it’d be a big help for Siri’s context analysis, making it more likely that two queries in a row are connected in some way, like so:
Or:
You get the idea. Conversational context is a bit of a holy grail. As is, all three (Siri, Alexa, Google) are still infants, still learning the most rudimentary rules of conversational memory.
Jonny Evans, writing for Computerworld, pulled together this extensive list of things you can ask Siri. This is worth a scan, just to make sure you have a sense of Siri’s current range.
How many of these commands will work on HomePod? I tried a number of these, and I was actually surprised by how many did work. Cool.
First things first, this set of rankings is based on data from GitHub and StackOverflow. Read the post for the details on how this data was collected.
There are plenty of other ways to assess the popularity of programming languages, but this seems a reasonable approach.
It’s notable that Swift has tied Objective-C. As the post says:
Finally, the apprentice is now the master. Technically, this isn’t entirely accurate, as Swift merely tied the language it effectively replaced – Objective C – rather than passing it. Still, it’s difficult to view this run as anything but a changing of the guard.
Pass this along to your dev friends.
Before we dig into the linked post, it might help to know a bit about Ken Segall. From his bio:
Working with Steve Jobs as his ad agency’s creative director for twelve years spanning NeXT and Apple, he led the team behind Apple’s legendary Think different campaign, and set Apple down the i-way by naming the iMac.
That said, here’s Ken Segall, from the linked post:
The Apple story of the week is the new HomePod ad. Four minutes in length, I’m not sure you can call it an ad, but it’s out there and getting mostly positive reactions. Directed by Spike Jonze, psychedelic expanding sets, cool music, emotional dance … what’s not to like?
And:
It’s not that I don’t like it. I think it’s beautifully produced, like all Apple ads. But it does make me feel like I’ve been here before. Or, more accurately, that I’ve been here many times before. Like I’m stuck in an infinite loop of Apple dancing ads.
Over the years, Apple has given us a virtual stream of ads in which music inspires someone to dance. The scenery changes, laws of physics are increasingly challenged, but the basic concept remains the same.
At least that’s been my overall impression. So the new HomePod ad moved me to action. After I finished dancing, I nosed around to see if my memory matched the reality.
At the very least, this is a fascinating walk through the history of Apple’s music advertising. Of course Apple’s ads will have a lot of dance in them. Advertising is a visual medium and if you are pitching music (and lots of Apple’s products involve music in some fashion), dance is a terrific visual storyteller.
So what’s the problem here?
In my opinion, a company like Apple can take two approaches to advertising. It can start thinking about what works for the mainstream audience—like dancing and celebrities (who are also frequently summoned by Apple these days)—or it can use its mass-popularity to take the same risks today as it did when it was the underdog.
The latter is the Apple that captured so many hearts.
And:
The iPod Silhouette campaign changed Apple advertising in a huge way. It was virtually the first Apple campaign that didn’t feature a lot of white space, a gorgeous product shot and clever words. Yes, it was a lot of dance, but it was a totally fresh take on dance.
Fair enough. This is more of a quest for a fresh take, something as groundbreaking and different as the Silhouette campaign.
No matter how you feel about this, scroll through Ken’s post, take a look back at some of Apple’s past ads. Some great stuff there.
Dave Winer:
I’ve been writing about Google’s efforts to deprecate HTTP, the protocol of the web. This is a summary of why I am opposed to this.
DaveW’s take on Google’s pitch:
- Something bad could happen to my pages in transit from a HTTP server to the user’s web browser.
- It’s not hard to convert to HTTPS and it doesn’t cost a lot.
- Google is going to warn people about my site being “not secure.” So if I don’t want people to be scared away, I should bend to their will (as if the web were their platform).
The rest of the article is Dave’s rebuttal, a thoughtful read from a very smart someone who knows this stuff inside and out. A few bits:
Google is a guest on the web, as we all are. Guests don’t make the rules.
And:
A lot of the web consists of archives. Files put in places that no one maintains. They just work. There’s no one there to do the work that Google wants all sites to do.
And:
Google has spent a lot of effort to convince you that HTTP is not good. Let me have the floor for a moment to tell you why HTTP is the best thing ever.
If you care about HTTP vs HTTPS, take a few minutes to read Dave Winer’s post. Then dig into Nick Heer’s excellent In Defence of Surfing the Insecure Web for a bit wider perspective.
Neither take is about bashing HTTPS, or about ditching security in any way. It’s about thinking carefully before ditching openness and about how decisions about the internet are and should be made.
Good stuff.
Peter Kafka, Recode:
Netflix says 70 percent of its streams end up on connected TVs instead of phones, tablets or PCs.
And:
Netflix isn’t an outlier, either. Last fall, for instance, YouTube said that its live TV service, which it had pitched as a mobile-first offering, was generating more than half of its streams on TVs.
The Netflix part is not a surprise to me. Netflix grew its brand with DVDs, inexorably tied to the TV. Add to that, the TV is (usually) the biggest screen in the house and set up as a social center, typically with comfortable chairs and couches facing the screen, with a table or two nearby for food/snacks.
But the YouTube live TV bit was a surprise. To me, that really shows the long-lasting pull of the TV, strong enough to pull a service born on your computer, over into the living room.
Kurt Wagner, in this Recode post:
In a very casual Periscope livestream on Thursday, Dorsey said that he wants to verify everyone on Twitter, a continuation of the plan Twitter laid out a few years ago when it asked users to apply for verification online.
That program as been suspended since the fall, when Twitter got major backlash for verifying a few white supremacists. But it appears that Dorsey is open to relaunching some version of it once Twitter figures out how it should work.
“The intention is to open verification to everyone,” Dorsey said from a conference room at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters. “And to do it in a way that is scalable [so] we’re not in the way and people can verify more facts about themselves and we don’t have to be the judge and imply any bias on our part.”
I do hope Twitter finds a way to solve the “identity” problem. I don’t have a problem allowing anonymity in public forums. But:
To me, anonymity is important. Think whistleblowers, not trolls. But if there’s a setting available to me that lets me limit my feed to only verified accounts, or shows verified tweets in a blue bubble and anonymous tweets in a grey bubble, I can’t help but see that as helpful in slowing the spread of malnews/hatespeech.
All that said, the road to a verified identity is fraught with difficulty. A nigh-impossible problem to solve. Here’s hoping.
I love Siri and what it can do for me, when it works properly. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen with every device. The more devices I use Siri with, the more I’ve come to realize that maybe it’s my expectations of Siri that allows me to enjoy it on certain devices more than others.
I am amazed with how well Siri works on my HomePod. As I wrote in my review of the device, I can stand 20 feet away with the music at 80 percent, and Siri will understand me. In fact, 99 percent of the commands I give Siri on the HomePod work perfectly.
As an aside: I did have a funny Siri story on the HomePod. I asked Siri to put the volume at 50 percent, and she responded, “Okay, now playing 50 Cent.” No, Siri, No.
What’s interesting about Siri on the HomePod is that I am limited in what I can ask it to do, so my expectations of its accomplishments are relatively low. It plays the bands I want, turns the volume up and down, gives me information about the song, etc.
Apple did a great job of setting my expectations of what to expect from Siri on that device.
I feel the same way about Siri in CarPlay. When I hop in the car and activate Siri, I’m basically going to do one of three things: Play music, ask for directions, or send a message.
Again, the expectations for what Siri is going to do are pretty low, but very specific. Siri does a great job in the car, no matter what I ask it to do. However, for the most part, I keep within the known parameters, which gives me the sense that Siri works really well.
HomePod and CarPlay are very similar devices in the way Siri works. They have very specific functions that work, we know those limitations, and we knowingly or unknowingly stay within those parameters.
I would love to see Siri handle multiple, complex commands. Even something as simple as adding items to your grocery list. “Hey Siri, add peas, bread, and milk to the grocery list,” and have Siri parse those three items. Or even, “Hey Siri, Play Ozzy, and turn the volume to 100 percent.” Currently, you have to do each one of those commands separately, which isn’t optimal.
Having said that, Siri still works really well on HomePod and CarPlay.
Where Siri starts to breakdown for me is with the iPhone and Apple Watch. There are parts of Siri that work really well on both of these devices, but there are some uses that are way out there.
For instance, dictating a message using Siri is nearly flawless on either device. However, I don’t know what the limitations of Siri on the iPhone and Apple Watch are, so I ask it all kinds of things that it either can’t do or misinterprets what I want it to do.
That is incredibly annoying and leads some of us to use Siri to set timers and do everything else using the keyboard. On my Apple Watch, I see the “Hold On…”, “I’ll tap you when I’m ready” message far too often. Sometimes it’s not even worth trying to set a timer or play music with it.
When I can open an app and do something simple like set a timer or start playing music faster than the virtual assistant, there is a problem.
Maybe Siri on the iPhone isn’t supposed to have any limitations—I certainly don’t see any, but I have trouble asking it questions about sports, music, schedules, Olympics, and other things.
I can wrap my head around HomePod and CarPlay’s limitations and Siri works like a charm. Maybe I’m doing Siri wrong on the iPhone and Apple Watch, but my troubles there have led me to using the technology as a dictation service and occasionally setting timers.
It seems like such a waste, but I can’t figure out a way to make it work better.
An illuminated manuscript is a book written and decorated completely by hand. Illuminated manuscripts were among the most precious objects produced in the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, primarily in monasteries and courts. Society’s rulers–emperors, kings, dukes, cardinals, and bishops–commissioned the most splendid manuscripts.
Amazing video showing some of the work that went into creating illuminated manuscripts.
I’ve been list-building again. Last week, I posted a tweet asking about Things Apple changed, were mocked for, then were copied industry wide.
Yesterday, I tweeted about requests for improvements in the next rev of HomePod and HomePod Siri.
I’ve already gotten a huge wave of feedback. Clearly, people see the potential with HomePod and have some great ideas on making HomePod and Siri interaction better.
All that said, one topic that came up in the Twitter discussion was the ability to control your HomePod experience from your Mac or your iPhone. The idea would be to access the HomePod’s history and current queue, adding and deleting songs to control what’s coming.
Turns out, there is a way to do some of that.
Jason Snell, from this MacWorld article:
The HomePod doesn’t behave like most other Apple devices. Unlike the Apple Watch, there’s no dedicated app. It supports AirPlay, so it shows up in the list of audio sources—but it’s also remote-controllable like an Apple TV. And to configure it, you don’t visit the Settings app, but the Home app. Here’s a quick guide to where and how you can control the HomePod from your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
In a nutshell, Jason walks you through the process of using the Home and Music apps, and Control Center (on iOS) or iTunes (on the Mac), to connect your iPhone/Mac to your HomePod, remote controlling content on HomePod without using AirPlay.
This feels like a hack to me. I do appreciate the ability to pick a song and add it to the HomePod queue, but I find the process confusing and insufficient.
Give me a HomePod app, please. One that shows the current queue and history, with a simple up next/add to queue feature. The keyword is simple. I shouldn’t need to juggle three different mechanisms, each with a unique and unrelated interface, just to visually manage my HomePod song experience.
Interesting side note: Playing around, I clearly was able to add songs to my HomePod while it was playing and, at the same time, have music playing on my iPhone. Then I powered down my iPhone and my HomePod stopped playing. I was not AirPlaying from my iPhone to my HomePod, yet the iPhone was clearly controlling my HomePod.
With my iPhone off, I asked HomePod Siri to play a song, and she did. When I powered down my iPhone, HomePod took back control. Interesting. And confusing.
UPDATE: With a bit of help from Kyle Gray, I got to the view of my HomePod up-next queue on my iPhone’s Music app. It’s there and it does work. Discoverability aside, I still would like to see a separate queue for my HomePod, one that lives beyond the moment. When I said, “Hey Siri, play Walk the Moon”, HomePod Siri complied, and that wiped the queue I’d constructed.
That said, if I say “Hey Siri, play Perfect Darkness by Fink next”, HomePod Siri will add that song to the queue and I can see that addition on my iPhone.
But if I say “Hey Siri, add some Steely Dan next”, I’ll get a river of Steely Dan songs added to the queue. Would love a “Siri, undo” command.
I’ve been tracking this one with great interest. From the description:
Up for sale is one of the rarest Apple computers you’ll find. This is a prototype/clear Macintosh Portable (M5126) backlit. I’ve been collecting for many years now and only know of four of these left in the world. All of which, based on my knowledge, exist in private collections i.e. Lonnie Mimm’s, an individual in Europe, this one, my personal collection. This is one of my favorite Apple computers and the fact this is a clear prototype make is unbelievably rare. The chances of one of these coming up for sale again are very low.
And:
The engineer I bought this from worked on the Macintosh Portable project. Another buddy of his, who also worked on the project and was leaving the Apple, said he planned on throwing this prototype out. The person I bought this from literally found it in his buddies trash before he left Apple. The engineer I bought this from kept it in his office until he left Apple and kept it safe for 28 years.
Follow the link, check out the pictures. Beautiful. From what I can tell, this is the prototype of this device, which Apple sold from 1989 to 1991 at the incredibly expensive price of $7,300 (about $14,000 in today’s dollars). Crazy.
As I write this, the prototype has a current bid of $8,100. Don’t tempt me, internet.
Federico Viticci, MacStories:
In the first update since November 2017, Apple today released version 1.7.8 of Workflow, the powerful iOS automation app they acquired last year. The latest version, which is now available on the App Store, introduces a brand new Mask Image action, adds support for Things’ automation features, and improves the ability to extract text from PDFs using the company’s PDFKit framework, launched in iOS 11. While the unassuming version number may suggest a relatively minor update, Workflow 1.7.8 actually comes with a variety of noteworthy changes for heavy users of the app.
If you’ve never played with Workflow, take a few minutes and download it (it’s free).
And if you use Workflow, read Federico’s excellent walkthrough of what’s new.
CNET:
Need an incentive to exercise? Maybe the chance to land an Apple Watch could help.
That’s what UnitedHealthcare is hoping, anyway. The health insurance company is integrating the Apple Watch into its UnitedHealthcare Motion digital wellness program, which gives people access to activity trackers that then allow them to earn up to $1,000 a year if they meet daily walking goals.
And:
After paying tax and shipping, anyone enrolled in UnitedHealthcare Motion can get an Apple Watch Series 3 and have the option to apply earnings from the program toward buying the device. After that, their earnings are deposited into their health savings account or health reimbursement account to help cover out-of-pocket medical expenses.
Great move.
From the release:
The company conducted 756 audits spanning 30 countries and covering suppliers representing 95 percent of total spend. Apple’s efforts to raise standards are having a dramatic impact and the number of low-performing facilities decreased to just 1 percent.
Apple goes deeper into the supply chain to find issues and fix them more than any other company in its industry and each year it will do more to raise the bar and protect the people who make Apple products as well as the planet.
Indeed.
“In rare circumstances, Alexa can mistakenly hear the phrase ‘Alexa, laugh,’ the company said in a statement to GeekWire. “We are changing that phrase to be ‘Alexa, can you laugh?’ which is less likely to have false positives, and we are disabling the short utterance ‘Alexa, laugh.’”
Hmmmm, from some of the reports I saw, I’m not sure if this is it or not.
This year, celebrate International Women’s Day by supporting a women-led business. Starting this week, businesses can now identify as owned, led, or founded by women, by enabling the women-led attribute from their Google My Business dashboard. Attributes appear on a business’s Google listing on Maps and Search and give customers more details like “Has Wi-Fi” and “Outdoor seating” to help them decide where to go.
Great idea from Google.
io9:
Look, The Shape of Water is great. Seriously, it is. But when you look at film history, the fact that The Shape of Water is the first science fiction film to ever win Best Picture is kind of weird. There have been decades and decades of phenomenal sci-fi films better than The Shape of Water, so for it to get the award first also feels a little frustrating. Here are some of the movies that earned the Best Picture Oscar—even if they didn’t win it.
Like most lists, this is completely subjective but, for at least the first eight on the list, I would have to agree.
Will Cosgrove:
It’s been proposed that the world would be a better place without Retweets. If you would like to see what a no Retweet world looks like, click the Disable button to turn off retweets from all of the people you follow. Don’t like it? Turn it back on with the enable button.
If you’re a power user who has spent a lot of time fine tuning which accounts you get retweets from and which you don’t, this tool is not for you. It will heartlessly ruin all of your hard work. So don’t click either button.
I’m in the latter camp that can’t really use this (I use Twitterrific to manage this kind of stuff on a finer level) but for some of you, this might be useful.
Over the past few days, users with Alexa-enabled devices have reported hearing strange, unprompted laughter. Amazon responded to the creepiness in a statement to The Verge, saying, “We’re aware of this and working to fix it.”
Thankfully it’s being fixed.
CNBC:
Let’s face it: Filing your income tax is time-consuming and confusing, and scammers play off of the uncertainty that comes along with it. And since no one wants to get on the bad side of the Internal Revenue Service, when you get a call from the “IRS” and they talk about “fraud,” “police,” “back taxes” and “arrests,” it tends to get your attention. It’s that fear that drives the tax-season scammers.
It’s tax season so please make sure your less tech-savvy family and friends are aware of scams in general and this type specifically. My wife almost got caught in a “Canada Post” phishing scheme a few days ago.
PetaPixel:
We had what looked like the exact same image, taken at the exact millisecond in time, from what looked like the same exact location and perspective.
It was astounding that we both captured the exact same image of water motion at the exact millisecond in time.
Even a more-than-cursory look at the two photos would lead you to believe they were identical. Great story.
Open Culture:
Heavy Metal was much more than sexy sci-fi mascots drawn in lurid pulpy styles. Along with its share of erotica, the “adult illustrated fantasy magazine” provided a vivid showcase for some of the most interesting artists and storytellers working in the mainstream and in various subgenres of fantasy and sci-fi.
Heavy Metal was unabashedly sexist, even misogynist, but as a kid I devoured every issue, in particular, the amazing writing. I’d never read the fantasy genre before discovering it in the pages of Heavy Metal.
Buzzfeed:
Owners of Amazon Echo devices with the voice-enabled assistant Alexa have been pretty much creeped out of their damn minds recently. People are reporting that the bot sometimes spontaneously starts laughing — which is basically a bloodcurdling nightmare.
Step through the article, read the tweets. This has all the elements of a next-gen horror movie. I can’t help but wonder if there’s IoT hacking going on here, if there’s not someone having a good laugh over this.
Or ghosts. Yeah, probably ghosts.
Western Australian Museum blog:
The world’s oldest known message in a bottle has been found half-buried at a West Australian beach nearly 132 years after it was tossed overboard in the Indian Ocean, 950km from the coast.
Until now, the previous world record for the oldest message in a bottle was 108 years, four months and 18 days between jettison and discovery.
The message is dated 12 June 1886 and was jettisoned from the German sailing barque Paula as part of a long-term German oceanographic experiment to better understand global ocean currents and find faster, more efficient shipping routes.
Fascinating. This is just a bit like time travel to me.
Craig Hockenberry:
Whether you’re a developer who’s working on mobile apps, or just someone enjoying the millions of apps available for your phone, today is a very special day. It’s the ten year anniversary of the original iPhone SDK.
I don’t think it’s an understatement to say that this release changed a lot of people’s lives. I know it changed mine and had a fundamental impact on this company’s business. So let’s take a moment and look back on what happened a decade ago.
First things first, this is a great look back at a moment in time. The iPhone shipped, but there was no SDK, the secret (VERY secret) sauce that let developers build apps that sat on the shoulders of Apple’s iPhone software designers.
Craig tells the story of that first wave of folks who found ways to pry the mysteries of iPhone OS mechanics from the clues of the native apps built by Apple, dumping the classes of those apps and working out how they did what they did.
This is the work of the giants on whose shoulders future iOS developers now stand.
Craig’s writeup resonated with me very strongly. Back then, my partner, Dave Wooldridge, and I were running a publishing company called SpiderWorks, shipping eBooks for developers before eBooks had quite hit the mainstream. SpiderWorks was bought by Apress and, as part of the deal, I convinced Apress to publish a book on iPhone programming I had been contemplating.
They agreed, and Jeff LaMarche and I signed an NDA with Apple to get a pre-release version of the iPhone OS (what it was called back then) SDK.
The core of the book, Beginning iPhone Development, was a series of 20 or so apps, each of which showed off a piece of the SDK. Jeff and I brainstormed the concepts, and he did all the heavy dev lifting, with my focus on writing and re-writing to crystallize the concepts, make sure the story was clear enough for beginners to follow without too much head-scratching.
The biggest problem we ran into was the combination of an NDA (which prevented us from discussing the SDK details with ANYONE) and a rapidly changing code base. Each new SDK Apple shared with us caused all our apps to break, which meant rewriting the code and the explanatory text that showed how it all works.
Madness.
Ultimately, the book was ready to go, and it shipped within days of Apple publicly releasing the SDK and officially lifting the NDA.
That experience was one of the most grueling, and thrilling, experiences of my life. I wouldn’t change it for anything.
Panic co-founder Cabel Sasser, on the Panic blog:
A few months ago, a complaint started popping up from users downloading or updating our apps: “Geez, your downloads are really slow!”
If you work in support, you probably have a reflexive reaction to a complaint like this. It’s vague. There’s a million possible factors. It’ll probably resolve itself by tomorrow. You hope. Boy do you hope.
Except… we also started noticing it ourselves when we were working from home. When we’d come in to the office, transfers were lightning fast. But at home, it was really, seriously getting hard to get any work done remotely at all.
So, maybe there was something screwy here?
This is a fascinating story, well told. In a nutshell, Panic got reports of slow downloads from a non-trivial subset of their customers, wrote a script to try to find a common link, and actually found that link. And it was Comcast.
Cabel tells the story in the video below. More detail in the linked blog post. Excellent detective work.
Reuters:
BlackBerry Ltd on Tuesday filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Facebook Inc and its WhatsApp and Instagram apps, arguing that they copied technology and features from BlackBerry Messenger.
And:
“Defendants created mobile messaging applications that co-opt BlackBerry’s innovations, using a number of the innovative security, user interface, and functionality enhancing features,” Canada-based BlackBerry said in a filing with a Los Angeles federal court.
One of the patents in question covers the concept of a badge, that is, a changing number tied to an icon that reflect, for example, the current number of unread email messages.
Check out this thread from The Verge’s Nilay Patel:
Ummmm BlackBerry is suing Facebook for infringing a patent that claims to cover…. displaying a count of unread messages on a notification dot. pic.twitter.com/sGqetm6qbH
— nilay patel (@reckless) March 6, 2018
This has massive potential. Potential revenue for BlackBerry, and potential disruption for a raft of companies that will find themselves in court fighting this and other patents.
Yikes.