Like many of the people likely to be reading this, I bought a digital SLR a few years ago and developed a photography hobby. Then, also like many of you, my iPhone’s camera slowly took over my casual photography needs, and I stopped bringing the big SLR with me most of the time. The iPhone camera was good enough for most uses.
Today I migrated to a different photo-management app, like I do every year or two because I’m always dissatisfied with them. (From Aperture to Lightroom this time. I’ll explain why another time.) In the process, I got to skim through most of my photos from 2008.
In retrospect, my progression clearly forms three stages:
The Rebel XTi, from 2006–2008: Mostly orange, mostly blurry photos of mostly boring objects as I learned how to use cameras.
The 5D Mark II, from 2008–2010: Technical excellence, slowly building compositional skills. I still have this camera, but its usage sharply dropped off after 2010, because of:
The iPhone 4 and 4S, the first iPhones with relatively decent cameras, from 2010–present: My photos took a huge technical nosedive compared to the SLR years, but my composition improved and I took far more photos. (Instagram also encouraged this.)
As part of my 2012 computer-setup shuffle, I also replaced my laptop with a Retina MacBook Pro, and the first thing it screams for is a high-resolution desktop wallpaper. Great, I thought, I’ll just use one of my photos. (On my desktop, I use a solid gray background, but on my laptop, I like to have a bit of fun. And it would be a crime to put a solid gray background on that screen.)
Almost nothing I’ve shot since 2010 is usable.
The Rebel photos look decent. The 5D Mark II photos look great. But photos from the iPhone 4, and even from the 4S, don’t hold up. They look fine on a 3.5-inch screen, but they look terrible on my big desktop monitor and abysmal on the Retina MacBook Pro.
Most of my favorite photos from the last two years only look good on small screens.
How do yours look? Are you happy with them? Will you continue to be happy with them when they’re displayed on large, high-density screens or printed in the future?
For me, this is a wake-up call. I’m going to try carrying the 5D with me a lot more often (the pancake I ordered should make it more bag-friendly), and when I’m in the house, I’m going to reach for it instead of my iPhone much more often than the current rate of “almost never”.
Because as fun as it is to share iPhone photos conveniently on Instagram, that can’t be my only photography: I also need some photos that won’t look like shit when I look back on them in the future.
AppCode is an alternative Objective-C IDE for productive coding: smarter editor, better refactorings, convenient code navigation and tight Xcode integration. Download AppCode, open your Xcode projects and create great apps faster with your code looking better than ever.
AppCode IDE is created by JetBrains, the company behind famous developer tools such as IntelliJ IDEA, ReSharper, PhpStorm, WebStorm and many others.
Thanks to JetBrains for sponsoring the Marco.org RSS feed this week.
If you ever transfer large files to or from a Thunderbolt-equipped MacBook Air or Retina MacBook Pro where wired networking is available, you probably want Apple’s new Thunderbolt to Gigabit Ethernet Adapter.
On this week’s show: avoiding keyboard-screen imprinting, Google’s odd TV ball, Sirius and Pulsar, the difference between copyright and patent infringement, Instapaper’s price-change results, the iPad 1 installed base, the Nexus 7, Apple’s Podcasts app, why Apple probably won’t offer paid podcasts, Facebook’s native iOS app and why web companies need to treat mobile apps as a first-class platform, Twitter’s ominous threat to client developers, and Tumblr’s pinned posts.
(Busy week.)
In the After Dark, we discussed initial impressions of the Retina MacBook Pro, including the poor Retina app support so far and the usefulness of its 1920x1200 scaling mode.
There is only one reason why you wouldn’t link right in the body of your text, as far as I’m concerned: you don’t want people to click on it.
Placing the links at the bottom of the post drives next to no traffic.
There are two issues here: burying a source link at the end of a long post in a half-assed “Source” or “Via” does indeed send almost no traffic.
But the bigger problem is the practice of news sites rewriting articles from source sites while adding little to no original value. In those cases, where they put the source link doesn’t matter, because as I wrote a few months ago, they replace the need to view the source article.
The most ethically and professionally sound practice when you have little value to add to the source story is the linked-list approach. Give a teaser quote and a prominent link. Make it clear that you didn’t write the target article, there’s more to be read there, and here’s how to get to it.
Don’t replace it. Send your readers there.
If you’re truly providing value, you should have the confidence to send your audience away, knowing that they’ll come back to you. If that’s not the case, don’t bother publishing.
There’s a lot of smoke now billowing around the “7-inch iPad”. This report is hardly the first, nor will it be the last. My only question is the timing.
Good rationale about doubting the October release.
If Apple were to launch a $200–300 7.8” iPad, they’d probably sell a ton of them for the holiday season — which means they’d need to start ramping up production pretty soon, if not already. If they were doing that, we’d probably see legitimate-looking parts leaked from the supply chain by now, but as far as I know, we haven’t.
It’s unlikely that Apple would be able to manufacture millions of iPad Minis without someone leaking some parts a few months ahead of their release. So if we don’t see such leaks by September, I don’t think this product, if it exists, will be released this year.
I believe the iPad Mini (or whatever it’s going to be called) uses the same display as the iPhone 3GS. So instead of cutting these sheets into 3.5-inch 480 × 320 displays for the iPhone 3GS, they’ll cut them into 7.85-inch 1024 × 768 displays for the smaller iPad.
This makes a lot of sense, and it’s also worth considering what this would mean for the 3GS.
Apple probably wants to push the iPhone even further downmarket to capture more share in low-cost markets. iOS 6 is being released, presumably, with the next iPhone. Precedent suggests that upon the launch of the next iPhone, the 3GS will be eliminated, the 4 will become the free-with-contract model, and the 4S will become the $99 model.
But what if that’s not happening this time? Maybe Apple went to the trouble of cramming iOS 6 into the 3GS not because it’s for sale now, but because it will continue to be for sale for another year. They can obviously produce them very cheaply by now. How low can they push that price?
I finally saw Steve Jobs: The Lost Interview, the very-extended version of Robert X. Cringely’s 1995 interview for Triumph of the Nerds. You can see a few of the good parts from Triumphon YouTube, but there’s a lot more to it.
The release has been a pretty blatant money-grab. The full interview was supposedly lost from its filming in 1995 until Steve Jobs passed away last year, and then suddenly a producer found a VHS copy. It was then shown only in movie theaters for a short time, about a month after Jobs’ death, with the implication that it might never be released in other forms.1
Now, seven months later, it’s available on iTunes for $3.99, but only as a rental. There’s no purchase option available.
Presumably, once the rentals die down in another few months, it’ll become available for purchase, maybe with some bonus footage or director’s commentary to get people to re-buy it for $12.99.
But if you can get past that, it’s good.
Very good.
There was, of course, a big risk that the 10 minutes of footage they used in Triumph of the Nerds was the only good footage in the interview. Fortunately, that wasn’t the case: most of the 70-minute interview was interesting and thought-provoking, as you’d expect from Steve. Even my favorite clip from Triumph, “Microsoft has no taste”, has a very good expansion in The Lost Interview.
Update, July 6:This is now resolved. Go to the App Store and redownload any affected apps — they should show up in the Updates tab. Do not delete and reinstall: it’s no longer necessary and you may lose data in those apps.
Last night, within minutes of Apple approving the Instapaper 4.2.3 update, I was deluged by support email and Twitter messages from customers saying that it crashed immediately on launch, even with a clean install.
This didn’t make sense — obviously, Apple had reviewed it, and it worked for them. My submitted archive from Xcode worked perfectly. But every time I downloaded the update from the App Store, clean or not, it crashed instantly.
Lots of anxiety and research led me to the problem: a seemingly corrupt update being distributed by the App Store in many or possibly all regions.
And this is happening to other apps, not just Instapaper, updated in the last few days.
Characterizations of this issue:
The app crashes immediately on launch, every time, even after a delete and reinstall as long as the corrupt file is being served by the App Store.
It doesn’t even show the Default.png before crashing. Just a split-second of a partial fade to black, then back to Springboard.
It may only affect customers in some regions.
If updating from iTunes, some customers might get a dialog citing error 8324 or 8326.
Mac apps might show this dialog: “[App] is damaged and can’t be opened. Delete [App] and download it again from the App Store.”
The console might show:
AppleFairplayTextCrypterSession::fairplayOpen() failed, error -42110
I emailed App Review less than an hour after the update went live and yelled about it on Twitter. About two hours after the update went live, a correct, functional version of it started being distributed on reinstalls. As far as I know, the problem hasn’t recurred since then.
I haven’t yet received a response from App Review, so I don’t know whether the fix was because I made noise, or simply because time passed, which may, for instance, expire a cache with the bad data.
The only fix for people with bad copies, once good copies are being served again by the App Store, is to delete and reinstall the app.(Update.)
I’ve heard reports of this happening with numerous updates released on July 3rd, 4th, and 5th. Below is a growing list of affected apps.
If you’re a developer, and you have a non-critical update pending release, I suggest waiting a few days for this to presumably get sorted out before releasing it.
Because if this happens to you, all of your most active users, the people who will install updates within hours of them becoming available, will be stopped in their tracks. They’ll think you’re careless, incompetent, and sloppy for issuing a release that doesn’t work. And they’ll leave you a lot of angry 1-star reviews.
And it’s even more serious for apps that store user-created data or game progress locally: if the only fix is to delete and reinstall the app, many users will lose their data.
Apple: This is a serious problem. It’s not isolated. Please fix this.
Update, July 5: After adding 114 apps to the list with more reports coming in every few minutes, it’s no longer practical for me to maintain the list. Obviously, this is a very widespread problem for many apps updated from July 3–5.
Apple has told a few news outlets that they’re looking into the issue.
Update, July 6:This is now resolved. Go to the App Store and redownload any affected apps — they should show up in the Updates tab. Do not delete and reinstall: it’s no longer necessary and you may lose data in those apps.
Jim Dalrymple at The Loop, along with many other press outlets, received a statement from Apple regarding the corrupt App Store binaries from July 3–5:
“We had a temporary issue that began yesterday with a server that generated DRM code for some apps being downloaded, it affected a small number of users,” an Apple representative told The Loop. “The issue has been rectified and we don’t expect it to occur again. Users who experienced an issue launching an app caused by this server bug can delete the affected app and re-download it.”
It’s probably worth nitpicking “a small number of users”: based on my cumulative stats for July 3, Instapaper’s corruption alone probably affected well over 20,000 customers, and there were over 120 other apps affected, including some very big names such as Angry Birds, GoodReader, Yahoo, and the LA Times.
But I’m glad this is fixed.
What’s even more interesting is this tidbit from the end of Macworld’s report:
Sources told Macworld that Apple will be removing one-star app reviews developers earned unfairly because of the company’s server issue.
I wouldn’t have predicted that. If they do, it will go a long way toward repairing their relationship with the affected developers.
If you’re a web designer, you really, really need to get a Retina MacBook Pro so you can see how bad your site looks on it and fix it.
I quickly got a lot of negative responses from people pointing out that Retina MacBook Pros are a small portion of the market, and other platforms are more worthwhile to test for, represented best by Stuart Frisby’s response:
There are still more IE6 users than Retina MBP users. Should I get a dell running Windows ME too?
this is like trying to redo the site for IE5! Not enough users. Once it is more than 1%, will consider.
Jeremy Meyers takes it in a slightly different direction:
um no. we should not get to the point where we are designing sites around one unique piece of hardware. please.
Certainly, many other platforms are bigger than the Retina MacBook Pro market today. Here’s the difference:
How much bigger will the IE5 or IE6 market be in a year?
How much bigger will the high-DPI market be in a year?
Even though it’s a small market today (although don’t forget about the iPad 3), it’s inevitably going to increase substantially in the near future. Don’t you want to get ahead of that? Do you want your site to be ready the first time someone views it on a Retina screen, or are you OK with it looking like garbage for a few years until you happen to buy high-DPI hardware?
If you don’t frequently see your site on a high-DPI screen, you may not realize quite how bad it looks when any graphical assets show at 1X. This is the first problem you need to address.
You can do that without buying a Retina MacBook Pro, such as by testing on an iPad 3, simulating the iPad 3 with the iOS Simulator from Xcode, or enabling HiDPI mode on a large-screened Mac.1
If you do any of these alternate methods, you’ll probably be able to figure out which images need 2X versions. That’s a great first step that will get you much of the way there.
But if you can go further, you should. This is what I was talking about when I said that web designers need Retina MacBook Pros:
Without having and using a real high-DPI computer, all you can do is add high-resolution images for the design you already have. You’ll miss the nuance of what looks good and what works well on a Retina Mac, because you won’t really be using one. Even an iPad 3 isn’t the same.
It’s like designing iOS apps using only the Simulator without ever testing on a device. No respectable developer would ever ship an app that wasn’t extensively tested on real devices, because on the device, you learn that some of your choices just don’t look right or work well.
I’ve been using a Retina MacBook Pro for one week, only as a secondary computer,2 and I’ve already changed my font, redesigned my narrow layout’s header, and conditionally replaced an image with text. I’ve noticed that fonts, especially, respond extremely differently on the Retina screen: many of my old, non-Retina choices simply didn’t look good, and many fonts and metrics that were previously poor for screen use can be used nicely on Retina screens.
And I’m not even a web designer by trade — I just accidentally design my sites sometimes out of necessity.
Once you use real high-DPI hardware, you’ll see that there’s a lot more potential for design changes than just doubling your images.
Windows-using web designers, if such people still exist: I’m sure there’s something you can do to enable high-DPI mode on Windows. ↩︎
It’s possible to configure a Retina MacBook Pro up to nearly $4000, but the base model is a very good deal at $2200. It has 90% of the CPU performance of the highest configuration, same GPU, 8 GB of RAM, and a 256 GB SSD.
Since it’s my secondary computer, I didn’t need to max out everything, so I just walked into an Apple Store — no shipping delay — and bought the base model. Once Amazon gets them in first-party stock, they’ll be even cheaper. ↩︎
Rather than remove the 1-star reviews — as far as I can tell, they’re all still there — it appears that Apple has triggered a reupdate on the affected apps, Instapaper included. This means:
All reviews for the “current version” are reset, since there’s a new current version.
The fixed binaries will show up as “Updates” in the App Store app and iTunes.
The latter is a big deal. Without that, the only easy way for customers to force their phones to download a working version was to delete the broken app and redownload it from the Store.
For Instapaper, that was just an inconvenience, since almost everything is stored on and synced from the service. But for apps that stored data locally, that often meant data loss, or progress lost in games.
By republishing “updates” to these apps, Apple is helping users avoid deleting them and losing their data.
Why? Because HiDPI customers may be a fringe group, but they are a forward-facing fringe. They represent the users of the future, and the more we cater to them now, the more deeply embedded our products and designs will be in their culture. The future culture.
“Just wait for the update” or “just wait for the apps” or “there's more launching soon” has became so pervasive that when I was at Gizmodo we had a badge for it in reviews. Do you know how many products I reviewed that evolved past the “half baked” status into “must buy”? None. Ever. Ever.
Two years ago, I wrote Great since day one. Nothing has changed: the products that were great on day one are still great, and the ones that weren’t still aren’t.
Sad, but not a surprise: there’s very little space in the market for desktop email clients.
Most people use webmail for their personal email and big-corporate mail systems such as Outlook with Exchange at work. Relatively few people want to use desktop IMAP clients instead of webmail or corporate systems, and the built-in Windows Live Mail and Mac Mail clients are good enough for nearly all of them.
There’s room for one or two niche clients such as Sparrow, but only if they’re radically different from the system clients. Thunderbird isn’t. (And I can’t speak for its recent years, but for most of its history, it’s been good on Windows but buggy as hell on Macs.)
It’s also worth considering the cynical angle: Mozilla can’t make money with Thunderbird the way they can with Firefox (web search placement and affiliate fees). The undertone of their post is “You all weren’t helping with Thunderbird enough, and we can’t justify doing it ourselves.”
I think Apple no longer wants to follow the EPEAT recycling guidelines because they think not following them allows product designs that will be more compelling for consumers and bring more value to Apple than their continued participation in EPEAT.
And I don’t think it matters much. Apple still accepts their own computers for recycling. It’s not unreasonable to ask the people who recycle old computers properly, who I imagine are very few, to bring their Apple computers back to Apple to guarantee the “best” recycling.
Corrupt App Store binaries, responding to customer reviews, advertisers paying more than customers, VC-funded startups’ road to acquisition, the business culture of condescension and euphemisms, the security of hosting sensitive files on Dropbox or GitHub, and Amazon Cloud Search.
Little-known social coding start-up GitHub Inc. has raised $100 million in its first round of funding, in a sign of how big investment bets are continuing in Silicon Valley.
It’s “little-known” compared to Facebook, I guess. But developers are a pretty big group.
Adobe Revel is a photo app that gives you one place for all your photos that you can access from your Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Revel combines a set of easy-to-use organizing and editing tools with a cloud service designed specifically for photos, so everything you do in Revel is automatically synced across all your devices. Organize your photos using albums, event tags, and captions. Crop and apply photo filters to get professional-quality results without all the work. And share albums privately on AdobeRevel.com or publicly on your favorite social network.
With Revel, you always have access to all your photos no matter what device you are using, and you have everything you need to make them look great.
Thanks to Adobe Revel for sponsoring the Marco.org RSS feed this week.
An interesting experiment: if they raise enough money to replace the ads, they’ll drop them. (Via John Siracusa.)
As we discussed in yesterday’s podcast, advertisers are usually willing to pay much more than online audiences would be willing and able to pay themselves, and that’s why advertising is by far the most common method to fund media.
Penny Arcade is challenging their audience to make them a counterexample.
This app’s existence is a big deal for a number of reasons.
First, this might be the last new full-featured client that Twitter permits. (They may not even permit this, but I bet it’ll be fine for at least a while.)
It’s especially important to me because the Mac is where I use Twitter the most by far, and I’ve been using Twitter’s official Mac client (formerly Tweetie). There are other great Mac clients, but this one has always fit me best, and I have its flow and shortcuts deeply ingrained into my muscle memory.
I use a Mac client all the time, for almost all of my Twitter use. Without a great Mac client, I’d use Twitter about as often as I use Instagram: in occasional bursts on my phone when I’m bored, but not regularly.
But when Twitter bought Tweetie from Loren Brichter, I think it’s clear now that they only cared about the iPhone client. They’ve severely neglected the Mac and iPad clients, effectively killing some of the best Twitter apps ever made. (Given their updates to the iPhone version, maybe we’re better off.) Twitter for Mac in particular is in severe disrepair, with significant bugs going unfixed for over a year and major recent features still missing, such as native photo uploads. And now that Loren no longer works at Twitter, it looks like nobody there is willing and able to keep these apps healthy.
Tweetbot for iOS has been the perfect modern client for displaced Tweetie refugees. It works mostly like Tweetie,1 but with very active development, modern updates, a unique style, and feature progress unconstrained by the strategic costs and restrictions of Twitter ownership.
I’m happy to report that Tweetbot for Mac serves the same role already, even in its incomplete, semi-buggy alpha state. (Anecdotally, it doesn’t seem significantly buggier than Twitter for Mac.)
As long as Twitter doesn’t squash third-party clients, Tweetbot for Mac will thrive, and it’s my client of choice today.
The one major departure that puts a damper on my use is Tweetbot’s interface for accessing multiple accounts. Tweetie for Mac stacked them all in the sidebar, with little blue dots to indicate unread messages in each account. In Tweetbot for Mac, just like their iPad app, accounts are buried under a toggle menu in the sidebar, so the only way to know whether your other accounts have new messages is to clumsily switch through them all, pausing to let each one load. ↩︎
Kat Stoeffel for the New York Observer, regarding the turmoil at News Corp.:
In addition, there are internal rumors that The Daily has been put “on watch.” According to a source the status of the groundbreaking iPad tabloid—which loses $30 million a year—will be reassessed after the November 6 election.
First of all, I’m amused that the election results may decide this. Watch for the November 7 headline, “Thousands of Casual iPad Owners Revolt As Obama Re-Election Shuts Down The Daily”.
It’s weird to me, as a long-time internet-only news reader, to pay money for a bunch of content I don’t care about. More than half of each issue is sports news, entertainment gossip, ads, and little newspaper games (crosswords, Sudoku, horoscopes), and I need to buy all of that to get the news, editorials, and app reviews that I care about.
Bundling a bunch of stuff I don’t care about with the few pieces I want to read is the old-world model, when custom-targeted or on-demand news for each reader was infeasible. But in this century, I can go to a handful of websites whenever I want news, view the handful of stories that interest me, then move on. Flipping through a bunch of uninteresting-to-us content and ads was an annoyance of the old world, like blow-ins, that we tolerated because we had to — but now, we don’t.
I think that still stands. And while The Daily has clearly found an audience, I question its ability to grow meaningfully.
Although I suspect that most former Digg fans will react the same way as if you’d told them that the Spin Doctors were breaking up:1 “Digg was still around?”
This clickbait article is sadly, unintentionally hilarious, but it’s especially worth nitpicking Atone Gonsalves’ misguided pricing argument:
Only Apple could get away with charging a $400 premium for a feature […]
What Retina Costs
Buying a MacBook Pro with Retina means shelling out at least $2,199 for a notebook with a 15.4-inch, 2880x1800 display. Top-end models approach $3,500!
By comparison, the cheapest 15-inch MacBook Pro starts at $1,799, with half the resolution and a different but roughly comparable set of features and specifications. (The Retina version is smaller and lighter but lacks a DVD drive, and uses expensive Flash storage instead of a slower conventional hard drive.)
Let’s compare Apples to Apples:
“A $400 premium for a feature”
When each model is equipped with a 2.3 GHz i7, 8 GB of RAM, and a 256 GB SSD — the least-expensive specs available in common between both models — the non-Retina model costs $200 more than the Retina model.
“Top-end [Retina] models approach $3,500!”
When each are equipped with a 2.7 GHz i7, 16 GB RAM, and a 512 GB SSD, the Retina model costs $3,250 and the non-Retina model costs $100 more. (It’s possible to make the Retina model cost $3,750 by upgrading to the 768 GB SSD, but that option isn’t available on the non-Retina model.)
Clearly, Gonsalves’ pricing argument is based upon the assumption that an SSD-equipped computer is “roughly comparable” to one with a 2.5”, 5400 RPM hard drive — an argument that no informed writer, or anyone who has owned an SSD-equipped computer, would ever make.
ReadWriteWeb is better than this, and they should be ashamed to have published it.
When I think about the possibility of taking this whole writing/podcasting/consulting thing full-time, it freaks me the hell out. Taking the financial reins in my own hands seems too scary to ever actually do. What if I see a downturn in readership and my advertisers want to renegotiate my flat monthly rates? What if Myke kicks me off the podcast network? What if I get sick and can’t write for 10 days? What if my next book is a flop?
What if you get laid off from your job? What if your hands fall off and you can’t do this sort of work anymore? (The boring answers: unemployment insurance and disability insurance, respectively.)
Realistically, nobody has job security. It’s a myth. Even CEOs don’t have job security (see HP), except Steve Ballmer, who seems curiously immune to losing his job.
The difference is who’s responsible for keeping you in your job, and specifically, how much of that control you yield to others. When you work for yourself, it’s all just you. You take all of the risk, you handle all of the bullshit and paperwork, you get to (but need to) make every decision, and you reap all of the rewards.
I was scared shitless to work for myself full-time, but I finally tried it, and it turns out that I’m a pretty good fit for it. I think I’d have a hard time ever working for someone else again. Not because everyone else sucks, but because I suspect I’ve lost the ability, if I ever had it, to be a very good employee for anyone else.
I’m in a similar position as Stephen with my blog and podcast: they do well enough that they could plausibly grow into my full-time job in the future. I often envision that, and I like what I see.
But whether the comments were for or against the post, I’m humbled that so many people took the time to participate in such a lively discussion. Because of that, we want to explain our reasoning further.
This is like people who respond to disagreements by trying to “educate” you on why they’re right.
Sounds like Gonsalves purchased a non-Retina 15” MacBook Pro a month before WWDC and he’s desperate to convince everyone else, and himself, that he didn’t make a bad decision.
Actually, it’s pretty clear that Gonsalves is not an Apple customer, and doesn’t want to consider why all of us stupid consumer sheep keep falling for Apple’s “marketing”. And it says a lot about ReadWriteWeb that they’d allow someone so blatantly unqualified to write two inflammatory Apple articles with their logo on top.
A packed podcast today: chicken salad recipes, Chicago pizza, the in-app purchase hack, depressingly realistic first-person shooters, gender and demographic myopia among developers, how well the 7.85” iPad might sell and what that might mean, Penny Arcade’s Kickstarter, Ben Brooks’ paywall, and how to get started with programming or making apps.
And in the unusually informative After Dark: how to cook steak, and what happens when you inadvertently cook it at 650°F.
Adobe Revel is a photo app that gives you one place for all your photos that you can access from your Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Revel combines a set
of easy-to-use organizing and editing tools with a cloud service designed specifically for photos, so everything you do in Revel is automatically
synced across all your devices. Organize your photos using event tags. Crop and apply photo filters to get professional-quality results without all the work. And post photos to your favorite social network to share with your friends.
With Revel, you always have access to all your photos no matter what device you are using, and you have everything you need to make them look great.
Thanks to Adobe Revel for sponsoring the Marco.org RSS feed again this week.
Jon Mitchell’s counterpoint to Antone Gonsalves’s poorly argued Retina articles. While I’m still disappointed in RWW for publishing Gonsalves’ posts, I’m glad they also published Mitchell’s.
For someone as ambitious as Mayer clearly is, not moving forward was not an option; staying at a company where she could not advance was not part of her game plan.
Good points.
As a sidenote, it’s interesting that most of the press (although not this piece) has focused on Mayer’s gender. I look forward to the time when female CEOs are so commonplace that a new one is no longer newsworthy.
In Mayer’s case, it’s also worth asking why so much coverage hasn’t focused on a different issue. Every time Apple loses one of its Senior VPs, we see stories questioning Apple’s leadership and future, suggesting that there may be significant inner turmoil.
The problem gets worse – I can’t design for 1x on my Retina Macbook Pro. It’s impossible.
As Wells says later, the solution is for designers to keep a 1X external screen around for a while. Wells thinks this will only be possible for a short time as Apple aggressively kills legacy compatibility, but I bet it’ll be a pretty long time before Apple’s computers can’t even output with adapters to any widely available 1X monitors.
The first time I worked with a web designer, in 2004, he had a giant, old, mediocre CRT on his desk next to his nice LCD so he could ensure that his designs looked good on older monitors. We’ll be doing the same thing for a while with 1X LCDs. (By the way, designers can still connect a CRT to a Retina MBP for $30.)
But we don’t need to wait until everyone stops using them before we stop caring to fine-tune our designs for them. After all, people still use CRTs today, and we don’t care anymore. The people who still use them probably won’t notice, or at least won’t care, if something doesn’t look exactly ideal.
The same transition of not needing to care about legacy support for 1X displays will almost certainly happen long before we lose the ability to drive one from a modern-day Mac. And until that transition occurs, which is probably at least a decade away, responsible designers are going to need to keep a 1X monitor around and be willing to buy a few adapters along the way.
Large publications often try to maintain separation between ad sales and editorial staff. One-person publications don’t have such luxuries, especially when we sell some of our ads directly, but we can at least maintain internal standards of objectivity and separation of priorities.
Since publishing yesterday’s Adobe Revel sponsorship, I’ve had a number of readers make comments that suggest that I wouldn’t criticize Adobe, or that I couldn’t objectively discuss photo apps anymore, because of the sponsorship.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
Adobe is a huge company that makes some software that I like and use often, mainly Photoshop and Lightroom, and some software that I dislike and avoid, including Acrobat and Flash. The Adobe Revel sponsorship was a multi-week buy, and it’s not over yet, but I’m not afraid to say here that I don’t like some Adobe software.
Someone at Adobe could see this post and get angry because I don’t like Acrobat or Flash, or because I’m talking about the sponsorship. But I don’t think they’ll care, because the people I’ve spoken with there are extremely reasonable. In fact, while negotiating this sponsorship, I posted this sharp criticism without hesitation, and they never mentioned it.
If a sponsor ever has a problem with something I write, and that affects pending or future sponsorship buys, that’s fine with me. I can find other sponsors. And if I can’t, I’ll write for free, like I did for years. If given the choice between writing for free or censoring myself, I’ll write for free. Fortunately, nobody’s forcing me to make that choice today.
A writer’s reputation can’t be easily jettisoned and started fresh. Writing is extremely important to me, and I never want to compromise it. Any given sponsor is temporary, but credibility is for life.
Here’s a thought: what if Apple were to cut the iPhone 4 from the lineup, instead of the iPhone 3GS?
The iPhone ‘next’ would be the flagship, the iPhone 4S would offer Siri and take the place of the 4 in the pricing lineup, and the 3GS would remain ‘free’ on contract. But, if the prices were right, Apple could expand the 3GS from a contract device to an off-contract pre-paid model that might finally give the company a horse in the developing nations race.
I bet this is what happens. Apple probably wouldn’t have crammed iOS 6 onto the 3GS if they were about to stop selling it.
8 “virtual cores” (are they counting each Hyperthreading virtual core separately, so this is only 4 hardware cores from a Xeon E5?), 60 GB RAM, and a whopping 2 TB of SSD storage for $3.10 per hour. Yikes.
Nice, but I hope they bring these downmarket a bit, too — there’s quite a large gap between people who need a small amount of SSD-level I/O performance and people who need 2 terabytes of it for $2,263 per month.
Today, development stopped on Pulp, Wallet, and Sparrow as their companies were bought by Facebook and Google, respectively.
Both appear to be “talent acquisitions”: the companies were bought primarily to get their staff to work for the new parent company, not because the new parent company wanted to own and continue their products. Usually, the purchased products are shut down shortly after talent acquisitions, or they’re not included in the deal and are simply abandoned.
A talent acquisition is effectively a job offer with a large signing bonus.
Instapaper has had multiple similar inquiries from large companies over the last few years. We’ve never gotten very far in talks because I don’t want Instapaper to shut down, I don’t want to move my family across the country, and they didn’t want to pay enough — for them, they’ll pay a premium to hire me, but they won’t pay much for a service they’ll shut down immediately and an app they’ll throw away.
I was only able to reject those offers because Instapaper is a healthy business, and the life that Instapaper provides for me and my family is better than what the big companies offered.
If you want to keep the software and services around that you enjoy, do what you can to make their businesses successful enough that it’s more attractive to keep running them than to be hired by a big tech company.
Apple is normally very protective of its private APIs, and rejects apps regularly for using even inconspicuous hooks from it. In this case, it is giving explicit permission to developers to dip into its private frameworks in order to enact a quick fix for this problem through the verification of certificates.
Good to know for developers using in-app purchase.
My talent-acquisition post yesterday got a lot of attention and some great responses, mostly about Sparrow specifically.
I ended the article with this:
If you want to keep the software and services around that you enjoy, do what you can to make their businesses successful enough that it’s more attractive to keep running them than to be hired by a big tech company.
But… that’s what I did. I paid full price for every version of the Sparrow app I could find. I told everyone who would listen to buy it. I couldn’t have given them more money even if I wanted to. So, as a customer, what more could I have done to keep them running independently?
I should have gone a bit more into this, but I had to run out and buy plants (in my exciting life as a homeowner) and decided to keep the article short and simple.
In the reality of our fast-paced, boom-and-bust industry, even very strong support from customers may not be enough for many companies to stay in business.
They might not take your money. In many cases, such as communication networks and social web services, there’s a lot more value in amassing as many users as possible and then finding ways to monetize the entire group at once, usually by advertising. Charging money before you’re huge is likely to inhibit the rapid growth required to pull this off.
They might not take enough of your money. Some developers and companies simply have poor business sense, or are too embarrassed to ask for a fair price. Many more are concerned that anything above rock-bottom pricing will cause too many potential customers to pass them up.
There might just not be enough customers. Even if a product can get a solid base of customers to pay a good price, it’s still not enough to keep a company afloat, or keep an independent developer working on it full-time, if there aren’t a lot of those customers. Running a business, especially with employees, is far more expensive than most people realize.
As I said two weeks ago when Mozilla canned Thunderbird, the market for third-party email clients is very limited and difficult.
Matthew Panzarino speculates, and I think he’s probably correct, that Sparrow’s business probably wasn’t very healthy:
First, I’m telling you honestly that neither Dom nor anyone else on the team has given me any inside information about this, so this is completely my conjecture.
That being said, I believe that the Sparrow team was building the best product possible in Sparrow for Mac, but not making nearly as much money as they needed to keep the business sustainable.
If so, when Google offered them a lot of money to come work on their extremely successful email service, what were they supposed to do? Sparrow probably made the right move, and almost everyone who’s angry about it would probably have done the same thing in that situation.
As Matt Gemmell yelled at many complainers, we shouldn’t condemn Sparrow for “screwing” or “abandoning” anyone, or for “selling out”.
It’s frustrating when a product or service you like goes out of business, and that’s effectively what happened here. Sparrow tried to succeed in an extremely difficult market, and apparently failed. Their customers supported their efforts up to this point, but there probably weren’t enough customers for them to refuse Google’s offer.
Don’t blame Sparrow. Blame the terrible market for email clients.
But this is not the time for reasonable people, on both sides of this issue, to be silent. We owe it to the people whose lives were ended and ruined yesterday to insist on a real discussion and hopefully on some real action.
Exactly.
The legality of such advanced weapons isn’t the only problem that led to the horrible Colorado shooting. We can’t fix everything, and we can’t prevent tragedies like this from happening again. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t try to improve what we can.
It makes no sense at all to name the next iPhone “iPhone 5”:
By Louie Mantia.
I never understood why people have such a bad memory for this. There were no models called iPhone 1, iPhone 2, or iPhone 3. The iPhone 4 was the only model named for its generation number. And since the iPhone 4S was the real “iPhone 5”, it doesn’t make sense to use the “iPhone 5” name for the upcoming sixth-generation model.
I’m guessing, like the third-generation iPad, that the next iPhone will simply be called “iPhone” in marketing and “iPhone (6th generation)” in technical and support documents.
This week’s podcast: how to research and find good products, portable and window air conditioners, the unfortunate status of TextMate 2 and the search for alternatives, Sparrow’s business and acquisition, and App.net’s chances of success.
Offering a stock Android experience on a $200 device, Google is trying to set the bar when it comes to smaller tablets.
Have they done it? Let’s find out.
Nice, concise review.
Mine is even shorter: The Nexus 7 is a very good implementation of a form-factor that I don’t really like, running an OS I don’t really like, that’s optimized for services I don’t use, and doesn’t run many of the apps I want.
Also, don’t miss DPReview’s hands-on preview: it sounds like this is effectively a Rebel T4i sensor and guts in a much smaller package, which could be quite compelling.
Adobe Revel is a photo app that gives you one place for all your photos that you can access from your Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Revel combines a set
of easy-to-use organizing and editing tools with a cloud service designed specifically for photos, so everything you do in Revel is automatically
synced across all your devices. Organize your photos using event tags. Crop and apply photo filters to get professional-quality results without all the work. And post photos to your favorite social network to share with your friends.
With Revel, you always have access to all your photos no matter what device you are using, and you have everything you need to make them look great.
Thanks to Adobe Revel for sponsoring the Marco.org RSS feed once again this week. Here’s a little tip: Revel is a publishing target in Lightroom 4, so you can quickly publish all of your photos to Revel to try it out. That’s how I’m trying it, and I like it so far. More next week.
Flop? Yes. There have been whispers and conjecture to that effect over the past few days, but no one has been able to prove it. I can.
There’s also some evidence that suggests that Sparrow was making $70,000–90,000 per month. Those are great numbers, but with a staff of five people in the cut-throat market for engineering talent, it goes quickly — a good developer may cost $15,000 per month to employ after all of the benefits and overhead.
Those income numbers were probably also for the good months. As any App Store developer knows, its income is like a roller coaster: you never know what you’re going to make next month. It could be 25% or 400% of last month. So when you have the high fixed monthly costs of a full-time staff, you need very high profits in the good months to keep you in business through the bad months. It sounds like Sparrow just didn’t have enough breathing room.
Designing the app was difficult. It wasn’t just difficult for the obvious reasons, like implementation details, aesthetic preferences, and because you want to add more and more to an application as you go along designing it, but also because Android is simply a really hard platform to design for.
Very interesting, especially about how to design for all of the different screen technologies.
It sounds like making a richly textured, iOS-like app for Android might really be a bad design because of these issues. Simple, high-contrast, flat-colored designs — effectively, Metro — might work much better on Android hardware.
It’s only been about a year since the last review’s release, an uncharacteristically short interval. With Apple now targeting an annual release cycle for OS X, we might now also expect annual Siracusa reviews. While this prospect is a treat for geeks, it may drive John Siracusa into an early, stress-induced retirement.
Length
Siracusa’s review lengths have remained mostly consistent over the years.
The 10.8 review maintains Siracusa’s standard at approximately 26,000 words, an impressive feat given that the interval between 10.7 and 10.8 was much shorter than most previous OS X update intervals.
This is not a quick read, so it’s a good opportunity to try a read-later method such as Safari’s Reading List, which Apple invented completely on their own.
Like Siracusa’s previous reviews, Ars Technica split the 10.8 review into 24 pages. This is a double-edged sword: it’s tedious to click through to each new page as you read, but the thoughtfully placed page breaks also provide useful stopping points and topical divisions. For the indecisive, Ars Premier subscribers can toggle a single-page option.
Speed
In my testing, reading the 10.8 review took approximately 128 minutes.
At medium brightness, my iPad (3rd-generation) battery fell from 73% to 56% while I read the review on it.
Additionally, my Retina 15” MacBook Pro was sitting open on my lap so I could take notes for this review-review. While reading on the iPad, the MacBook Pro’s battery fell from 99% to 86%.
These numbers are strong, especially on the Mac side. Power management has come a long way since Siracusa’s Mac OS X 10.0 review, and I’m cautiously optimistic for the battery-life improvements while reading Siracusa’s future review of 10.9.
Images
Siracusa’s image performance has been steadily increasing over the series of reviews.
In the 10.8 review, the traditional TextEdit HiDPI screenshot makes its possibly final appearance, as fully-functional HiDPI support has finally been released.
Unfortunately, most of the 10.8 review’s images lack HiDPI versions, and only appear to be taken at 1X resolution. This is a glaring oversight in Siracusa’s otherwise impeccable attention to screenshot detail, and hopefully Ars will lend him a Retina Mac for next year’s 10.9 review.
Compatibility
Like the 10.7 review, Siracusa’s 10.8 review is available on Ars Technica’s site and as an ebook. Ars Premier members can download it for free as PDF, ePub, or Kindle format, and non-subscribers can buy a standalone Kindle edition for $4.99.
This wide compatibility ensures that as many Mac geeks as possible can read Siracusa’s review.
Under The Hood
There have been a few architectural changes to John Siracusa’s OS X reviews as well. Siracusa has detailed the process in his separate explanatory blog post, because the review wasn’t long enough and he had more to say.
Recommendations
I greatly enjoyed John Siracusa’s 10.8 Mountain Lion review for Ars Technica. I was especially satisfied with the iCloud vs. Reality, Scene Kit, and Power Nap sections.
If you’re concerned about stability, or you want to argue with Siracusa about anything he said, you might want to wait for the first few edits. But for the adventurous, you can install it into your reading list of choice right now.
Postbox’s exit from the Mac App Store should sound very familiar to anyone who buys Mac software. If you read between the lines a bit, I think the real story there is one we’ve seen a lot since June 1: they tolerated the App Store’s lack of paid upgrade mechanics before, but sandboxing — and more accurately, needing to remove important app features because of their incompatibility with the current set of sandboxing entitlements — was the last straw.
How many good apps will be pulled from the App Store before Apple cares?
The problem with sandboxing isn’t that any particular app is incompatible with the current entitlements. It’s a deeper problem than that: Apple is significantly reducing the number of apps that can be sold in the Store after people have already bought them.
Apple’s stance seems to be pretty typical of them: comply with the new rules or leave. This usually works for them, but this time, they’ve made a critical strategic error: leaving is often a better option, or the only option, for the affected developers. Many of them have already left, and many more will.
In the first year of the Mac App Store, before sandboxing, I bought as much as I could from it. As a customer, the convenience was so great that I even repurchased a few apps that I already owned just to have the App Store updates and reinstallation convenience. And, most importantly, when an app was available both in and out of the Mac App Store, I always bought the App Store version, even if it was more expensive.
But now, I’ve lost all confidence that the apps I buy in the App Store today will still be there next month or next year. The advantages of buying from the App Store are mostly gone now. My confidence in the App Store, as a customer, has evaporated.
Next time I buy an app that’s available both in and out of the Store, I’ll probably choose to buy it directly from the vendor.
And nearly everyone who’s been burned by sandboxing exclusions — not just the affected apps’ developers, but all of their customers — will make the same choice with their future purchases. To most of these customers, the App Store is no longer a reliable place to buy software.
This jeopardizes Apple’s presumed strategic goal of moving as much software-buying as possible to the App Store. By excluding so many important apps and burning the trust of so many customers, the App Store can never become ubiquitous.
Apple can never require an App-Store-only future and all of the simplicity and security benefits that it could bring, if that was ever their goal. And with reduced buyer confidence, fewer developers can afford to make their software App Store-only.
This even may reduce the long-term success of iCloud and the platform lock-in it could bring for Apple. Only App Store apps can use iCloud, but many Mac developers can’t or won’t use it because of the App Store’s political instability.
The Mac App Store is in significant danger of becoming an irrelevant, low-traffic flea market where buyers rarely venture for serious purchases. And I bet that’s not what Apple had in mind at all.
The App Store is really mostly a game store. And a free game store at that. But you still want to build paid apps? So did we! We had a nice tractable project we could build in our spare time, but we still wanted to be sure that it was worth our while.
I will not buy anything from the Mac App Store again.
Most Mac users will stop shopping in the Mac App Store.
Most developers will stop putting apps in the Mac App Store.
My argument was more nuanced: many previously-acceptable apps have been effectively kicked out of the App Store because they’re incompatible with the current implementation of sandboxing, and this hurts the customers of those apps enough that they will lose confidence in buying nontrivial software from the Store in the future. For this reason, I, as a customer, have lost confidence. Furthermore, the increasing number of good, useful apps not permitted in the App Store will prevent it from becoming ubiquitous, therefore harming Apple’s presumed long-term goals.
The most common response I received, by far, was that this would only impact geeks like us. Nearly every response was along the lines of “I agree with you, but my [computer-newbie relative] won’t care,” or “The App Store is for average people, not geeks like us.”
First of all, geeks are a very large and influential market. As one big example, if not for geeks, Firefox would never have started to catch on in 2004 and broken Internet Explorer’s reign. We installed Firefox on every non-geek’s computer we could find. And while we were there, we set everyone’s search engine to Google instead of Yahoo or MSN, and we made fun of their AOL email addresses until they switched to Gmail. Our preferences matter.
But it’s incorrect and arrogant to assume that Mac App Store exclusions only affect geeks. While it’s true that many of the excluded apps might be used by a lot of geeks, it’s also likely that a very large portion of “average” Mac users are using at least one. Already, most Mac users can’t go App Store-only because they rely on Microsoft Office, Parallels Desktop, VMware Fusion, or nearly anything from Adobe. These aren’t just geeks. Not even close.
Even the “geeky” apps that get excluded, such as TextExpander and SuperDuper, aren’t used exclusively by geeks. I know because I run a web service that uses a Javascript bookmarklet that people manage to install in Mobile Safari (this is not a simple procedure) that solves a problem that’s mostly only encountered by people who browse the internet all day, don’t want to read what they find while browsing, and want to instead read it on an expensive portable gadget in the future. And they’re not all geeks. One look at my support email makes that extremely clear, and I bet Smile and Shirt Pocket would confirm that the same is true for the “geeky” TextExpander and SuperDuper.
Geeks aren’t the only people who have the problems that these apps solve, and we’re not the only people who can figure out how to find, buy, and use these tools. Give the rest of the computer-owning world some credit.
This isn’t about a few geeks being inconvenienced. It’s about a very large number of Mac users, far beyond geeks, being discouraged from buying (or being unable to buy) the software they need from the Mac App Store, and why that’s not in Apple’s best long-term interests.
David Pogue really doesn’t like the new MagSafe 2 connector. I don’t like it, either.
During its unveiling on the Retina MacBook Pro at WWDC, Phil Schiller simply said, “MagSafe 2 — we took MagSafe and we had to make it even thinner to fit into a design like this.” If it was significantly better in other ways, he probably would have given it a bit more of an explanation.
To me, it seems worse in every other way: the connector is longer, wider, weaker, uglier, and not available in the more-convenient “L” shape that every MagSafe plug has had for the last couple of years.
I’m curious if there were any physical or electrical reasons why they needed to make it so much bigger and revert from the “L” to the inferior “T” shape.
From the otherwise minimally valuable Slashdot comment thread on my Mac App Store post, a very insightful comment from Slashdot user “dgatwood”:
The UNIX security model sucks. It assumes that attacks come from the outside, and is designed to protect the user from other users on the same system. In the UNIX model, everything run by a particular user has the same rights as the user. In practice, that just isn’t a viable security model anymore. […]
A modern security model must be fundamentally built on the principle of distrust. Distrust everything. Any app could potentially become malicious at any time, whether because the app developer put in a backdoor or because somebody exploited a buffer overflow. It is, therefore, the responsibility of the operating system to not only protect the user from other users on the system, but also from flaws in other applications being run by the same user.
He’s right. (I wasn’t arguing against sandboxing.)
In this week’s podcast, we revisit text editors and discuss clicky tenkeyless keyboards and ergonomics, the Mac App Store’s sandboxing issues, designing apps with stock UIKit widgets, foreign App Store reviews, and some of Instapaper’s feature decisions including non-native Twitter integration, bookmarklet mechanics, and the lack of highlights or annotations.
In the After Dark: the EOS M, a dim and deserted Best Buy, and choosing a Retina MacBook Pro model.
Iced coffee is tricky to get right. I’ve made this recipe for my last few barbecues, and it always gets compliments, so I think it’s ready to share.
The problem with iced coffee starts with the American expectation that iced drinks should be very large.
If you want to make a 32-ounce coffee of any sort that doesn’t suck, and doesn’t make you explode from overcaffeination when you drink it, I can’t help you. It’s simply too much liquid, especially as the correspondingly huge amount of ice melts and dilutes it over the half hour it should take you to drink that much.
Throw that expectation out. How can we make great iced coffee if it can be smaller and more densely flavored?
The same way we make great hot coffee: the AeroPress.
The idea behind my AeroPress iced coffee is to first make a very strong coffee concentrate. (Why not cold-brew? I don’t like the taste.)
To do this, I boil a lot of water and brew 40 grams of coffee per full AeroPress. (If you haven’t yet, get a scale.)
AeroPressing for multiple cups is a fine art itself, and the most useful tool I’ve found for this is Crate and Barrel’s Quadro Small Jug, a 16-ounce glass jug with an opening that fits the AeroPress’s base perfectly and is strong enough to withstand the pressure. (Disclaimer: If you find a way to shatter one of these or otherwise hurt yourself, I am not responsible. Do this at your own risk.)
Multi-shot brewing into a jar is too unwieldy to use the inverted-AeroPress method, so I just use the standard upright method.
40 grams should look ridiculous in the AeroPress. (And if it doesn’t foam up a lot and almost overflow like beer foam as you pour the water in, your coffee was roasted too long ago.)
I can get three 40-gram AeroPress brews into these 16-ounce jars. If you come up slightly short, top it off with more hot water.
With 120 grams of coffee per 16-ounce jar, this is very dense. (For reference, I normally use 9-15 grams to make one cup of hot coffee with the AeroPress.) Each jar should give you 5–10 cups, depending on how crazy you get with it.
When you’ve made enough for your intended use, refrigerate this concentrate until it’s cold. Don’t add ice — that will just dilute it. Good iced coffee takes time to chill.
But first:
The Sugar Question
While everything’s hot, you should prepare for the sugar question: are you going to serve this sweetened?
I always drink hot coffee black. It’s the only way. But I actually don’t like black iced coffee. (Please email Dan.)
You can stir in sugar when serving, but then it stays grainy and doesn’t dissolve. I suggest you take advantage of sugar’s ability to dissolve into hot water by either of two options:
Add sugar to the concentrate while it’s hot, and stir it until it dissolves. Or:
Make a simple syrup in a separate container by adding a lot of sugar to a few ounces of hot water, then stirring until it’s all dissolved.
I prefer the simple-syrup option with a twist: use dark brown sugar. The resulting solution should be dense enough that it’s as dark as coffee.
Anyway, let everything chill for a few hours, or overnight if you want. The concentrate lasts at least a few days in the refrigerator without any noticeable changes.
Rear jar: the dark-brown-sugar syrup. Fun glass half-and-half pitcher from MoMA.
When you’re ready to brew, treat the concentrate like liquor. It’s strong and dense, and you may regret overdoing it, so start small.
(And tell your guests the same, if it’s self-serve.)
Use a small juice or cocktail glass and pour about 2 ounces of concentrate over ice.
Add sugar and dairy as desired. I suggest a good amount of half-and-half. If it still tastes too strong, you can dilute with cold water, but I’ve never needed to — I’ve found that the ice dilutes it just the right amount over the course of drinking it.
“Let’s find out if this is a huge mistake. Let’s find out. I’m willing to sacrifice my first theater tour and have the places empty and identify that it’s because I wouldn’t let the radio people participate. But we also might find out that it didn’t make a difference and that I never have to do it.” [Laughs.] Because you can’t roll that shit back once you’ve started.
There’s a lot of great wisdom in here that goes far beyond the comedy business.
AppFigures and App Annie are very useful to iOS and Mac app developers: they automatically fetch, store, and graph sales reports from Apple so we don’t need to keep logging into iTunes Connect. And both can send you an email every morning with the previous day’s sales data, which is both incredibly useful (“Wow, that Talk Show sponsorship caused a lot of sales!”) and incredibly stressful (“Why were yesterday’s sales lower than usual?”). You can also get a lot of this functionality in a native app, minus the daily emails, with AppViz on your Mac.1
But since iTunes Connect doesn’t have an API, all of these reporting tools need you to give them your developer Apple ID and its password, and they need to store it forever in their databases. This has two major downsides:
It’s a very large security risk. Your developer Apple ID can change anything about your apps or remove them from sale, or reroute the sales money to another account. If it’s your personal Apple ID, it can also make purchases, and can even log into iCloud and fetch all of your contacts and calendars. And more.
Occasionally, as I found out this morning, a bug or badly behaved coincidence in one of these apps or services can cause your Apple ID to be locked out and force you to change its password, which is inconvenient.
Fortunately, you can avoid both risks, for the most part, by creating an additional user in iTunes Connect that only has access to sales reports.
Select the “Sales” role for the new user, generate a nice random password, and give that user’s credentials to these services.
That way, the worst that can happen to you if one of these services is compromised is that your sales data might become public, which might be awkward, but wouldn’t be as potentially destructive.
I’m sorry if I didn’t mention your favorite app or service for this. I know there are more than the ones I’ve mentioned. ↩︎
It must be flattering to be Marco Arment, creator [of] Instapaper and pioneer of putting articles aside to read in the bathroom. His app’s imitators are legion, and have grown by a very intimidating one: Facebook.
At this point, I’m more surprised by apps and services that don’t have their own read-later features.
Adobe Revel is a photo app that gives you one place for all your photos that you can access from your Mac, iPad, and iPhone. Revel combines a set
of easy-to-use organizing and editing tools with a cloud service designed specifically for photos, so everything you do in Revel is automatically
synced across all your devices. Organize your photos using event tags. Crop and apply photo filters to get professional-quality results without all the work. And post photos to your favorite social network to share with your friends.
With Revel, you always have access to all your photos no matter what device you are using, and you have everything you need to make them look great.
Thanks to Adobe Revel for sponsoring the Marco.org RSS feed again this week. Here’s another tip: you can have multiple users editing and contributing to the same Revel collections, which is especially useful within couples and families who want a shared library. More next week.
Google has just let us know that it is delaying the launch of the Nexus Q as it works to improve the device.
A weird device gets weirder.
I suspect it went something like this:
Google: How many of you would like a free ball-shaped Google version of the Apple TV that doesn’t have a remote and instead requires another Android device (not included) to control it? I/O attendees: Did you say free? We’ll take it! Google: OK, now how many other people out there would like one for $300? World:(crickets)
I wonder what they’ll change. I’m guessing they cut the speaker amp, outsource the manufacturing, and cut the price to $199. Or, more likely, they’ll just quietly cancel it.
I think an even better solution would be to remove the password completely, allowing users to login with only an email address. Each time a user needs to login, they enter their email address and receive a login link via email.
It has always seemed to me, as an outsider with admittedly little knowledge of the magazine business, that The Daily’s staff and expenses were too high for an iPad-only magazine (that isn’t particularly noteworthy, honestly) to sustain.
Unfortunately for the 50 people who are about to lose their jobs, apparently, it was.
I love the GE Energy Smart LED, but it really needs a 60W-equivalent version to be competitive. That said, I’ve already bought a few more of these because I like them so much. They’re great for table and night-stand lamps. …
I can’t recommend the Philips AmbientLED. The color is just too weird. But Philips is pushing LEDs forward very aggressively, and I bet they’ll have a more broad general-purpose LED lineup in the near future. I’d love to see Philips offer a cooler-colored option.
For applications where incandescent bulbs are still necessary or most practical, I still recommend the Philips EcoVantage halogen-incandescents, which are like incandescents but use about 25% less power, run a bit hotter, cost a bit more, and don’t last as long.
But since publishing the first review, I’ve found two new LED bulbs worth mentioning.
I’ve re-photographed some bulbs from the previous review under tonight’s conditions for the most accurate comparison with the new bulbs. I’ve also measured the power draw from each one using a Kill A Watt.
A cheap G.E. 60W warm-white incandescent
Actual draw: 62W (close enough)
Once again, my setup is fairly reproducible if you want to compare my photos with other bulbs: I photographed them in an otherwise dark room against a white wall at 100mm, ISO 400, f/4, 1/100th with white balance set to 5000K.
(This is a Javascript image switcher. View on the full site to see and compare the bulb photos.)
My opinion on this bulb stands: it’s great, and I’m pleased to see that it draws even less power than advertised. But it’s also only a 40W replacement, it’s a relatively poor value at $30, and it’s a bit cool-colored for some (although I like its color).
I’d love to see G.E. make a higher-wattage version of this bulb.
New: Lighting Science Definity Omni V2
This is an excellent bulb. (Thanks to Ben Brooks for the recommendation.)
It’s my favorite general-purpose bulb now. It’s bright enough to replace a 60W bulb, it’s colored to be a very good match to “soft white” without looking noticeably yellow, it’s omnidirectional, and it’s attractive enough to work in many partially exposed fixtures. At just under $30, it’s also reasonably priced.
Philips AmbientLED
These are getting cheaper and more widespread, but I still don’t like this bulb. It’s too yellow, and its poor color spectrum makes objects in the room look strangely pink.
But it’s a hell of a bulb. Its light is still more yellow than the others, but it’s far less noticeable in use. It still has the short startup delay, just like the AmbientLED, but most people don’t care. And it only uses 10W (or less — mine’s only using 8), which nothing else in the 60W-replacement class can match. Admittedly, you probably won’t notice a 2–3W power-draw difference, but it’s impressive nonetheless.
And, subjectively, I think it’s noticeably brighter than the other 60W-replacement LEDs.
It’s far better than Philips’ older AmbientLED bulb, and it’s better than almost every other LED bulb on the market for many uses.
Practical recommendations
I still like the G.E. for a 40W replacement, but I just don’t have a lot of uses for 40W bulbs.
The L-Prize bulb is very good, and it’s the brightest standard LED bulb I’ve seen. But it’s $50, and its light is still a bit yellow. Worth a try if you’re a light-bulb nerd, but otherwise, probably safe to ignore until the price drops.
The Lighting Science bulb is fantastic. It’s the best general-purpose 60W-replacement LED bulb I’ve seen. Recommended.
