Wednesday, 26 October 2011

Program games for the iPad — on your iPad.

Neven Mrgan:

Some time later, I worked on a twitter client with my pal Buzz. A friend of his who worked at Apple told us this little story. One day while riding the elevator at Infinite Loop, he found himself in the freakiest scenario any Apple employee can imagine: alone, with the elevator door opening to let Steve in. Being a well-adjusted individual, Buzz’s friend promptly disappeared into the tap-world of his iPhone, lest he say or do something wrong in Steve’s presence. It was still the early days of iPhone apps, and Steve did something that had apparently become a habit with him. He reached for the iPhone and asked,

“What app is that?”

“Birdfeed”, came the reply.

Steve tapped here and there, flicked the scrollview a bit, then handed the phone back. “The background needs more texture,” he said.

I’ve heard similar stories regarding other apps, particularly within Apple. This is why Aqua debuted with those horizontal stripes. This is why Brushed Metal became a rock star. This is why iOS’s default UI theme features those vertical background stripes. This explains the proliferation of dark linen. And I’m definitely not saying it was Steve Jobs alone who held this opinion.

I’m just saying there’s a very strong line of thought within Apple, which came (and I’ll bet still comes) from the top, that distinctive in-app textures are important.

‘Don’t Buy a Parrot Figuring That It Will Be a Fun Surprise for Me.’ ★

From Richard Stallman’s 9000-ish-word rider for speaking engagements:

I do not eat breakfast. Please do not ask me any questions about what I will do breakfast. Please just do not bring it up.

It’s a lot to read, but worth it. If you have to skim, don’t miss the sections on hospitality and music. (Via Jacqui Cheng.)

On Apple’s Skeuomorphic UI Textures ★

James Higgs, on the stark contrast between Apple’s minimalist hardware and often exuberantly-decorative software:

It should probably be obvious that my own preference is for design without ornamentation, certainly without a hint of sentimentality, and that I detest these new apps. Why?

Simply put: it’s because they are lies. They attempt to comfort us (to patronise us) by trying to show how they relate to physical objects in the real world when there is no need. How are we helped to understand what Find My Friends does by the addition of “leather” trim? And how difficult can it be for someone, even a relative digital newcomer, to understand a list of books? Difficult enough that the only possible way they could understand it is to present them in a “wooden” bookshelf format?

My record as a critic of Apple’s use of over-the-top UI textures speaks for itself. And I’ve long noted something that Higgs emphasizes: that the use of these software skins today —rich Corinthian leather, dark linen, etc. — seems in contrast with the minimalism and truth of Apple’s hardware. The iPhone 4 and iPad are made of glass and aluminum, and they look like glass and aluminum. That’s truth. A decade ago, Apple’s exuberant software skins — candy-colored Aqua and brushed metal — always struck me as being designed as natural counterparts to Apple’s hardware of the day. Aqua was like the candy-colored iMacs, brushed metal the PowerBooks and Mac Pros.

I think Higgs is overthinking this, though. These themes aren’t lies. They’re not designed to help users understand how these apps work. They’re just decoration. They’re per-app branding. Apple no longer endorses system-wide visual uniformity. Special apps are supposed to look special. Why is Find My Friends wrapped in rich Corinthian leather? Because someone at Apple likes (and, sadly, if my guess is right, better said liked, past tense) how it looks.

And as for the dichotomy between Apple’s hardware and software designs: I think Apple sees the hardware as the universal frame, the software as dozens of diverse pictures.

Sprint Talks iPhone ★

Sinead Carew and Yinka Adegoke, reporting for Reuters:

Sprint, which started taking iPhone orders on October 7, said it would pay Apple a subsidy that is 40 percent higher, or $200 more per device, than what it pays for other phones.

Chief Executive Officer Dan Hesse told analysts on a conference call that the iPhone would be worth the extra cost as it has already lured record numbers of new customers to Sprint.

I’ll bet that’s true for all iPhone carriers, not just Sprint. This is how Apple soaks up a majority share of the industry’s profits while only selling 3 percent or so of the total handsets.

21-Month-Old Nexus One ‘Too Old’ for Android 4.0 Upgrade ★

The Nexus One was released in the U.S. in January 2010, and in Europe in May 2010. (The iPhone 3GS was released in June 2009, and just got an upgrade to iOS 5.)

Nokia’s First Windows Phones: Lumia 710 and 800 ★

The Lumia 800 looks like the Windows Phone Mango device to get.

The Apple-Fication of Everything ★

Dan Frommer:

Go to the “thermostats” page on the Home Depot website — I’ve sorted the results to put the most expensive ones at the top of the page — and see a bunch of white plastic boxes with black-and-green LCD displays. And now you see why the Nest thermostat is exciting people today.

More than anything, this reminds me of the slide of 2006-era smartphones — Motorola Q, BlackBerry Pearl, Palm Treo, Nokia E-something-something — that Steve Jobs displayed before he introduced the iPhone for the first time. Night and day.

Apple’s priorities — simplicity, beauty, excellence — are becoming the industry’s priorities. You don’t have to be a former Apple employee to get on board this train, though.

Two-Thirds of Google’s Mobile Search Traffic Comes From iOS Devices ★

Seth Weintraub, last month:

But as part of the testimony, Creighton said briefly (before she was cut off) that 2/3rds of mobile search comes from Apple iOS devices. That’s pretty interesting considering the share of Android devices in the market.

Keep this in mind, both regarding Siri as a threat to Google, and with the whole “Android is winning because there are more Android handsets than iPhones” thing.

I’ve speculated for years that by making Apple into an enemy, Google could wind up losing money with Android, long-term, compared to a hypothetical world where they’d kept Android as a BlackBerry-ish OS rather than an iPhone-ish one. iPhone users are the cream of the crop, demographically.

The Limits of Human Rationality ★

Jonah Lehrer, writing for The New Yorker on Daniel Kahneman’s new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow:

It’s impossible to overstate the influence of Kahneman and Tversky. Like Darwin, they helped to dismantle a longstanding myth of human exceptionalism. Although we’d always seen ourselves as rational creatures — this was our Promethean gift — it turns out that human reason is rather feeble, easily overwhelmed by ancient instincts and lazy biases. The mind is a deeply flawed machine.

Depressing, in a way, but it explains so much of our collective behavior. (Via Kontra.)

How Siri Disrupts Search ★

Rich Mogull, at TidBITS:

Siri doesn’t replace search, but in many cases it circumvents it by directing users straight to integrated partner services. When you ask for the nearest Indian restaurant there’s still a search taking place, but it’s through Yelp, not a generic search engine that would include Yelp plus various other results.

By skipping the search engine and going straight to a designated source there is no place to insert advertising.

‘That Is All’ ★

Fabulous book trailer for John Hodgman’s That Is All, the finale in his trilogy of complete world knowledge.

Lex Friedman Reviews Eight iPhone 4 Battery Cases ★

On any typical day, my iPhone battery lasts all day, easily. And my new 4S seems to get about the same battery life as my old 4 did. But when I’m traveling and depending on my iPhone for my net access all day long, I need more power. Previously I had one of those external battery dinguses, but last year I bought a Mophie Juice Pack Air, and I’ve found I greatly prefer a battery case over the external battery packs. It’s like having a much thicker iPhone with somewhere around 1.6 times the battery life.

But it seems to me like my Juice Pack doesn’t hold as much juice as it did when new, and, I figure, if I’m going to buy another battery case that fits the 4/4S form factor, now is the time to do it, when I’ll maximize the time I’ll be carrying a phone that fits it. I like my Mophie, but I’d rather have something slimmer than either of the Mophie models, even if it packed a bit less capacity. Put a Juice Pack-encased iPhone in your jeans pocket and it feels like you have a Samsung Galaxy Battleship in there.

The two most tempting ones, judging by Lex Friedman’s survey of the field: the Incipio OffGrid (.5 inches thick, vs. .7 inches thick for the Juice Pack Air) and the Third Rail Slim Case. I’ll probably just stick with my Juice Pack Air, though.

Robot Barf ★

When your kids ask you “Where do QR codes come from?”, send them here.

The Just-Buy-Our-Devices Model

Tuesday, 25 October 2011

Tim Bajarin, “Why Google and Microsoft Hate Siri”:

Yes, Siri is an important product for enhancing our user interface with the iPhone. But Siri is in its infancy. When it grows up, it will be the front end to all types of searches conducted on iPhones, iPads, Mac’s and even Apple TV. And, if I were Google or Microsoft, perhaps I too would be playing down the impact of Siri since they know full well that it is not just a threat to their product platforms, but to their core businesses of search as well. In fact, they should be quaking in their boots since Apple is taking aim at their cash cow search businesses with their technology and could very well impact their fortunes dramatically in the future.

I think it’s a stretch to call search one of Microsoft’s “core businesses”. They’re still losing money — a lot of money, consistently, quarter after quarter — in their online services division. But they wouldn’t be sticking with it if they didn’t see it as a future core business.

For Apple’s investors, the call for them to start paying dividends on their cash hoard is too short-sighted. Instead, they should be encouraging Apple to start buying up as many databases and services they can and begin the process of entrenching Siri’s role as the first line of offense when searching for a product and service and get the search ad revenue from this for themselves. I believe that if they do this, they could probably add another $3-$5 billion in quarterly revenue to their already healthy business model within three years, as search becomes another profit center for Apple.

I think Bajarin is correct that Siri is a huge deal, and that if it truly thrives, it will adversely affect traditional web search like Google and Bing. But I can’t see Apple monetizing it through advertising. That’s tacky.

I see Apple “monetizing” Siri simply as a way to sell more devices — more iPhones now, more iPads (and who knows, maybe Macs?) in the future. Siri could be the interface to future products, like tiny little Nano-sized devices, or home entertainment systems. Google’s ad-driven model disrupted Microsoft’s pay-for-software-licenses model. Apple’s just-buy-our-devices-and-look-at-all-the-cool-shit-you-get-with-them model could disrupt Google’s ad-driven model.

Microsoft’s model was: you’d buy a device, then pay for licenses for Microsoft software. Google’s disruption was: hey, you don’t need to pay for Microsoft software if you’re willing to put up with our non-blinking mostly-text ads. Apple’s model is: you don’t even need to see those ads, just buy your devices from us. (Although you could argue that with the App Store, Apple is circling back to the pay-for-more-software model. But that’s not really a profit center for Apple.)

Siri doesn’t need to lead to advertising in order to add to Apple’s bottom line. Consider iCloud — Apple now offers free-of-charge online services ad-free. It’s a sunk cost in the name of the overall experience for Apple device buyers. ★

Tuesday, 25 October 2011

Font Hipsters

Wednesday, 19 October 2011

Thom Holwerda, OS News:

Ice Cream Sandwich also introduces a new font, Roboto, which is the default font all throughout Android 4.0. It’s designed for high-density displays, and, as always with anything that isn’t ZOMGHELVETICAGGNRFFRRRR, the font hipsters are hating on it like crazy.

No one — no one — is criticizing Roboto because it isn’t Helvetica. If anything, the complaint is that it’s too similar to Helvetica. Nor is anyone suggesting that Android should use Helvetica as its system font. In fact, if they did use Helvetica as their system font, the criticism would be louder, insofar as they’d be seen as copying from Apple. (Of course, they couldn’t use Helvetica, because Helvetica can’t be included in an open source OS, but that’s beside the point.)

The criticism is simply that Roboto is ungainly, homely, unharmonious.

Of course, had Apple used this font, it would’ve been awesome and beautifully elegant and understated and magical (how’s that Comic Sans rip-off Marker Felt that’s infesting iOS working out for ya?).

If Apple chose a font as ugly as Roboto as the system font for iOS, both type and UI designers would be driven into apoplexy with rage. We love great design and beautiful things, and Apple tends to produce great design and beautiful things — we don’t blindly love Apple and claim all it produces is great. I dare you to find one critic of Roboto who claims to be a fan of Marker Felt. Here’s me complaining about it on the first day the iPhone was available: “Marker Felt is silly, ugly, and worst of all, hard to read.”

Alas, I like [Roboto], I think it looks nice.

That’s one.

It’s certainly not as beautiful as Metro’s excellent Segoe-based typography, but then again — nothing is.

On Segoe, we agree. But note that everyone agrees. No one from Holwerda’s imaginary Apple-defending Helvetica-loving cabal has anything but praise for Segoe, as Metro’s system font. It’s attractive, readable, friendly, and distinctive.

Honestly, I’m just selfish. I want Android to have an attractive system font, if for no other reason than that the system font is going to be used to render Daring Fireball for anyone reading it on an Android device. This idea that designers who favor iOS criticize Android for being poorly designed just because it’s from an Apple competitor is nonsense — a bogeyman construct dreamed up by open source zealots who refuse to believe over a decade of evidence that open source UIs tend to be ugly, and that ugly UIs tend to be unpopular. We criticize Android for being poorly designed because it’s poorly designed. We favor iOS because it’s better designed. That’s it. ★

The iPhone 4S

Wednesday, 12 October 2011

This is the easiest product review I’ve ever written. The iPhone 4S is exactly what Apple says it is: just like the iPhone 4, but noticeably faster, with a significantly improved camera, and an impressive new voice-driven feature called Siri.

Siri

Siri feels like old-school Apple. Newton-esque, at least in spirit. Sculley-era Apple was obsessed with this sort of thing — natural language processing, the computer as “digital assistant”. New models of human-computer interaction. AI that works naturally. Even the startups from former Apple employees of that era worked on this sort of thing — remember General Magic?

It’s also sort of the antithesis of everything prior in iOS. iOS is explicit and visual. Everything you can do in iOS is something you can see and touch on screen. The limits are visible and obvious. Siri, on the other hand, feels limitless. It’s fuzzy, and fuzzy on purpose. There’s no way to tell what will work and what won’t. You must explore. I found it extremely fun to explore Siri — primarily because so many of the things I tried actually worked. It’s a completely different interface for interacting with your iPhone. You’re not driving or commanding the existing iPhone interface with commands. There is no syntax to memorize. You’re just, well, talking to your iPhone.

I tried the same things Scott Forstall demoed on stage. They all worked, as promised. On a whim, I asked Siri, with no other context, “When is my next haircut?” Siri answered with my appointment scheduled for later this month. I asked, “When was my last haircut?”, and it found that appointment from a month ago. I told Siri, “Play something by the Rolling Stones” and it played a random Stones song (“Gimme Shelter”, from Let It Bleed). I interrupted and said, “Play ‘Some Girls” by the Rolling Stones”, and Siri played just that song.

I was out running errands today, walking through the city. I remembered, a mile away from home, that a screw had fallen out of my wife’s favorite eyeglasses over the weekend, and that she was waiting for me to fix them. Walking down a city street, I said, “Remind me to fix Amy’s glasses when I get home.”¹ Half an hour later, within a few doors of our house, the reminder went off.

Me: “Set an alarm for 9 AM.”

Siri: “It’s set for 9 AM.”

Me: “Change that to 10 AM.”

Siri: “I changed your alarm to 10 AM tomorrow.”

Me: “Cancel that alarm.”

Siri: “I deleted your 10 AM alarm.”

Me: “Thank you, Siri.”

Siri: “Your wish is my command.”

In a sense, Siri is like a second interface to iOS. The first interface is the app interface. Launch, tap, drag, slide. The Siri interface is a different world. As stated above, this new interface is in many ways the opposite of the regular one — open-ended and implicit instead of narrowly defined and explicit. I don’t mean to imply that Siri doesn’t fit in or feel right at home — it does. But Siri is indicative of an AI-focused ambition that Apple hasn’t shown since before Steve Jobs returned to the company. Prior to Siri, iOS struck me as being designed to make it easy for us to do things. Siri is designed to do things for us.

But there are parallels between Siri and the regular iPhone interface, too. The original iPhone launched in 2007 with a limited feature set and no third-party apps. 2011’s Siri is largely based on the same feature set: messages, email, phone calls, calendars, alarms, web search. But with the original iPhone, it was always obvious how Apple could allow third-party developers into the party: by allowing third-party apps. Apps are a nice clean, obvious concept. The iOS interface is fundamentally only two levels deep: the first level is the home screen, listing all available apps. The second level is when you tap an app to use it. Hit the home button to go back to the home screen. That’s it. File system sandboxing and background processing restrictions make it easy to keep apps from interfering with each other or with the system as a whole.

People are going to start clamoring for third-party Siri integration as soon as they see Siri in action. But I’m not sure what form that integration could take. Best I can think is that apps could hook up to (as yet utterly hypothetical) Siri APIs much in the same way that Mac apps can supply system-wide Services menu items. But how would they keep from stomping on one another? If Siri supported third-party apps and you said, “Schedule lunch tomorrow at noon,” what would Siri do if you have multiple Siri-enabled calendar apps installed? This is similar to the dilemma Mac OS X faces when you open a document with a file extension that multiple installed apps register support for.

Perhaps Siri is too centralized to allow for third-party integration? Where by third-party integration, I mean “any app in the App Store” integration. Siri does support two third-party services right now: Yelp and Wolfram Alpha. But it was Apple that added those two, and Apple that determines when to use them. They’re data services, not software.² With the regular iOS interface, the central hub is very thin: a home screen of app icons. It wasn’t necessarily obvious from the get-go that Apple would allow third-party apps, but it was obvious how they could: just add those new icons to the home screen. It’s not so obvious how you could add new commands to Siri without potentially stomping on existing ones.

Here’s an example. Wolfram Alpha has terrific stock-price information and comparison features. I link to them frequently for stock info from Daring Fireball. So I tried asking Siri, “What was Apple’s stock price 10 years ago?” But once Siri groks that you’re asking about a stock price, it queries the built-in Stocks app for data, and the Stocks app doesn’t have historical data that goes back that far. “What did Apple’s stock price close at today?” works, but asking for historical data does not. But Wolfram Alpha has that data. And in fact, you can get it through Siri, by asking something like “Search Wolfram Alpha for Apple’s stock price ten years ago.” But there’s no way to tell Siri to prefer Wolfram Alpha for stock market information by default.

Even if Siri is never opened up to App Store apps, though, there’s clearly a sense when you use it that Apple is only just getting started with this.

The best sign I can think of regarding Siri’s practical utility: after a week of using this test iPhone 4S, yesterday, while using my regular iPhone 4, without thinking I held down the home button to create a new reminder for myself, and when the old Voice Control interface appeared, my mind went blank for a few seconds while I pondered what went wrong. I missed Siri already.

I wouldn’t say I can’t live without Siri. But I can say that I don’t want to.

Speech-to-Text

Alongside Siri, the digital assistant, is the straight-up speech-to-text dictation feature now available system-wide. This was my favorite feature of Android when I tested a Nexus S early this year. It’s now one of my favorite features of the iPhone 4S. I composed numerous tweets, text messages, and email replies this week using it. It’s not flawless but it is excellent. It works just as well while walking on a city street as it does while I’m sitting alone in my office. It even worked remarkably well in a crowded, busy bar.

Worth noting that you can say punctuation, like “comma”, “period”, and “question mark”. So if you say, “Try saying quote open the pod bay doors unquote”, Siri should properly interpret that as:

Try saying “open the pod bay doors”

Why Is Siri Limited to the iPhone 4S?

The cynical answer, of course, would be that Apple is withholding it from other iOS devices in order to spur additional upgrades to the iPhone 4S.

A non-cynical answer would be that Siri depends on certain hardware in the iPhone 4S that doesn’t exist on any other iOS device. But what, exactly? The iPad 2 has the same CPU (A5) and same amount of RAM (512 MB), but no Siri, no text dictation. No one at Apple has an answer for this other than to say that Siri was developed alongside and specifically for just one device: the iPhone 4S. And as good as Siri is, I get the impression that Apple is far from satisfied with where it stands today. The Newton was killed by that “egg freckles” stuff — it never recovered from the public perception that its handwriting recognition wasn’t good enough. If Siri is any less accurate on older iOS devices than it is on the 4S, Apple isn’t going to allow it.

Don’t forget that there’s a server/cloud-based backend that is required for Siri to function. I can’t help but suspect there’s some truth to this tweet from Mark Crump, speculating that Apple might be limiting Siri to the 4S simply to restrict the server load while the service is “beta”. There could be 100 million iOS 5 users by the end of this weekend; there will only be 1 or 2 million iPhone 4S users.

Camera

The most-hated sight in all of Mac OS X: the rainbow “wait” cursor, a.k.a. the spinning pizza of death. Waiting sucks.

iOS doesn’t have any cursors, let alone the spinning pizza, but it does have an equivalent: the closed iris splash screen of the Camera app. You want to snap a picture, but instead, you see the iris, and… you wait.

The most profound difference between the 4S and 4 cameras has nothing to do with image quality. It’s that you don’t have to wait nearly as long. That closed iris comes up for a moment and then it’s gone, and you’re ready to shoot. And after you shoot, the camera is ready to snap additional photos almost instantly. The difference is huge, and it’s especially nice in conjunction with iOS 5’s new lock screen shortcut to jump right into the Camera app.

I spoke to some friends familiar with the development of iOS 5 and the 4S, and word on the Cupertino street is that camera speed — time from launch to being able to snap a photo, as well as the time between subsequent photos — received an enormous amount of engineering attention during development. The stopwatches were out, and every single tenth of a second that could be shaved was shaved.

Image quality is improved, too, as promised. White balance and exposure choices look more accurate (or at least more pleasing) to my eyes, it performs noticeably better in low light, and dynamic range has been improved significantly. Here’s a small photoset I put on Flickr, showing the same scenes photographed with three different cameras: my old iPhone 4, the iPhone 4S, and my trusty Ricoh GR-D — a dedicated point-and-shoot camera I bought for $800 four years ago.

The photos were not edited, retouched, etc. I simply imported them into iPhoto and then uploaded them to Flickr. You can quibble with the exposure settings, but I snapped the photos naturally — I framed the image, tapped to choose a focus/exposure point, and snapped. (With the Ricoh, I focused first, then recomposed.)

The photos from the 4S look better than those from the 4. They don’t look as good as those from the Ricoh, but over the last year, I found myself carrying the Ricoh less and less, because the iPhone 4 was good enough — and already in my pocket. Now, I wonder if the Ricoh is going to start collecting dust.

Sprint

I asked for and received a Sprint model from Apple for testing, so that I could compare it against AT&T and Verizon. Sprint service was decent in both downtown San Francisco and at home in Philadelphia. Network benchmarks (using the Speedtest.net iPhone app) showed very similar results to those I’d gotten with the Verizon iPhone 4 earlier this year.

My tests were certainly far from extensive, but from what I’ve seen, Sprint’s service is very much comparable to Verizon’s. Compared to AT&T, Sprint and Verizon are better for voice (both in terms of audio quality and call-dropping), but worse for data (slower, often much slower).

Because I use 3G for data far more than I do for voice calls, I’m sticking with AT&T for at least another year. At whatever point in the future the iPhone adds support for LTE networking, I will definitely reconsider this decision, and likely switch. (Look at this comparison of the service plans available from AT&T, Sprint, and Verizon. Sprint’s is far simpler — the only difference between tiers is the number of monthly voice minutes. Text messages and data are unlimited on all Sprint plans.) If you live or work in an area with excellent Sprint coverage, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend a Sprint iPhone.

Overall Snappiness

Apps launch quicker, scrolling is smoother, web pages render faster. If you used both an original iPad and and iPad 2, it’s a lot like that. If anything, the jump from iPad to iPad 2 was a little more of an improvement, though, because the iPad 2 went from 256 MB of RAM to 512. The iPhone 4 and 4S both have 512 MB of RAM.

Bottom Line

The iPhone 4 was my favorite product that Apple has ever made. The iPhone 4S has all the best features of the iPhone 4 — same look, same feel, same Retina Display — and adds several significant improvements. The one and only disappointment I have with the iPhone 4S is that the shutdown spinner animation is still low-res. That’s pretty low on the list of nits to pick. ★

You might wonder, Hey, don’t you feel like a jerk walking around the city talking to your phone? But here’s the thing: Siri, by default, kicks in when you hold the iPhone up to your ear, so you can talk to it and it looks like you’re on a phone call. ↩
You ever notice how Wolfram Alpha’s website returns just about all results as static rendered images, not text? I’ve always suspected the point of that is to make it harder for anyone to systematically spider their results. One side effect for Siri, though, is that Siri can’t read anything from Wolfram Alpha results. ↩