A nice treat for your holiday weekend listening enjoyment: MG Siegler returns to The Talk Show. (Finally.) Topics include rumors of an upcoming Siri SDK and an Amazon Echo-like device from Apple, the future of the MacBook lineup, Peter Thiel’s secretive role as the financial backer of Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker, and my hatred of Roman numerals.
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Yesterday’s post about my distaste for Google’s use of Android-style Material Design for their iOS apps reminded me about one of the most interesting iOS apps I’ve seen in the last year: “Maps+”, from IZE. It’s a native iOS app that follows the UI design of Apple Maps, but uses Google Maps for the actual maps. It’s close to what you’d get if Google Maps were still providing the data for Apple Maps. It can’t do turn-by-turn directions, but when you ask for directions, it gives you the choice of whether to hand off to Apple Maps or Google Maps.
Best “finally” ever?
Jason Snell, writing at Macworld:
As someone in Google’s ecosystem as well as Apple’s, I’m happy
that they continue to develop apps for iOS. Unfortunately,
every time I open one of them, I’m brought back to the mid-’90s
and Word 6.
I don’t know the reason — arrogance, pride, or a lack of desire
to do the extra work are all options — but for a while now,
Google has insisted on using the Material Design approach when
creating iOS apps. Just as Word 6 inflicted Windows conventions on
Mac users, Google’s iOS apps inflict Android on iOS users. […]
I’m not saying either design is superior. If you’re on Android,
you should expect apps to look like Android apps–Apple Music for
Android uses Android’s icons for sharing and offering additional
options, rather than the ones you’d see on iOS. And the reverse
should be true too. (It’s not. Google Play Music looks the same on
iOS as on Android.)
Hear, hear. I find every one of Google’s iOS apps too foreign to bear.
Update: Jason specifically calls out iTunes on Windows as being in the same boat. I’d add the late , too.
Great take from Ben Thompson:
The tech industry, like Thiel, is no underdog: it is the dominant
economic force not just in the United States but in the entire
world, both because of the wealth it creates, but especially
because of the wealth it destroys. And, to quote another comic
book figure, “With great power comes great responsibility”.
In this case, no matter how badly Thiel was personally hurt by
Gawker, or how morally wrong their actions were, he is the one
with far greater power, and the appropriate approach is not to
leverage said power in an act of vigilantism, but to exercise the
responsibility of defending the conditions that made his power
possible to emerge, conditions that I believe are to the long-term
benefit of everyone. That would be an approach worth applauding
and emulating, not just because it’s the right thing to do, but
because the freedom that made possible the tech industry that made
Thiel rich depends on it.
Joe Mullin, reporting for Ars Technica:
Following a two-week trial, a federal jury concluded Thursday that
Google’s Android operating system does not infringe Oracle-owned
copyrights because its re-implementation of 37 Java APIs is
protected by “fair use.” The verdict was reached after three days
of deliberations. […]
There was only one question on the special verdict form, asking if
Google’s use of the Java APIs was a “fair use” under copyright
law. The jury unanimously answered “yes,” in Google’s favor. The
verdict ends the trial, which began earlier this month. If Oracle
had won, the same jury would have gone into a “damages phase” to
determine how much Google should pay. Because Google won, the
trial is over.
I’m sure they’re out there, but I haven’t seen anyone who was rooting for Oracle in this case.
Update: , writer of the FOSS Patents weblog, is :
Also, while Google was able to present all of the “evidence” and
testimony that helped its defense, .
Presumably, Judge Alsup will deny Oracle’s motion for judgment as
a matter of law (JMOL), if his jury instructions are any
indication. Then Oracle will appeal again. I predict Oracle is
very likely to succeed once again on appeal.
Kara Swisher, writing for Recode:
What does Facebook, which has been trying mightily to court the
media industry to publish on the social networking site, think
about Thiel’s actions, especially given he is a prominent director
of the company?
And, more importantly, will it do anything about them?
The answer is, not surprisingly, a solid “No comment” from the
company and a number of other board members. In fact, insiders are
going out of their way to say that Facebook is not responsible for
Thiel’s private actions and noting that it had nothing to do with
the lawsuit.
Felix Salmon, writing at Fusion, making the case that Peter Thiel revealed his role in the Hogan-Gawker case as a strategic move:
But then the Thiel bombshell dropped. The Hogan case, it turned
out, wasn’t a war in which Gawker cou
instead, it was merely a battle in a much larger fight against an
opponent with effectively unlimited resources.
Gawker could continue to fight the H it could even win
that case outright, on appeal. But even if Hogan went away, Thiel
would not. Thiel’s lawsuits would not end, and Thiel’s pockets are
deeper than Denton’s. Gawker’s future is indeed grim: it can’t
afford to fight an indefinite number of lawsuits, since fighting
even frivolous suits is an expensive game.
The result is that investing in Gawker right now is a very
unattractive proposition, since any investor knows that they will
be fighting a years-long battle with a single-minded billionaire
who doesn’t care about how much money he spends on the fight. And
if Gawker can’t raise any new money to continue to fight the Hogan
case, then its corporate end might be closer than anybody thinks.
It’s also not clear what policy response Gawker’s outraged
defenders would recommend. Put caps on the amount of money people
can contribute to legal efforts they sympathize with? That would
put the ACLU and any number of advocacy groups out of business. It
would also represent a far greater threat to free expression than
a court-imposed legal liability for the non-consensual publication
of what is essentially revenge porn. If Marshall and others are
worried about the superrich harassing critics with genuinely
frivolous lawsuits — as, yes, authoritarian characters like
Donald Trump have attempted to do — they would have more success
backing tort reform measures to limit litigiousness overall than
attacking Thiel for contributing to a legitimate cause he has good
reason to support.
Willick’s argument is that Thiel’s bankrolling of Hogan’s case against Gawker is within the bounds of free speech. I don’t disagree. My counter to Willick, though, is that it’s possible to be outraged and/or alarmed by Thiel’s behavior without proposing any sort of new legislative barrier to prevent this sort of thing.
Fortunately, this debate does not needs to be resolved, because
our First Amendment protects the speech rights of everyone,
regardless of where they reside on the left-wing privilege totem
poll. And that means Peter Thiel’s right to back Hogan’s cause is
not and should not be in dispute, no matter how much
Gawker-sympathizers hand-wave about how the wealthy contrarian is
ushering in a totalitarian oligarchy.
It’s free speech on both sides. Thiel was free to secretly back (and apparently strategically steer) Hogan’s case against Gawker. But Gawker founder Nick Denton , and Forbes was free to . And now commentators who are appalled are free to , perhaps embarrassing him and making it less likely that he or others of similar super-wealth will do this in the future. Willick’s defense of Thiel strikes me as being of a piece with .
I, for one, don’t dispute Peter Thiel’s right to back Hogan’s case. I simply think he’s an asshole for doing it, and a coward for having attempted to do it in secret.&
Andrew Ross Sorkin of The New York Times scored Thiel’s first interview regarding Thiel’s heretofore secret funding Hulk Hogan’s lawsuit against Gawker (to the tune of around $10 million). The problems start with the headline: “Peter Thiel, Tech Billionaire, Reveals Secret War With Gawker”. Thiel did not reveal it — Forbes did. If it were up to Thiel this would still be secret. The fact that Thiel waged his “war” secretly is a key aspect of this story that should not be brushed over.
“It’s less about revenge and more about specific deterrence,” he
said in his first interview since his identity was revealed. “I
saw Gawker pioneer a unique and incredibly damaging way of getting
attention by bullying people even when there was no connection
with the public interest.”
Mr. Thiel said he considered his financial backing of the cases
against Gawker to be “one of my greater philanthropic things that
I’ve done. I think of it in those terms.” He refused to divulge
exactly what other cases against he has funded but said, “It’s
safe to say this is not the only one.”
Philanthropy. Got it.
Update: It’s . I didn’t see that angle, but if so, and Sorkin’s aware of it, “reveals” works in the headline. But none of Thiel’s public remarks supports that.
Elizabeth Spiers:
On the one hand, you have to admire Thiel’s sheer and apparently
unending determination to make Denton and Gawker pay for coverage
he didn’t like — it’s Olympic level grudge-holding. But the
retribution is incredibly disproportionate in a way that seems
almost unhinged. It would be hard to argue that Thiel was
materially damaged by Gawker’s coverage in the way that he’s now
trying to damage Gawker. His personal finances haven’t been
destroyed and even the most egregious things Gawker has written
haven’t put literally everyone who works for Thiel out of a job.
(What did Lifehacker ever do to Peter Thiel?) And given his hard
libertarian tendencies, it should at least make him uncomfortable
in a very prickly way to utilize government bureaucracy to put a
capitalistic enterprise out of business.
Even if Thiel wants to argue that Owen Thomas’s 2007 notorious
“Peter Thiel is Totally Gay, People” post had a cataclysmically
negative emotional toll for him, trying to destroy the entire
business via abuse of the U.S. legal system still seems so epic in
its vindictiveness that I couldn’t help but wonder whether this
kind of asymmetrical reaction is just part and parcel of what you
can expect in Thiel’s orbit generally, if you choose to do
business with him.
There is some irony to the fact that Adobe is wrestling with the problems caused by security vulnerabilities in an Apple plugin.
Brent Simmons:
So, again, I’m documenting the problems currently solved by
Objective-C’s dynamism, and suggesting that Swift, as it evolves,
needs to take these problems into account. The foundation should
be built with some idea of what the upper floors will look like.
The answer doesn’t have to be that Swift is dynamic in the way
Objective-C is, or even dynamic at all. But the eventual Swift app
frameworks need to solve these problems as well as — hopefully
better than — UIKit and AppKit do right now. And those solutions
start with the language.
I love Brent’s open-minded approach to this debate. One thing I’ve seen some “I’ve switched to Swift and don’t miss the dynamic aspects of Objective-C” proponents seemingly overlook is that today’s Swift apps for iOS and Mac rely (deeply) upon the dynamic Objective-C runtime and frameworks. There’s no such thing as a pure-Swift app on iOS or Mac today — they’re apps written in Swift .
Kirby Ferguson on Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Great stuff, as usual.
Josh Marshall, writing at TPM:
It all comes down to a simple point. You may not like Gawker.
They’ve
publish. But if the extremely wealthy, under a veil secrecy, can
destroy publications they want to silence, that’s a far bigger
threat to freedom of the press than most of the things we commonly
worry about on that front. If this is the new weapon in the
arsenal of the super rich, few publications will have the
resources or the death wish to scrutinize them closely.
Brian Roemmele:
It is not a secret that Siri has not kept up the pace that just
about all of us expected, including some of the Siri team. The
passion that Steve had seemed to have been waning deep inside of
Apple and the results were Dag and Adam Cheyer moved on and formed
Five Six Labs (V IV in Roman numerals) and Viv.
(VI and V are 6 and 5 in Roman numerals. IV is 4. So “Viv” could come from V-IV (5-4) or VI-V (6-5).
suggests “Viv” comes from 6-5. Anyway, Roman numerals suck. Update: The article now reads “formed Six Five Labs”, but still has the Roman numerals wrong.)
Tom Gruber, one of the original team members and the chief
scientist that created Siri technology, stayed on and continued
his work. During most of 2016 and 2017 we will begin to see the
results of this work. I call it Siri2 and am very certain Apple
will call it something else.
(No relation, for what it’s worth.)
Apple has always been a vital mix of internally created technology
and acquired technology. From iTunes to TouchID Apple has been
spectacular in identifying young and smart companies and
integrating them into the very core of Apple.
Late in 2015 Apple approached a small Cambridge, England Voice
AI company called VocalIQ and made a pitch to Blaise Thomson
that he could not refuse. As a University of Cambridge spin out,
VocalIQ had already been around for about 2 years and I had
become very familiar with their amazing technology. VocalIQ
built astounding technology that no doubt you and I will use
every day, some day soon.
Via Nick Heer (whose excellent
should be on your daily reads list), who writes:
So, who’s excited for WWDC?
Ryan Mac and Matt Drange, reporting for Forbes (sorry for linking to Forbes — I think this is the first time I’ve done so since they started attempting to block visitors using content blockers — but this is their scoop):
Peter Thiel, a PayPal cofounder and one of the earliest backers of
Facebook, has been secretly covering the expenses for
Hulk Hogan’s lawsuits against online news organization Gawker
Media. According to people familiar with the situation who agreed
to speak on condition of anonymity, Thiel, a cofounder and partner
at Founders Fund, has played a lead role in bankrolling the cases
Terry Bollea, a.k.a. Hogan, brought against New York-based Gawker.
Hogan is being represented by Charles Harder, a prominent Los
Angeles-based lawyer. […]
Money may not have been the main motivation in the first place.
Thiel, who is gay, has made no secret of his distaste for Gawker,
which attempted to out him in late 2007 before he was open about
his sexuality. In 2009, Thiel told PEHub that now-defunct Silicon
Valley-focused publication Valleywag, which was owned by Gawker,
had the “psychology of a terrorist.”
“Valleywag is the Silicon Valley equivalent of Al Qaeda,” Thiel
said at the time.
A storyline right out of pro wrestling.
(Interesting perhaps only to me: I already had tags in my CMS for “Gawker” and “Hulk Hogan”, but not for “Peter Thiel”. Apparently
was the only time I’ve even mentioned Peter Thiel on Daring Fireball.)
Very fun Instagram account.
Amir Efrati, writing for The Information (paywall, alas):
Apple is upping its game in the field of intelligent assistants.
After years of internal debate and discussion about how to do so,
the company is preparing to open up Siri to apps made by others.
And it is working on an Amazon Echo-like device with a speaker and
microphone that people can use to turn on music, get news
headlines or set a timer.
Opening up its Siri voice assistant to outside app developers is
the more immediate step. Apple is preparing to release a software
developer kit, or SDK, for app developers who want their apps to
be accessible through Siri, according to a person with direct
knowledge of the effort. […]
Apple hopes to make the Siri SDK available in time for its annual
conference for developers in June.
Will be interesting to see how this API works. Will the Siri extensions be packaged within existing iOS (and Mac?) apps? As for the Echo competitor — I hope they call it the .
Speaking of Paul Kim, he just released version 4.0 of his excellent Mac utility, Hazel. If you’ve wanted an app to automatically clean up the files on your desktop and Downloads folder, that’s Hazel. Hazel does a lot more than that, but that’s the basic gist. You set up the rules you want and it just works. (If you want to know just how much more Hazel offers, David Sparks just released a two-and-a-half hour
that will teach you just about everything.)
One more item regarding Swift and dynamism — Michael Tsai’s excellent roundup of links on the subject, including .
One thing many people seem to overlook about the dynamism of
Objective-C is that it enabled NeXT (and Apple) to provide better
GUI tools. Using dynamism, they were able to make GUI building
declarative in nature. Connect this to that. Call this method. All
stored in a file that was (and still is) data, not code.
Competitors at the time (and today) resorted to code generation
which is fragile and, ironically, unsafe. Yes, you could have a
more declarative file format, but implementing that in using a
static language required a lot of hard-coding and switch
statements. Not the elegance that many people claim to be moving
I’m not saying that a language has to be purely dynamic but it
shouldn’t be purely static either. It think it’s spurious not to
credit a level of dynamism for the quality of apps on Apple
platforms over the years, and to be pedantic, the NeXT ones as
well — many of which were considered the best on any platform at
the time. To deny that, I feel, shows a lack of understanding of
what has made the platform great all these years.
Objective-C is a very dynamic language. Swift (for now at least) is not. There are arguments on both sides, and I find the whole thing fascinating. But what I’ve noticed is that those arguing most strenuously against dynamism (or if you prefer, in favor of Swift’s relatively strict type safety) are doing so in the name of idealism. That rigorous type safety is correct almost in a moral sense (or, if you prefer, that the sort of bugs you can write with Objective-C’s dynamic features are immoral, that a modern language should prevent you from writing them in the first place).
Those arguing in favor of dynamism — and keep in mind Kim’s utterly even-handed stance quoted above — are doing so from an utterly practical perspective. We have 25 years of evidence that Objective-C and the NeXTStep/Cocoa/Cocoa Touch frameworks allow for the creation of the best apps in the world — and that they allow smaller teams to accomplish more, faster. (Exhibit A: .)
I can’t prove that dynamic nature of Objective-C and the frameworks has been essential to the success of the Mac and iOS for app development. But a lot of people who’ve spent years — or decades — creating those apps sure think so. I tend to side with pragmatism over idealism.
Ben Sandofsky:
I strongly believe Swift is the future of iOS development. It’s
only a matter of when, and the blocker is the breakneck speed it
evolves. For smaller apps, Swift is good enough. For big apps,
it’s at least a year away. […]
If you’re working in a smaller app, stop reading. The benefits of
Swift 3.0 probably outweigh the risks. If you’re curious about the
challenges of large companies, large codebases, and complex
dependencies, this post should explain why big projects are
holding back.
In the run-up to WWDC (and in the wake of
a week ago, that certain features slated for the upcoming Swift 3.0 have been postponed) I’ve seen a slew of great pieces on Swift and dynamic programming. Sandofsky provides a good layman’s overview of why it’s not yet practical — arguments over dynamism aside — for big apps to move to Swift.
Kirk McElhearn, writing at Macworld:
Apple has thankfully merged the two different types of contextual
menus, in most locations. Instead of one menu displaying when you
click the “…” button, and another when you right-click an item,
the menus are the same, and work in the same way. I never
understood why Apple wanted these two menus to be different, but
it’s good that they’ve realized how confusing they were.
Unfortunately, there are some locations where the “new”
co click the “…” button next to an artist or
album name, and the new menu is still there. There’s also a new
Song menu in the menu bar, which reproduces the menu items from
the contextual menu.
When you’re watching a movie, the Song menu changes to M watch a TV show and it changes to “TV Show”. I don’t think it’s a bad idea, but I’ll be damned if I can recall another app that did something like this with the name of a menu.
See also: .
A thoughtful piece by Marco Arment over the weekend, which :
Today, Amazon, Facebook, and Google are placing large bets on
advanced AI, ubiquitous assistants, and voice interfaces, hoping
that these will become the next thing that our devices are for.
If they’re right — and that’s a big “if” — I’m worried for
Today, Apple’s being led properly day-to-day and doing very well
overall. But if the landscape shifts to prioritize those big-data
AI services, Apple will find itself in a similar position as
BlackBerry did almost a decade ago: what they’re able to do,
despite being very good at it, won’t be enough anymore, and they
won’t be able to catch up.
When the interface becomes invisible and data based, Apple dies.
That sounds right to me. But I’m not sure I accept the premise that the rise of AI assistants will decrease in any way our desire for devices with screens. iPhone and Android doomed BlackBerry because people stopped buying BlackBerries. Even if we accept the premise that Google Assistant is going to be a big deal that Apple won’t be able to compete with, I’m not sure how that decreases demand for the devices Apple already makes.
I keep thinking back to the original iPhone introduction in 2007, when Steve Jobs touted their partnership with Google. . Eric Schmidt even jokes that their partnership was sort of like a merger without actually merging — with Apple doing what Apple does best, and Google doing what Google does best. I don’t know if that was ever tenable in the long run, but it’s interesting to wonder where they’d be today if they had made it work.
Hamza Shaban, writing for BuzzFeed:
Google’s “smart” replies and virtual assistant improve with use,
“learning” by analyzing conversations and context. But this kind
of fine-tuned processing requires a record or “memory” of chats
that take place in the normal settings. Similar to Google’s web
browser, Chrome, which includes its own incognito mode, the normal
settings offer a more intuitive experience to consumers, Google
said. The option to turn on incognito mode in Allo and enable
end-to-end encryption offers additional security, but with the
choice to revert back to the fuller version, Google added.
But others are concerned with the broader ramifications of Allo’s
design. “Google has given the FBI exactly what the agency has been
calling for,” Christopher Soghoian, the ACLU’s principal
technologist, told BuzzFeed News.
A live Google bot inside a chat stream is an interesting feature, and it can’t be done with end-to-end encryption. But this means law enforcement can require Google to hand over transcripts, and effectively wiretap your “normal” Allo chats. That’s a tradeoff many people will be willing to make. My beef is with using the words “normal” and “incognito”. Perhaps I’m spoiled by iMessage, but to me a “normal” chat is one with end-to-end encryption and no AI bot. Allo’s “normal” chats are the ones that are abnormal.
And “incognito” is absolutely the wrong word for Allo’s private chats. The word incognito means “having one’s true identity concealed”. That’s not what happens with Allo’s private chats. You’re still identified by your phone number. They should call this “private”, not “incognito”.
Remember Project Ara, Google’s modular phone project? Headline of David Pierce’s piece for Wired: “Project Ara Lives: Google’s Modular Phone Is Ready for You Now”.
After years of failed demos, public sputters, and worrisome
silence, Ara works. About 30 people within ATAP are using Ara as
their primary phone. Camargo actually has the luxury of worrying
about things like aesthetics, rather than whether it’ll turn on.
“Please pay no attention to how it looks,” he tells me, flipping
the blocky smartphone over in his hands, “because it’s a
prototype.” It’s not a concept, not an idea, not a YouTube video.
It’s a prototype. Developer kits for Ara will be shipping later
this year, and a consumer version is coming in 2017.
In what universe does this qualify as “ready for us now”? It’s not ready at all, and nothing in this story makes it sound like a good idea. It’s nonsense.
Update: I’ve been asked why I think Ara is a dumb idea. :
How does this have any more mass market appeal than building one’s
own PC? And with mobile devices, size and weight matter more than
ever, and reductions in size and weight can only come through
integration.
for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Every day they have a new daily deal — but even if you don’t care about the daily deals, they’re worth visiting just for the stories, videos, and community. Just go there and check it out — it’s easier than trying to explain it.
For your weekend listening enjoyment, a new episode of America’s favorite 3-star podcast, with special guest Rene Ritchie. Topics include Apple’s new flagship retail store in San Francisco, recent improvements to App Store approval times, and Google’s announcements at I/O this week — Google Home and Google Assistant, Allo and Duo, and Android “N” and Android Instant Apps.
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Nice photographs from The Verge.
Rene Ritchie:
Apple has pulled the iOS 9.3.2 update for the 9.7-inch iPad Pro
and is working on a fix. Apple provided an updated comment to
iMore on the issue:
“We’re working on a fix for an issue impacting a small number of
iPad units that are receiving an error when trying to update the
software,” an Apple spokesperson told iMore. “We’ll issue an
update as quickly as possible.”
Seems odd that it took so long for Apple to pull this.
Rehema Figueiredo, reporting for The Daily Mail:
Insiders said Craig turned down a ?68million offer from MGM studio
to return as Bond for two more films following last year’s hit
Spectre. The sum included endorsements, profit shares, and a
role for him working as a co-producer.
One LA film source said: ‘Daniel is done — pure and simple — he
told top brass at MGM after Spectre. They threw huge amounts of
money at him, but it just wasn’t what he wanted.’ He added: ‘He
had told people after shooting that this would be his final
outing, but the film company still felt he could come around after
Spectre if he was offered a money deal.’
One source said that executives had finally agreed to let the
actor go after growing tired of his criticism of the franchise.
Craig had a very good run, but I thought Spectre was the worst of his films. The soap opera-style plot twist with Blofeld did damage to the entire Bond canon, and wasn’t suspenseful in the least. I’m ready for a Bond who enjoys being Bond.
I watched most of
and came away very impressed. My short take:
Under the new Alphabet organization and Sundar Pichai’s leadership, Google has focused itself on the things Google is actually good at, and which people will actually want to use. No more pie-in-the-sky stuff like Google Glass. Google is clearly the best at this voice-driven assistant stuff. Pichai claimed that in their own competitive analysis, Google Assistant is “an order of magnitude” ahead of competing assistants (read: Siri and Alexa). That sounds about right. This might be like Steve Jobs’s 2007 claim that the iPhone was “5 years” ahead of anyone else.
Pichai’s example of a query Google Assistant can handle but which “other assistants” cannot was asking “What is Draymond Green’s jersey number?” I tried that query in the Google app on my iPhone. Got the right answer: 23. I tried with Alexa on my Echo, and got the response “Hmm. I can’t find the answer to the question I heard.” I tried with Siri, and I got .
Update: Wow. Dozens of DF readers have replied that Siri correctly answers that same question when they ask: exhibits , , , , , , , , , , ,
on Twitter, and more via email. And lo, when I ask “What is Steph Curry’s jersey number?”, Siri nails it. But I’ve tried at least 20 times, on multiple iOS devices, with “Draymond Green” and Siri gets it wrong each time, usually sending me to that same dry cleaner in New Jersey, sometimes suggesting a Bing web search. I can’t get it to work even when I say “What’s the jersey number for Draymond Green of the Golden State Warriors?” Maybe it’s my Philly accent. I tried with Derek Jeter (retired), Larry Bird (long retired), and Tony Romo (2017 Super Bowl champ-to-be) and Siri correctly answered all three — quickly.
I really liked .
Jacob Kastrenakes, writing for The Verge:
The key improvement here is the removal of the drop-down menu on
the righthand side of the screen, which previously held all of the
options that are now exposed in the lefthand menu. That’s a real
help, but the lefthand menu doesn’t take over everything. You’ll
still have to search through those top tabs to find major
features, like Apple Music and the App Store. (There is, by the
way, no one tab that says “Apple Music” — it’s actually a
combination of the For You, New, Radio, and Connect tabs.)
Bringing back the sidebar is an improvement, but the fundamental problem remains: there’s no visual hierarchy to iTunes’s multitude of sections and features. Mail, for example, has a clear hierarchy: accounts → mailboxes → messages → message details. I’m not saying iTunes could or should copy Mail’s design, but it ought to be just as clear as Mail in terms of knowing where you are, or where to find something.
Juli Clover, MacRumors:
In the menu bar, there’s a simple Siri black and white icon that
features the word “Siri” surrounded by a box, while the full dock
icon is more colorful and features a colorful Siri waveform in the
style of other built-in app icons. Clicking on either of the icons
brings up a Siri waveform to give users a visual cue that the
virtual assistant is listening for commands, much like on iOS
devices when the Home button is held down.
Why would Siri need both a menu bar item and an icon in the Dock?
David Streitfeld, reporting for the NYT from San Francisco, on the eve of Google I/O:
Google will introduce its much-anticipated entry into the
voice-activated home device market on Wednesday, according to
people who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
Named Google Home, the device is a virtual agent that answers
simple questions and carries out basic tasks. It is to be
announced at Google’s annual developers’ conference in
Silicon Valley.
Google Home will come to market in the fall — a long time away,
given the speed of technology, but Google needed to plant a stake
in the ground now. The device will compete with Amazon’s Echo,
which was introduced less than two years ago.
Google has the speech recognition and back-end performance down. But is this going to be a Google-branded device, or a platform for OEMs like Android? The Times’s report makes it sound like a Google-branded device — none of which have done well. Update: I forgot about Chromecast, . And Google Home might be the same sort of “just plug it in” low-cost device.
Amazon has already sold an estimated three million units.
Estimated by whom? How?
Jean-Louis Gassée:
But Intel had a justification, a story that it kept telling the
world and, more perniciously, itself:
‘Just you wait. Yes, today’s x86 are too big, consume too much
power, and cost more than our ARM competitors, but tomorrow…
Tomorrow, our proven manufacturing technology will nullify ARM’s
advantage and bring the full computing power and immense software
heritage of the x86 to emerging mobile applications.’
(after ), Intel has repeated the promise.
There are some variations in the story, such as the prospect of
the 3D transistor, but mobile device manufacturers don’t seem to
be listening.
Dave Gonzales, writing for Geek:
Called a “Futurist” by Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye in the film, Stark
is the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s genius on the forefront of
speculative technology. If Banner knows human mutation, Stark
knows the machines. That’s why it’s so shocking to see Tony using
a Vivo cell phone in Civil War, a cell phone that would
absolutely be condemned by the US government if it were being used
like it is in the film. It makes absolutely no thematic sense
within the context of the film, but there’s a big reason why
Marvel would endanger the theme of its most popular on-screen
character.
Tony Stark using a Vivo phone is another of Marvel Studios’
ongoing attempts to make more money in the Chinese box office,
which — for better or worse — has become noticeable to the
American and English audiences.
Vivo doesn’t even sell phones in the U.S. They’re a mid-market Chinese brand. It’s not just gratuitous product placement — it’s simply incompatible with Tony Stark’s character. No phone would satisfy Tony Stark but his own, from Stark Industries.
had subtle LG branding (bad enough), but also a prominent “Stark Industries” label on screen. But Vivo? If Marvel wants to sell out to the highest bidder for the other Avengers’ phones, that’s one thing. But not Stark.
See also: , on the grounds that “Bond only uses the ‘best’, and in their minds, the Sony phone is not the ‘best’.”
(This post is proof that I’m concerned only with truly important matters in&life.)
Alan Levin, reporting for Bloomberg:
Reports filed over the time it took U.S. Transportation Security
Administration to screen passengers grew more than 10-fold, to 513
this past March from 48 in March 2015. Concern about lack of
courtesy by TSA screeners increased more than three-fold, to 1,012
in March from 294 a year ago. […]
The TSA is trying to get 500 new airport screeners through
training and onto the job by the end of June as a growth in
travelers has led to longer lines at airports. Almost 6,800 people
traveling on American Airlines missed flights in March due to
delays at TSA checkpoints, airline spokesman Casey Norton said in
an interview earlier this month.
Almost 7,000 people in a single month, just on American. That’s unacceptable. TSA has never been competent at conducting airport screening — but this year the whole thing is collapsing upon itself.
From , CEO of MCX, the consortium behind the long-overdue mobile payments app :
Utilizing unique feedback from the marketplace and our Columbus
pilot, MCX has made a decision to concentrate more heavily in the
immediate term on other aspects of our business including working
with financial institutions, like our partnership with Chase, to
enable and scale mobile payment solutions.
CurrentC is a complete and utter failure.
As part of this transition, MCX will postpone a nationwide rollout
of its CurrentC application.
CurrentC’s nationwide rollout is never going to happen.
As MCX has said many times, the mobile payments space is just
beginning to take shape — it is early in a long game. MCX’s
owner-members remain committed to our future.
We’re falling further behind every day. MCX’s owner-members are giving up on this misguided endeavor.
As a result, MCX will need fewer resources. This change has
resulted in staff reduction of approximately 30 employees.
We were forced to lay off 30 employees. Everyone remaining should start polishing their résumés.
These are very tough decisions, but necessary steps.
We had no choice.
For those employees leaving us, we want to thank our
colleagues for their hard work and dedication to MCX over the
last several years.
We want to thank our departing colleagues for their hard work and dedication to MCX over the last several years, and wish them well in their future endeavors. Christ, I can’t even manage a straightforward “thank you”, can I?&
Say you’re texting with a friend about tomorrow’s lunch plans.
They ask you for the address. Until now it’s worked like this: You
leave your texting app. Open Search. Find the restaurant. Copy the
address. Switch back to your texts. Paste the address into a
message. And finally, hit send.
Searching and sending stuff on your phone shouldn’t be that
difficult. With Gboard, you can search and send all kinds of
things — restaurant info, flight times, news articles — right
from your keyboard. Anything you’d search on Google, you can
search with Gboard. Results appear as cards with the key
information front and center, such as the phone number, ratings
and hours. With one tap, you can send it to your friend and you
keep the conversation going.
My first thought, of course, was “Sounds like a privacy disaster — Google will see and log everything people type with this keyboard.”
But that doesn’t seem to be the case. During setup, Gboard displays
simple privacy statement, regarding its need for you to grant it “full access”, including networking:
This lets you use Google Search in your keyboard. Your searches
are sent to Google, but nothing else you type is.
Here’s what Google says in the app’s :
We know the things you type on your phone are personal, so we’ve
designed Gboard to keep your private information private.
What Gboard sends to Google:
When you do a search, Gboard sends your query to Google’s web
servers so Google can process your query and send you search
Gboard also sends anonymous statistics to Google to help us
diagnose problems when the app crashes and to let us know which
features are used most often.
What Gboard doesn’t send to Google:
Everything else. Gboard will remember words you type to help you
with spelling or to predict searches you might be interested in,
but this data is stored only on your device. This data is not
accessible by Google or by any apps other than Gboard.
This privacy policy could change in the future, of course. , and . But right now, it looks like Gboard is actually private. In fact, so far as I can tell, not only are you not required to sign into a Google account to use it — there is no way to sign in to a Google account even if you wanted to. Queries sent through Gboard don’t show up in , even when I’m signed into my Google account in other Google iOS apps. Only what you type in Gboard’s search input field gets sent to Google, and even that is always sent anonymously.
Whether this is Google’s own magnanimous decision, a technical limitation in iOS, or a policy decision enforced by App Store review, I don’t know.
Other notes:
Gboard is iOS-only for now, .
Design-wise Gboard is a little weird. All of Google’s recent iOS apps use Google’s
visual language, including the Roboto font. Their iOS apps look and work a lot more like Android apps than iOS apps. Gboard, however, was visually designed to mimic the standard iOS keyboard very closely. Gboard sports slightly different colors and changes a few key placements, but is clearly designed to look like the familiar system keyboard — I’ll bet many users will think Gboard is only adding a search bar above the system keyboard. (Third-party keyboards in iOS can’t merely modify the system keyboard — they must reimplement just about everything from scratch.)
But Gboard uses Roboto instead of SF. The differences between Roboto and San Francisco are sometimes subtle, but to my eyes it just makes it look out of place on iOS 9. Also, they chose too thin a weight of Roboto — I can barely see the period on their “.” key. I think the whole Material Design thing feels terribly out of place on iOS. I’m glad they didn’t do it with Gboard, but they should have gone the whole way and used San Francisco for the typeface, too.
Gboard has some . First, rather than make you switch to a different keyboard, it has its own dedicated emoji layout built in, including search. Mac OS’s “Emoji and Symbols” picker has lon it’s long struck me as a little curious that iOS’s standard emoji keyboard does not. Second, Gboard’s predictive text feature will suggest emoji in addition to actual words. Type “dinner” and the first predictive suggestion is “🍴”; type “basketball” and you get “🏀”. That’s clever.
Update: : “There must be people at Google who really don’t get the iPad. Gboard is very good on the iP the layout is atrocious on the iPad Pro.” I didn’t even think to try it on an iPad — for some reason I’ve got it in my head that third-party keyboards are an iPhone-only thing on iOS.
Update 2: , regarding this article:
@daringfireball It was our magnanimous decision, we should go all
the way w/ design, and we will polish iPad.
Update 3: Another cool feature. You know how you can move the insertion point by 3D pressing on the iPhone 6S keyboard? Gboard lets you move the insertion point by sliding across the space bar.&
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