The Daring Fireball Linked List

Saturday, 18 Feb 2012

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Jumping to Conclusions ★

Erik Wemple of The Washington Post notes this exclusive Mountain Lion-announcement-day interview the WSJ scored with Tim Cook and somehow concludes that Apple is giving The New York Times reduced access because of the Times’s “iEconomy” investigative reporting series. Problem is, The Wall Street Journal has been Apple’s favorite publication for exclusive leaks and interviews for years. For as long as I can recall, really. The Journal, for example, got the biggest exclusive in Apple history: the June 2009 leak that Steve Jobs had a liver transplant three months earlier.

It’s certainly possible that The Times might have been granted an interview with Cook as well if they had not run the iEconomy series, but Wemple doesn’t show any evidence of that, and recent history suggests they would not have.

Jackass stock swindler Henry Blodget reads Wemple’s report and concludes Apple’s “retaliation” against the Times includes blacklisting David Pogue:

The NYT’s gadget guru, David Pogue, did get a sneak-preview review copy of Apple’s new operating system for a week, which is another favor Apple PR gives to approved journalists. But he does not appear to have gotten access to Apple’s execs, the way John Gruber and the WSJ did. It would have been self-defeating for Apple PR to completely snub Pogue, who has his own following and who generally writes breathless reviews of Apple products. So Apple’s retaliation, in other words, appears to be cleverly subtle. Did we mention that Apple’s PR team is really good at this game?

By sheer coincidence, I can report that this is nonsense. When I left my briefing with Schiller last Wednesday in New York, waiting in the hallway for the next briefing was: David Pogue.

Microsoft’s Biggest Miss ★

Intriguing argument from Patrick Rhone (and wife) on how Microsoft’s underestimation of iOS let slip the Office empire.

Osfoora for Mac ★

Great new Mac Twitter client, $5 on the App Store. I’m giving it a shot as my primary client.

‘8:31 AM’ ★

This week’s episode of The Talk Show, recorded yesterday with special guest John Siracusa. We talk about, of course, Mountain Lion. If you don’t enjoy this show, you’re not hooked up right.

Brought to you by Rackspace and Squarespace.

Friday, 17 Feb 2012

Steven Frank on Gatekeeper ★

Steven Frank:

But I canâ€™t find it in me to disparage this goodwill effort that Apple has undertaken to not turn every third-party developer upside-down with regard to app distribution. To me itâ€™s a great sign that theyâ€™re aware and at some level sympathetic to our concerns, while remaining committed to a high-security experience for users.

Further cementing this feeling is the fact that we were invited to a private briefing at Apple about Gatekeeper a week before todayâ€™s announcement. Cabel was told point-blank that Apple has great respect for the third-party app community, and wants to see it continue to grow — they do not want to poison the well. I think their actions here speak even louder than their words, though.

Talk about doing things differently.

Wil Shipley’s November 2011 Call for Apple-Signed Mac Developer Certificates ★

Wil Shipley, back in November:

There are three primary ways Apple increases security of applications running on the Mac and the iPhone: Sandboxing, Code Auditing, and Certification. While all these are incrementally valuable, none is perfect on its own.

The problem Mac developers are facing is that the two that Apple is enforcing on the Mac App Store (Sandboxing and Code Auditing) are implemented currently to be actively bad for developers and not particularly good for users. And the method that would provide the most benefit for developers and users (Certification) isnâ€™t enforced broadly enough to be useful.

When I linked to this then, I wrote, “Letâ€™s hope Apple is listening.” Looks like they were, because Mountain Lion’s Gatekeeper is very close to what Shipley asked for.

Farhad Manjoo: Appleâ€™s Stock Price Is Still a Bargain ★

Farhad Manjoo:

Not only is Apple not peaking, it is likely not even close to reaching its potential earnings in its two biggest markets, smartphones and tablets. Indeed, I suspect that one of the reasons Appleâ€™s share price is so low is that it has been difficult, on a purely perceptual level, for investors to understand the financial opportunities the company is poised to realize. The numbers are just too big; it simply doesnâ€™t seem possible that a single company could capture such a large part of the market. But not only is it possible — it is happening. The iPhone accounts for only 9 percent of the market share in smartphones, but Apple is earning 75 percent of the profits in smartphones. Its dominance in the tablet market is even more staggering.

I think one reason why Apple’s stock price has started to rise again regards the rule of thumb that investors dislike uncertainty. Especially in broad, simple terms. Steve Jobs’s health was uncertain. Apple’s ability to thrive without Jobs was uncertain. Tim Cook’s leadership was uncertain. I think we’re getting to the point now where the market, collectively, thinks Apple is going to do just fine with Cook as CEO.

Apple Sold More iOS Devices in 2011 Than All the Macs It Sold in 28 Years ★

It’s getting harder and harder to put iOS’s success in perspective. The lesson: simplicity sells.

Update: Another thought: this fact is the definitive response to those arguments that Android is going to do to iOS what Windows did to the Mac. iOS is in uncharted territory for Apple.

Thursday, 16 Feb 2012

Macworld’s Mountain Lion Coverage ★: Hands-on coverage of pretty much everything that’s new in the developer preview. E.g., an entire article looking at Gatekeeper.
Messages Beta for Mac ★: Much like Apple did with FaceTime, the new Messages app with iMessage integration is available early as a free beta — not something you need to wait for Mountain Lion to start using.

Wednesday, 15 Feb 2012

Christa Mrgan on the Evolution of Piezo ★

I’m a sucker for these illustrated design-process stories.

There Are Now Over 100 Million iCloud Users ★

Matthew Panzarino, on Cook’s Goldman Sachs appearance:

He also announced that its syncing service iCloud now has over 100M users. Just last month, Cook said that the service had 85M users, making this a growth of 15M users in 21 days.

Maybe this just correlates with the number of new iPhones and iPads sold over the past three weeks, but even if so, it shows that Apple has been successful at getting users to sign up for iCloud. It’s not just early adopters who rushed to sign up when it debuted — it’s millions of new users every week.

The S&P 499 ★

Speaking of Apple’s effect on market indexes:

Earlier this month, Jonathan Golub, the chief U.S. equity strategy at UBS AG, caused a stir among his clients by publishing two versions of his regular quarterly earnings update: one for the companies that make up the S&P 500, and another for what he calls “S&P 500 ex-Apple.”

“In two and a half years, I haven’t got as much response as I did to that note,” Mr. Golub says.

Kind of reminds me of the “non-iPad tablet market”.

Apple, Cisco, and Dow 15000 ★

Adam Nash:

Of course, being who I am, I went home and built a spreadsheet to recalculate what would have happened if Dow Jones had decided to add Apple to the index instead of Cisco back in 2009.Â Imagine my surprise to see that the Dow be would over 2000 points higher.

In real life, the Dow closed at 12,874.04 on Feb 13, 2012.Â However, if they had added Apple instead of Cisco, the Dow Jones would be at 14,926.95.Â Thatâ€™s over 800 points higher than the all-time high of 14,164 previously set on 4/7/2008.

Can you imagine what the daily financial news of this country would be if every day the Dow Jones was hitting an all-time high?Â

Interesting to think about — but it’s really more of an argument against using the Dow as a measure of the whole market than an argument that Apple should have been included.

Transcript of Tim Cook’s Appearance at Goldman Sachs Technology Conference ★

Regarding Apple TV:

Apple doesn’t do hobbies as a general rule. We believe in focus and only working on a few things. So, with Apple TV however, despite the barriers in that market, for those of us who use it, we’ve always thought there was something there. If we kept following our intuition and kept pulling the string, we might find something that was larger. For those people that have it right now, the customer satisfaction is off the chart. We need something that could go more main-market for it to be a serious category.

No hint from Cook, though, whether he thinks Apple has figured out what that “something” could be.

Note too how Cook emphasizes the centrality of iCloud to Apple’s strategy for the coming decade.

‘Insanely Simple’ ★

Ken Segall:

Iâ€™ve written a book.

Something tells me you wonâ€™t be surprised when I tell you itâ€™s about Steve Jobs and Apple. But this book is different. Really.

Thatâ€™s becauseÂ (a) I had a unique vantage point to some pivotal events in Apple history, and (b) this book focuses on one thing alone — the core value that has driven Apple since the beginning.

I’m greatly looking forward to this.

Samsung’s Galaxy Note Is the Most Useless Phone Jonathan Geller Has Ever Used ★

Jonathan Geller:

The phone is too big. You will look stupid talking on it, people will laugh at you, and youâ€™ll be unhappy if you buy it. I really canâ€™t get around this, unfortunately, because Samsung pushed things way too far this time.

Hard to believe how much promotional effort Samsung and AT&T are putting behind this thing.

Samsung’s Super-Sized Galaxy Note ★

Abdel Ibrahim and Jon Dick:

After just days with a Galaxy Note, my forearms have never been so toned, and my apartmentâ€™s never been so bare. Is it a tablet? Is it a phone? Itâ€™s everything.

iOS Apps and the Address Book: Who Has Your Data, and How They’re Getting It ★

Dieter Bohn, The Verge:

Stated simply: any iOS app has complete access to a large amount of data stored on your iPhone, including your address book and calendar. Any iOS app can, without asking for your permission, upload all of the information stored in your address book to its servers. From there, the app developer can either use it to help find your friends, store it in perpetuity, or do any number of other things with it.

Over the course of the past day, we have been using the method explained by Arun Thampi (who discovered Path’s privacy violation) to investigate several dozen popular iOS apps. Our findings should bring both comfort and concern to any iPhone user — and to be frank the work of doing a similar investigation on Android and other platforms remains to be done.

Makes me wonder whether any apps are playing similar shenanigans on the Mac, where most apps still have unfettered access to all your data. (I say “still” because this is one of the problems that app sandboxing is meant to mitigate, but few third-party Mac apps are sandboxed yet.)

Apple: Access to Contact Data Will Require Explicit User Permission in Future Version of iOS ★

John Paczkowski:

â€œApps that collect or transmit a userâ€™s contact data without their prior permission are in violation of our guidelines,â€ Apple spokesman Tom Neumayr told AllThingsD. â€œWeâ€™re working to make this even better for our customers, and as we have done with location services, any app wishing to access contact data will require explicit user approval in a future software release.â€

I think this was inevitable.

iOS â€™86 ★

This is fun, but the font should be Geneva 9, not Chicago, and the industrial design of the phone is all wrong. Should have looked like a little Apple IIc, or maybe something like this.

Tuesday, 14 Feb 2012

AAPL $500 ★

Ajay Makan and Dan McCrum, reporting for The Financial Times:

The technology groupâ€™s success has also given a healthy glow to corporate America. Were Appleâ€™s results stripped out, Barclays Capital estimates earnings growth at S&P 500 companies that have reported fourth-quarter results would be 2.9 per cent rather than 7 per cent.

Apple: Fair Labor Association Begins Inspections of Foxconn ★

Apple PR:

Apple today announced that the Fair Labor Association will conduct special voluntary audits of Appleâ€™s final assembly suppliers, including Foxconn factories in Shenzhen and Chengdu, China, at Appleâ€™s request. A team of labor rights experts led by FLA president Auret van Heerden began the first inspections Monday morning at the facility in Shenzhen known as Foxconn City.

This is the biggest challenge facing Apple today.

Mooresville School District, a Laptop Success Story ★

Alan Schwartz, reporting for the NYT:

The districtâ€™s graduation rate was 91 percent in 2011, up from 80 percent in 2008. On state tests in reading, math and science, an average of 88 percent of students across grades and subjects met proficiency standards, compared with 73 percent three years ago. Attendance is up, dropouts are down. Mooresville ranks 100th out of 115 districts in North Carolina in terms of dollars spent per student â€” $7,415.89 a year â€” but it is now third in test scores and second in graduation rates.

WSJ: ‘Apple, Suppliers Test Tablet With Smaller Screen’ ★

Lorraine Luk and Jessica Vascellaro, reporting from Taipei for the WSJ:

Officials at some of Apple’s suppliers, who declined to be named, said the Cupertino, Calif.-based company has shown them screen designs for a new device with a screen size of around 8-inches, and said it is qualifying suppliers for it. Apple’s latest tablet, the iPad 2, comes with a 9.7-inch screen. It was launched last year.

This is not the iPad 3, which I believe will have a same-sized (9.7 inches) double resolution display. This is a different iPad, which, last I heard, Apple was only considering, not committed to bringing to market. I wouldn’t bet on it.

Monday, 13 Feb 2012

Ed Bott: Why Windows on ARM Has a Desktop ★

Ed Bott:

Why Windows Explorer? Because the new Metro style environment doesnâ€™t have a full-strength file manager.

But why not write a file manager using Metro? Same for the decision to include both the desktop and Metro versions of IE — if the desktop version of IE has certain essential features, why not just add those features to the Metro version?

I still don’t get it.

Samsung Doesn’t Think Apple Can Compete in the TV Market ★

Brian Ford hears echoes of former Palm CEO Ed Colligan in Samsung’s pooh-poohing of the potential threat of Apple TV sets.

Cancel or Allow Overload ★

Justin Williams:

When we are overwhelmed or confused, we either leave the situation or just blindly access whatever it is. Do you ever read the end user license agreement for iTunes before you click the â€œAgreeâ€ button? Probably not, because itâ€™s an overwhelming amount of tiny text. The same can be said for complex permissions and access dialogs. If you put too much in the face of the user, they will likely disregard it and say yes to get into the product itself.

Maybe the answer to the iOS address book situation is to require the user to grant explicit permission through a dialog box, but it’s not a slam-dunk decision. Every dialog box has a cost.

The Differences Between Intel and ARM Processors ★

Fun nerdy piece by John Brownlee for Cult of Mac:

Is ARM really a threat to Intel? Yes, absolutely, and especially as we transition into Appleâ€™s Post-PC world. But there is next to no chance Apple will replace Intel chips for ARM-based ones any time in the next five years. In fact, thereâ€™s a good chance the exact opposite could be true, and Intel chips will be powering our iPhones and iPads by then. Hereâ€™s why.

Sunday, 12 Feb 2012

Digital Espionage ★

Nicole Perlroth, reporting for The New York Times:

When Kenneth G. Lieberthal, a China expert at the Brookings Institution, travels to that country, he follows a routine that seems straight from a spy film.

He leaves his cellphone and laptop at home and instead brings â€œloanerâ€ devices, which he erases before he leaves the United States and wipes clean the minute he returns. In China, he disables Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, never lets his phone out of his sight and, in meetings, not only turns off his phone but also removes the battery, for fear his microphone could be turned on remotely. He connects to the Internet only through an encrypted, password-protected channel, and copies and pastes his password from a USB thumb drive. He never types in a password directly, because, he said, â€œthe Chinese are very good at installing key-logging software on your laptop.â€

Fascinating story, but with regard to his password technique: clipboard history loggers are just as easily installed as keystroke loggers, no? If your device has been compromised, there’s no safe way to enter a password.

iOS Address Book Access Should Prompt the User for Permission ★

Marco Arment:

When implementing these features, I felt like iOS had given me far too much access to Address Book without forcing a user prompt. It felt a bit dirty. Even though I was only accessing the data when a customer explicitly asked me to, I wanted to look at only what I needed to and get out of there as quickly as possible. I never even considered storing the data server-side or looking at more than I needed to.

This, apparently, is not a common implementation courtesy.

Saturday, 11 Feb 2012

Instagram Now Asks for Permission to Share Contacts ★: This is how it should be. (Couple of other nice new features in the latest update, too.)

Friday, 10 Feb 2012

Audio Hijack Pro ★

My thanks to Rogue Amoeba for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote Audio Hijack Pro, their indispensable audio recording app for the Mac. As they say, if you can hear it on your Mac, Audio Hijack Pro can record it. Skype conversations, streaming radio, or recording a note via your microphone — you name it. Audio Hijack Pro even works to capture audio from sandboxed App Store apps.

Download their free trial, then purchase from Rogue Amoeba’s store. This week only, Daring Fireball readers can save 25 percent using coupon code “DF201202”. Great app at a great discount.

A Conversation With Amy Jane Gruber ★

For your weekend enjoyment, even more podcast fun: my wife Amy is the guest on this week’s Let’s Make Mistakes.

Wow, Is That a Pen? ★

This week’s episode of The Talk Show, with topics including iPad 3 rumors, Windows 8 on ARM, LTE hardware, Google’s purportedly imminent Dropbox competitor, Super Bowl ads, and Path doing the wrong thing the wrong way.

Brought to you by Smile and Sourcebits.

Bookle ★

New app from Stairways Software — a $10 Mac e-book reader for DRM-free ePub books. Included with the app is, self-referentially, Take Control of Bookle, by Adam Engst.

No Third-Party Code on the Windows on ARM Desktop ★

Peter Bright, Ars Technica:

The built-in Windows apps — including Explorer and Internet Explorer 10 — and four Office apps — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote — would run on the desktop, but nothing else would. Third-party applications would be prohibited, and there would be no provision to port existing desktop applications to run on the ARM desktop.

This led to an immediate, if somewhat surprising, reaction across the Internet. “But what about browser plugins? Will they also be forbidden?”

The answer to that is “Yes.” Or perhaps even “Yes, of course they are, since it was stated in unequivocal terms that there would be no provision to run third-party code on the desktop. That means you, Flash.”

So maybe I was right that Windows on ARM would go Metro-only — it’s just that they’ve made an exception for a few built-in apps from Microsoft itself. Why include desktop versions of Explorer and IE, though? Why include two different versions of IE if even the desktop version doesn’t allow plugins?

Also: this seems to suggest that the Office suite is included free-of-charge with Windows on ARM. That’s a pretty bold move considering how much money Microsoft makes from Office licensing.

Leaked Download Counts for USA Today Tablet Apps ★

Todd Bishop:

The undated slide shows 260,000 downloads of the USA Today app for Kindle Fire, the Android-based tablet released by Amazon last fall.Â That is double the 130,000 cumulative downloads of the USA Today app for other Android tablets.

It still pales in comparison to the more than 2.9 million total downloads of the USA Today iPad app, but the iPad has also been around for a lot longer than the Amazon tablet.

Even the HP TouchPad has double the downloads of all Android tablets combined.

Joanna Stern Reviews the MacBook Air as a Windows 7 Laptop ★

Joanna Stern:

I could go on and on about how much better the touchpad experience is on the Air, but the big question Iâ€™ve always had is: why? Why is it that other laptop makers havenâ€™t mastered the touch experience and Apple has been able to make it work so fluidly, even with another operating system?

Because no one other than Apple gives a shit about doing the hard work to get things like this right.

Interesting note on battery life: the Air got over 6 hours of battery life running Mac OS X, but only 4 running Windows 7.

‘Can You Hear Me, Dave?’ ★

Apple’s 1999 Super Bowl ad. It’s like they made this one just for me.

Paul Thurrott Giveth Common Sense, Paul Thurrott Taketh Away ★

Not so good a piece by Paul Thurrott:

But the big takeaway here is simple. Windows on ARM, or “WOA,” as Microsoft calls it, looks like more than a credible answer to the iPad. In fact, it looks like something that will relegate the iPad to the backwater of the tablet market, much as Windows did to the Mac.

That’s simply not going to happen. Comparisons to the Mac are impossible — the iPad is now far more popular than the Mac ever was. They sold over 15 million iPads last quarter; in the old days, when the Mac-vs.-DOS/Windows war was running hot, Apple sold around 1 million Macs per quarter. I say Windows 8 should be deemed a success if it simply joins iOS as a successful tablet computing platform. It’s not too late for others to join the tablet party, but it is too late to keep the iPad out.

And they will ship with full, but touch-enabled, versions of the coming Office 15 apps, which should be a neat final nail in the coffin of those overpriced luxury items from Cupertino.

There’s a kernel of wisdom here, which is that the Office 15 apps should be the best selling point in favor of Windows 8 tablets versus the iPad, for those buying tablets for use as a secondary or even tertiary computing device in a job that’s already dependent upon Microsoft Office. When I travel, I see gobs of corporate businesspeople using iPads; with a real version of Office, many of those people may well be using Windows 8 tablets a year from now. It’s a genuinely compelling hook.

But “overpriced”? Really? If anything, the opposite remains the case: no one can match Apple on pricing for comparatively-spec’d tablets. Remember when everyone thought the iPad was going to start at $999? (Including Thurrott himself?)

Why Microsoft Shouldn’t Focus Only on Windows ★

Good piece by Paul Thurrott, arguing that “Office everywhere” might be a better strategy for Microsoft than “Windows everywhere”:

So what would an unfettered Office look like? [â€¦]

You’d also target other popular computing platforms — primarily iOS/iPad but also iOS/iPhone and Android for both smartphones and tablets. You’d make sure that Office ran as well as possible on all of these platforms, and not just a single app but as many Office apps as possible. You’d speak openly about how the computing world was changing and that for a large percentage of customers, just having an A-1 product on Windows PCs wasn’t enough.

Motorola Exec on Android Upgrade Delays: It’s the Hardware ★

Sascha Segan, PCMag:

It’s the hardware, said Christy Wyatt, senior vice president and general manager of Motorola’s Enterprise Business Unit. The issue at hand, according to Wyatt, is that writing code to support hardware other than Google’s Nexus model has proven to be a tall order for smartphone makers.

“When Google does a release of the software … they do a version of the software for whatever phone they just shipped,” she said. “The rest of the ecosystem doesn’t see it until you see it. Hardware is by far the long pole in the tent, with multiple chipsets and multiple radio bands for multiple countries. It’s a big machine to churn.”

Presumably this will change for Motorola once they’re a Google subsidiary. In the meantime though, the simple truth is that if you want Android 4.0, you’ve got to buy a new phone.

Thursday, 9 Feb 2012

Today’s Social Media Landscape Explained With Donuts ★

A little sad that Flickr doesn’t even warrant a mention.

Kodak to Stop Selling Digital Cameras ★

Dana Mattioli, reporting for the WSJ:

The decision to shutter the business, which Kodak says will save it more than $100 million a year, is the strongest symbol yet of the sea change in consumer electronics and decades of missteps that forced the former blue-chip company to seek bankruptcy protection last month.

A sad fate for a once-great company. But when not selling a product saves you $100 million a year, you know you were in the wrong business or doing business wrong.

Google Wants 2.25 Percent Royalty for Every iPhone Sold ★

Florian Mueller:

Google’s letter spans over four pages but fails to provide satisfactory answers to those burning questions. With sincere intentions, Google could have put on a page — or a page and a half — everything that other companies in the industry, and consumers using the ubiquitous standards over which Motorola is suing others, need to be reassured about. Look at Apple’s and Microsoft’s concise and crystal clear statements. Why can’t Google provide clarity like that? Because its four pages aren’t meant to improve anything. Google is basically saying that it will do exactly what Motorola is already doing now.

Apple can be a dick about patents. Microsoft can be a dick about patents. But of the three, only Google is a hypocrite about patents — against their use as a competitive weapon only until they have their own to use.

Windows on ARM to Include Traditional Desktop Interface ★

Steven Sinofsky:

Using WOA â€œout of the boxâ€ will feel just like using Windows 8 on x86/64. You will sign in the same way. You will start and launch apps the same way. You will use the new Windows Store the same way. You will have access to the intrinsic capabilities of Windows, from the new Start screen and Metro style apps and Internet Explorer, to peripherals, and if you wish, the Windows desktop with tools like Windows File Explorer and desktop Internet Explorer. [â€¦]

Some have suggested we might remove the desktop from WOA in an effort to be pure, to break from the past, or to be more simplistic or expeditious in our approach. To us, giving up something useful that has little cost to customers was a compromise that we didnâ€™t want to see in the evolution of PCs. The presence of different models is part of every platform. Whether it is to support a transition to a future programming model (such as including a virtualization or emulation solution if feasible), to support different programming models on one platform (native and web-based applications when both are popular), or to support different ways of working (command shell or GUI for different scenarios), the presence of multiple models represents a flexible solution that provides a true no-compromise experience on any platform.

Count me in as one who suggested they go Metro-only on ARM. I believe this is a grave error on Microsoft’s part; that they’re ceding the future of personal computing to Apple and the iPad by doing this.

WSJ: Google Developing Home Entertainment System ★

Amir Efrati and Ethan Smith, reporting for the WSJ:

Google Inc. is developing a home-entertainment system that streams music wirelessly throughout the home and would be marketed under the company’s own brand, according to people briefed on the company’s plans.

The effort marks a sharp shift in strategy for Google, which for the first time would design and market consumer electronic devices under the Google brand.

If Amazon can get into the hardware business, why not Google too? I have to presume that such a device would work with video, too, not just audio. Audio-only doesn’t make any sense to me.