The Brooks Review

Year: 2011

  • ‘An O.K. Decision’

    Claire Cain Miller, reporting for the New York Times, on Google CEO Larry Page’s management style:
    >“It’s much more of a style like Steve Jobs than the three-headed monster that Google was,” said a former Google executive who has spoken with current executives about the changes and spoke anonymously to preserve business relationships. “When Eric was there, you’d walk into a product meeting or a senior staff meeting, and everyone got to weigh in on every decision. Larry is much more willing to make an O.K. decision and make it now, rather than a perfect decision later.”

    I’m not a Steve Jobs expert, but I feel pretty confident saying that he didn’t make decisions that he thought were just “O.K.” — he preferred to try and make the perfect decision, even if that meant waiting. That much is pretty clear from reading just a handful of chapters in his new biography.

    So Page has decided that any decision is better than no decision — good luck with that.

  • ‘The Asus MacBook Air, Sort of’

    Marco Arment on the state of the PC industry:
    >It’s sad, really, that the state-of-the-art in the PC world is attempting to copy Apple.

    What’s more sad as that these same companies also need to be bribed by interested parties (Intel) before they even attempt to copy Apple. There’s a huge market for a well designed PC — regardless of how you feel about Windows.

  • Dave Winer: ‘I Deleted My Facebook Account’

    Dave Winer on deleting his Facebook account:
    >Bottom-line: I know from experience that it’s bad to depend on a for-profit company to give me a free service that is supposed to not feel like it’s free.

  • Mixel: The World’s First Social Art App, for iPad

    And why are we still creating apps/services that require Facebook to login? Is it that hard to create your own login system when you [claim](http://www.subtraction.com/2011/11/10/introducing-mixel) that your app is indeed, also, a social network?

    I’m not saying the app is bad or good, I’m just saying that I can’t use it. ((By my own choice of course, I could sign up for Facebook — I guess.))

  • The Problem with Siri Downtime

    The real problem with Siri is not that it (often) goes down, but rather how Siri informs you that it is down — which it does after you have already asked it to do something.

    Apple, and Siri users, certainly want the service to maintain 100% availability, but with services that rely on so many working parts — this is just an unrealistic expectation. So when Siri fails it should do so in the least intrusive way — it just so happens that’s not the way it fails right now.

    Typical scenario: Driving home and want to text my wife to let her know that I will be there in 20 minutes. Activate Siri and ask her to message my Wife. Siri comes back to say: something, something, I don’t work.

    Siri really should be smarter than this. Siri should tell me from the moment I activate it whether, or not, what I am about to do is going to work. How hard is that?

    – Activate Siri.
    – Siri checks servers.
    – Siri responds: “Sorry, I’m drunk as a skunk right now. I’ll sober up soon.”

    That’s really not that hard and offers a far less frustrating experience than the current solution of leading on the user, in hopes that — what — it will be back working by the time I am done speaking?

  • Adobe, not too Shabby

    Dan Frommer on Adobe’s end to mobile Flash:
    >Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen isn’t a magician, but he’s proving that he’s not a dummy. Today, Adobe — in theory — has a plan.

    Some good points and Frommer is right — Adobe seems to understand that they need to continue to adapt.

  • The iTunes Rental Icon

    Turns out there is a benefit to washing sidebar icons in all one color: when you color one of them it can serve as an alert. Nice touch.

  • Branding

    As you have noticed by now there has been yet another redesign for this site. ((My apologies for some of the responsive/layout issues I am having this fixed. Completely my fault.)) When I get it in my head that I hate one aspect of the site ((This go around it was the menu.)) I start playing with it, what inevitably happens is that I start changing more and more things until — well — I have a new design.

    I don’t really think this design needs explanation and I don’t really think it is all that “unique” — what is the biggest change is the lack of “branding” anywhere in the header of the site. Most blogs/sites you visit will have a logo of some sort at the top — identifying where you are — this site used to have that, but it’s now gone.

    This has nothing to do with the design of the logo, I quite like the design of the logo — it has everything to do with the design of the site. I could go into some long, really philosophical, explanation of why I dropped the logo from TBR — but that would just be a lie.

    The truth is that I dropped the logo on accident when I was designing the new site (forgot to paste back in the relevant code) and I *kept* designing without it. Then I realized it was missing and added it back in, hated it, and I removed it again — this time on purpose.

    I just like the site without a logo weighing down the top, right or wrong, it’s really that simple.

  • HP’s Meg Whitman, Still Incompetent

    Joshua Topolsky:
    >HP CEO Meg Whitman just told a room full of Palm and HP employees that the company doesn’t yet know what to do with webOS.

    She needs more time to analyze all of this, after all it’s not like she has been on the board and able to analyze this while Apotheker was CEO. ((Actually she was on the board.))

  • Adobe Kills Mobile Flash Player

    Danny Winokur, November 2011:

    >However, HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms.

    and then:

    >We will no longer continue to develop Flash Player in the browser to work with new mobile device configurations (chipset, browser, OS version, etc.) following the upcoming release of Flash Player 11.1 for Android and BlackBerry PlayBook.

    [Steve Jobs](http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/), April 2010:

    >New open standards created in the mobile era, such as HTML5, will win on mobile devices (and PCs too). Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

  • More Consumer Reports Madness

    Marco Arment on the way *Consumer Reports* graded the iPhone:

    >They also say the iPhone has “one of the best cameras we’ve seen on a phone”, but that wasn’t enough to earn the “excellent” dot-circle rating.

    Marco does a great job breaking this down. At the end of the day I can’t help but wonder if *Consumer Reports* just knows that rating the iPhone well will result in less traffic to their, erm, Reports — thus they try to be *more* “objective”.

  • The Mac Experience and the Mac Pro Experience

    There has been a lot of talk about the “future” of the Mac Pro — Apple’s beefiest Mac. I owned the first version of the Mac Pro, when Apple made the transition to Intel chipsets and I loved that computer. Now — as I think about my computing setup and where the different systems sit — I can’t help but think that the Mac Pro offers a decidedly un-Mac-like experience for users.

    Before you start emailing me, let me explain how I see the “Mac experience”, because only one half of that experience is software driven.

    ### The Mac Experience

    Here’s how I see the current Mac experience from the non-software half:

    – As few wires as possible.
    – Sits on your desk, because it is gorgeous looking.
    – Quiet.
    – Truly designed to not be touched by the user. (Caveats have been made for RAM access and the like, but for the most part these are “sealed” systems.)
    – As small as possible.

    There are surely more things that make up the Mac experience from a hardware perspective, but these offer us a good, simple, starting point.

    ### The Mac Pro Experience

    If you go through the above list of attributes you will notice that by and in large the Mac Pro goes against most of them.

    – It begs for more wires to make use of the vast amount of ports.
    – While gorgeously designed, no one in their right mind is putting it on top of their desk — it’s huge.
    – Depending on what you are doing it can sound like a sedate ceiling fan or a 747 taking off.
    – The entire side panel is easily — easily — removed allowing the user access to most all inner components of the machine. It was designed to be expanded upon from the hard drives and RAM to the PCI slots.
    – It may well be as small as it can be, but it still ain’t small.

    All of this is really the most undesirable part of Mac Pro ownership to me. I never could play video games on it, because the sound drowned out the TV in the next room — with the door closed. There was always a mess of cords surrounding it. I was always on the hunt for more RAM to add, swapping hard drives and various other things that I never think twice about with my MacBook Air.

    In reading the new Steve Jobs biography I can’t help but think that the Mac Pro is decidedly the computer that he likes the very least. I know he used/had one, but that doesn’t mean that he did so because it was his favorite machine — given an unlimited budget, I’d have five.

    As I think about everything that Apple stands for with its design and goals, I can’t help but suspect that the MacBook Air is the epitome of the Mac experience as Apple sees it. Small, quick, sleek, low-price, sealed.

    The MacBook Air and the Mac Pro are polar opposites: one a marvel of engineering — the other a marvel of brute strength.

    I don’t think the Mac Pro is going anywhere, but I also don’t think it is something that Jony Ive’s team has spent much time thinking about.

  • Quote of the Day: @Pinboard

    “I can’t believe Groupon’s stock ticker symbol isn’t PNZI”

  • The Quiet Place

    This is the first thing I have added to my ‘Morning’ bookmarks folder in at least a year.

  • Apple Store App Adds in-Store Pickup, Accessory Purchase

    Dan Moren on Apple’s updated iOS app:
    >Using your iPhone 4 or iPhone 4S, you can scan the barcode on a product, which will provide you with information about it (specs, ratings, reviews, etc.), and then log in with your Apple ID and pay for it using the same credit card that’s linked to your iTunes account. After that, you can take your item and walk right out of the store. Receipts for items you’ve purchased via EasyPay are available under the app’s More tab, just in case the security guard isn’t convinced.

    It’s a pretty clever solution, but I have to wonder the implications on how easy it is to walk out of the store — what if I want to buy more than one accessory, can I do that, and if so what if I need a bag? I’ll check this out over the weekend, but for now I think this can only help to alleviate some of the congestion at Apple stores.

  • Consumer Reports Recommends the iPhone 4S… Kinda

    Mike Gikas, presumably picking words at random:
    >Other phones that topped the iPhone 4S include the LG Thrill ($100 on AT&T), which has the ability to capture stills and videos in 3D […]

    If only I had a phone that was completely shit, but allowed me to capture 3D video — life would be complete…

  • How Good Is the iPhone 4S Camera’s IR Filter?

    Preston Scott on why the iPhone 4S camera looks less purple than the iPhone 4 camera:
    >When IR light is allowed to pass through to the sensor, the IR light contaminates the channels (mostly the red channel) with information that was not visible in the original scene. The result is an image with a color cast.

    Great job explaining this — I had no idea the new IR filter was the reason for the more accurate colors in the 4S camera.

  • How Does the iPhone 4S Measure-Up Against All Other iPhone Models in Low Light Shooting?

    A great comparison of all iPhones in low-light situations. Look at how much better the 4S camera is over just the iPhone 4. Really impressive improvements.

  • Quote of the Day: Apple Inc.

    “Apple denies that its correct name is Apple, Inc. The correct name of Respondent is Apple Inc.”

  • ‘The Most Impressive Thing About the Nook Tablet Is That It Exists’

    Dan Frommer:
    >This isn’t a company with a strong electronics background like Apple or Sony, or an Internet leader like Amazon or Google, or even anything close. This is a company that has spent most of its recent history selling paper books and magazines, cat calendars, overpriced CDs, and Starbucks coffee.

    Good point.