The Brooks Review

Category: Articles

  • Mine

    I wasn’t quite sure what Ben was thinking when he asked me to take over his site for a week. Surely he must know I’m not a [popular blogger][1] like himself. I don’t even carry a [pocket knife][2].

    While I don’t get why Ben [handed the keys over to me][3], I’m glad he did. We’re going to have a lot of fun this week. Heck, maybe we’ll even [make this site responsive][4] while the owner’s away.

    So get ready, kids. For the next 6 days, you are all mine.

    [1]: https://brooksreview.net/2012/12/money/
    [2]: https://brooksreview.net/2012/10/pocket-knife/
    [3]: https://brooksreview.net/2013/02/tired-ben/
    [4]: https://brooksreview.net/2011/10/rrw-design/

  • Mentally Fatigued

    I’m not particularly stressed ((Although this door I have been staining for a week is really pissing me off.)), I’m not particularly overwhelmed. I’m not even mad, but for the past week I have just been feeling bored.

    Bored of everything I see on App.net, RSS, and other blogs. There’s a lot going on, but nothing that I give a rat’s ass about. Oh well, I get this way every so often, but this time it’s different.

    This time I feel a bit lost. Unmotivated even. I keep trying to find something to write about, something new, but I come up blank, or with things that I question the value of.

    So I’m taking a break.

    Not a long break, mind you, just a week to step back and rest my mind — I think my mind is just tired.

    While I’m out, Mr. [Pat Dryburgh](http://patdryburgh.com) is going to be given the task of keeping you entertained.

    Take it away Pat.

  • Horizon Calendar

    *Disclaimer: I was on the beta program for Horizon and given a free copy of the app to review before the final version launched. Do what you want with that knowledge.*

    I’ve been [outspoken about calendars](https://duckduckgo.com/?sites=brooksreview.net&k8=%23444444&k8=%23333333&k9=%23D51920&kt=h&k3=brooksreview&kq=n&k4=-1&q=Calendar), which has prompted a lot of discussion with developers about making better calendar apps. Recently I was asked to try a new calendar app for iPhone called Horizon.

    [Horizon Calendar](http://horizonapp.me) — available today on the App Store — was created with the simple goal of showing calendar events alongside the weather in a single view.

    The main view in Horizon.

    I was skeptical about the app when Horizon’s developer first contacted me. And after initial use I thought: “It’s *just* Agenda with Weather data”.

    Then I quickly forgot about Horizon and moved on, which was unfair. I didn’t understand the vision of the app. Horizon is more than just ideas from Agenda mixed with weather data — it’s your day and your week.

    I admit that sounds obvious, and a little silly, but consider how I plan my week:

    1. On Sunday I try to review the weather for the week in Check the Weather, then review my tasks for the week in OmniFocus, and finally my appointments for the week in Fantastical: Three apps.
    2. Each morning I check my appointments for the day, and then the weather to make sure I’m dressed appropriately: Two apps. (Tasks are reviewed on my Mac at work once the week starts.)

    If Horizon could show me the OmniFocus tasks for the day, I’d have a fantastic dashboard overview of my day and week, without needing those other apps.

    Before I continue down that rabbit hole, I want to talk briefly about Horizon itself:

    – The icon is appropriate for the app’s name but feels like neither a weather app or calendar. I don’t get it.
    – The design is great. I love the font choices, text sizing, spacing, and color scheme.
    – It has an automatic ‘night mode’ — a nice touch that I’d love to see in more apps.
    – It’s fast. It installs very quickly and the entire interface is snappy. Normally I wouldn’t notice it, but for some reason the responsiveness stands out in this app.
    – It shows location-based weather information, but it’s not always obvious what location the weather refers to. Horizon’s developer tells me it uses your current location by default and your event’s location field if it contains an address, city, GPS coordinate, or zip code. Luckily the app helps you by auto completing addresses as you type them.

    So that’s Horizon in a nutshell: fast and pretty.

    Now back to the utility aspects of the app: It’s like my mom. I mean that in a good way.

    As a kid my mom would give me a rundown of the day when I was getting ready for school:

    – “Remember you have knife lessons after school today”
    – “Don’t forget to take in your new search engine code for show and tell”
    – “It’s going to be cold and rainy, so bring a jacket”

    Horizon gives me most of that information. It tells me what I have going on and it gives me the weather highlights. The only thing missing is OmniFocus task data to tell me what I’m actually *doing* during the day.

    I don’t know how practical Horizon is for people that have a lot of meetings and are always indoors in a cubicle. Fantastical or Agenda are probably better as stand alone calendars. But for a high-level overview of your week or day this app is really intriguing to me.

    Horizon seems like it could be great while traveling: Imagine landing in an unfamiliar city on business, not knowing the local weather conditions, and needing help to be prepared and stay on track. That seems like a great fit for Horizon.

    Horizon won’t replace my weather apps, or Fantastical, but I don’t think it needs to in order to be useful. I’m currently using Horizon when I need an overview of my life and using Fantastical as a quick-entry calendar app. It will be interesting to see if that workflow sticks and even more interesting if the location-event-specific weather data becomes less cumbersome to use.

    Horizon is `$2.99` [on the App Store](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/horizon-calendar/id593206559?ls=1&mt=8).

  • Time for a Forward Thinking CMS

    There is no shortage of content management systems (CMS) on the web: WordPress, MovableType, Kirby, Statamic, Drupal, Squarespace, Django, Expression Engine, and on and on. No shortage. Most of the current CMSs have begun to leverage Dropbox and respond to one of the loudest complaints about WordPress — its lack of caching — by making “static” or “baked” sites.

    That’s all well and fine, but isn’t it time someone built a CMS that actually works for users? I like WordPress a lot, that’s what I use here, but it’s about as user friendly as Windows, which is certainly better than MS-DOS, but falls a long way short of OS X.

    What *I* want is the iOS equivalent of a CMS: Massive power and expandability presented through a simplified, easy to understand interface.

    Whenever I look at a CMS I usually see one of two use-cases: writing/blogging, or business websites. I find this absurd.

    Any type of blog with an ad, or other monetization, is a business website. A business website with a blog, or any other written content, is a writing site. Both types of site need to sell goods — digital or otherwise — out of the box. Otherwise why bother?

    So in my mind, the ideal CMS does all of this, out of the box:

    – Pages
    – Feedback forms
    – Liveblogging
    – Blogging (meaning a series of posts shown in chronological order, with an archive)
    – Link posts
    – Articles
    – Comments & moderation
    – Integration with a payment processor for credit cards
    – Ability to sell ad spots within the site’s theme, see the number of slots sold, for which date, and for how much.
    – Ability to create and sell memberships.
    – Ability for a paywall.
    – Allow the sale of digital goods, like software, and physical goods like books and t-shirts.
    – Able to handle hundreds of thousands of hits per day, out of the box, on the cheapest hosting available.
    – Require no knowledge of specialist software to install.
    – Installable in less than 15 minutes.
    – Be fully customizable: all the code.
    – Be customizable in a WYSIWYG editor like Squarespace.
    – Have a marketplace to buy themes and add-ons that have been vetted like Apple vets iOS apps.
    – Cost users money to use.
    – Include analytics out of the box that help users understand what is and isn’t actually working — this goes beyond numbers of visitors.

    You may have noticed that I didn’t talk about the design or writing interfaces — those are not as important as how the system actually works. I can write in a text editor and copy and paste — I can’t easily setup half the stuff I listed above.

    ## The Thinking

    This idea isn’t fully formed. This list wouldn’t make a feature-complete CMS, however, the rationale for such a CMS *is* clear: give people the ability to monetize their site out of the box.

    Give me an easy way to sell things via my site: It doesn’t matter whether that’s content accessed behind a paywall, or a t-shirt.

    Almost every existing CMS only focuses on one aspect of running a site. Use Shopify if you want to sell things, and WordPress if you want to write. Use Squarespace if you want the easiest and prettiest solution to blogging. We don’t have a CMS that makes writing your business, and to reiterate my previous point, most of business *is* writing.

    Such a CMS may be massively complex under the hood, but it needs to be easy to use, like iOS. A user should be able to link a credit card processor to their bank account without leaving the site and add in the SSL certificate they need without leaving the admin panel.

    This should, and can, be easy to do — so where is it?

  • Obomba

    [A new white paper has been released by NBC detailing how, why, and when Obama can kill an American overseas](http://openchannel.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/02/04/16843014-exclusive-justice-department-memo-reveals-legal-case-for-drone-strikes-on-americans?lite):

    >A confidential Justice Department memo concludes that the U.S. government can order the killing of American citizens if they are believed to be “senior operational leaders” of al-Qaida or “an associated force” — even if there is no intelligence indicating they are engaged in an active plot to attack the U.S.

    So much for the [presumption of innocence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presumption_of_innocence). There’s a philosophical debate that needs to be had here in the U.S. over the clear-conscious nature with which we willfully break U.S. laws and moral values in the pursuit of eradicating terrorism against our country and our allies. Because when a country decides they can fly a drone over a foreign country and kill accused at will… Well things get murky when you do that.

    [via Kottke]

  • Some PDF Tips

    Amazingly the Real Estate industry has done well in shifting from paper files filling room after room, to PDFs filling our inbox. I’ve been using PDFs as paper replacements for a very long time and it still amazes me how quirky the system can be.

    Dan Moren details a huge problem that Mac users [will encounter when they save a filled out PDF form from Preview](http://www.macworld.com/article/2027181/solving-the-mystery-of-the-empty-pdf-form.html). Essentially you need to “reprint” that PDF so that the fields stay filled when sending to Windows users, otherwise they see no information.

    I personally run into that problem all the time. I’ve simplified my issues a bit by utilizing two tools:

    – Keyboard Maestro
    – [PDFpenPro](http://www.smilesoftware.com/PDFpen/index.html)

    The free way to speed up “flattening” PDF files, so that Windows users can see the text you add, is to use [this tip from David Sparks](http://macsparky.com/blog/2008/3/19/keyboard-shortcut-for-save-as-pdf-in-os-x.html). Sparks walks you through adding a shortcut to your Mac so that you can simply hit CMD+P twice and get straight to the save printed PDF dialog. I extended that idea (and I think stole it from Patrick Rhone) by adding a new Keyboard Maestro macro.

    The macro I created simply tells the system to press `CMD+P` twice, whenever I type the keyboard shortcut `OPT+CMD+P`. It doesn’t ever feel like a smooth solution, but it works very well.

    There is another tool you can use: PDFpen or PDFpenPro. Both from Smile Software are great and robust replacements for Preview. What I like is that, as best I can tell, PDFpenPro flattens the information added to a PDF when you save it, yet keeps that information editable inside of PDFpenPro. This saves a step over Preview when sending to Windows users.

    If you work with PDF files on your iOS device, PDFpen is a must have. Inside the iOS app there is an email file option — when clicked PDFpen asks if you want to send the file as an Annotated PDF, or a Printed PDF — the latter of which is the rasterized version that you want for sending to Windows users.

    I still use Preview a lot on my Mac, but PDFpenPro is what I use when I need to fill out a form. Oh and PDFpenPro does a great job OCR-ing any PDf file you open.

  • The Dell Debacle

    By now you’ve [heard that Dell is going private](http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2013/02/05/dell-sets-23-8-billion-deal-to-go-private/), and is no longer a publicly traded company. [Michael Dell’s infamous quote](http://news.cnet.com/2100-1001-203937.html) has been slung all around the web as a [Nelson-esque](http://www.myinstants.com/instant/the-simpsons-nelsons-ha-ha/) “ha-ha” moment. Much of what I have read has been fairly wrong-headed, because most assume this is an admission of failure, but it’s not.

    In fact, IPO-ing, or being public traded, is not a hallmark of success — it just so happens that in this tech-crazed world we often view a company *only* as successful when they actually IPO. There are thousands and thousands of companies that are [exceedingly successful and yet still private](http://www.forbes.com/lists/2011/21/private-companies-11_land.html). To name a few: Enterprise Rent-a-Car, SC Johnson & Son, Hilton Worldwide, and Levi Strauss & Co. I don’t think you could accurately point at any of those companies and say they are a failure because they are not public.

    You take a company public if you need a huge cash influx to grow — that’s why Facebook went public, and likely why Dell went public. If you want to expand, and expanding in your business costs millions (or billions) which won’t be recouped for years, then an IPO is one of your only options. So Dell going private isn’t a sign of failure, it’s a sign of change.

    [Ashlee Vance explains why Dell went private very well](http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-02-05/why-michael-dell-really-had-to-take-dell-private) (via [John Gruber](http://daringfireball.net/linked/2013/02/05/dell)):

    >The worst-case scenario for Michael Dell would have occurred if an activist shareholder had gotten into the mix. Dell would have faced the prospect of being kicked out of the company that bears his name. I’m certain this is why Dell went private. Dell, Silver Lake, and Microsoft get a company that pumps out enough cash to keep all parties happy, while Michael Dell shields himself from being berated by analysts, investors, and the media. Best of all, he gets to keep his company.

    I think this explains the situation pretty well. Dell was facing a group of investors that didn’t believe in the path he was steering the company too, and even though the company is still making money, the stock was dropping. We see this type of investor uncertainty with investors of Apple, Inc., because despite record sales, and profits, Apple stock drops in price.

    [To that point, Watts Martin shares a sentiment that I very much echo](http://tracks.ranea.org/post/42369043060/good-for-dell-maybe):

    >If I ran a company I’d try to avoid taking it public as long as possible. Public companies are expected to increase profits every quarter or face dire punishment, and eventually this all but requires cutting corners—and once you start doing that, it’s all but impossible to stop.

    Now, taking a company private doesn’t mean you have no one to answer to, but it does mean that [idiot “analysts”](https://brooksreview.net/2013/01/anal-yst/) are not muddying the water. Effectively Dell can now take more risks and make bolder moves to try and reposition the company, or they can do nothing and bleed the company dry — both of which would not have been possible if the company is publicly traded. For further proof of this, look no further than HP and their revolving door of CEOs.

    [Oh and speaking of HP, this is one hell of a cold statement from them on the situation](http://www.marketwatch.com/story/hp-issues-statement-on-dells-leveraged-buyout-plan-2013-02-05) (via [Jim Dalrymple](http://www.loopinsight.com/2013/02/05/hp-picks-at-dells-bones/)):

    >Dell has a very tough road ahead. The company faces an extended period of uncertainty and transition that will not be good for its customers. And with a significant debt load, Dell’s ability to invest in new products and services will be extremely limited. Leveraged buyouts tend to leave existing customers and innovation at the curb. We believe Dell’s customers will now be eager to explore alternatives, and HP plans to take full advantage of that opportunity

    All in all, this move is a smart one. It’s not an admission of failure, it’s actually a good sign. It shows that Dell knows he needs to do something that he would get fired for doing if he stayed a publicly traded company — that should encourage any PC user.

    ***

    While we are at it, on the topic of Microsoft’s investment pissing off other PC Windows OEM vendors, I call bullshit. (Keep in mind I own like 14 shares of Microsoft, BIAS!)

    What’s HP, Lenovo, Acer, and others to do if they are mad at Microsoft?

    Use…Ubuntu?

    There are only two commercially viable PC operating systems to sell to people: Mac and Windows. Ubuntu is great, but selling it in place of Windows is a ticket to losing billions. It’s been tried before on select systems, and guess what, commercial failure. As Linux geeks say (yearly), next year will be the year of Linux.

    So ignore all the talk about backlash towards Microsoft for investing — if anything Microsoft can spin it by saying they are helping an OEM partner just like they would help any other OEM partner.

  • ‘The Missing Workflow’

    In his recent Monday Note [Jean-Louis Gassée laments about the things that are far too cumbersome to do on an iPad](http://www.mondaynote.com/2013/02/03/ipad-pro-the-missing-workflow/):

    >Once I start writing, I want to look through the research material I’ve compiled. On a Mac, I simply open an Evernote window, side-by-side with my Pages document: select, drag, drop. I take some partial screenshots, annotate graphs (such as the iPad Pro prices above), convert images to the .png format used to put the Monday Note on the Web…
    >On the iPad, these tasks are complicated and cumbersome.

    As I always say, I wish I did more writing on my iPad, but the fact is that Gassée’s problem seems to be one of an unwillingness to dive into the App Store more than a problem that is a true limitation of the iPad. As best as I can tell here are Gassée’s problems/issues:

    1. No easy way to save pages to Evernote
    2. He can’t view research material side by side with his writing app.
    3. Adding a link is difficult.
    4. He cannot take partial screenshots.
    5. He knows of no way to add annotations to a screenshot. (Really?!?)

    The points that Gassée is making are all valid — it is *more* difficult to do all of these tasks on the iPad, but not nearly as difficult as Gassée makes them out to be.

    As for item 1, well just install the Evernote bookmarklet and you should be all set — not sure what the issue is here. Yes, bookmarklet’s are hard to install in iOS, but you can install it on your Mac and sync it over.

    Spend just a few moments browsing the App Store and you might come across [Writing Kit](http://getwritingkit.com). In one app Gassée can take care of items 2 and 3 — well mostly 2. Still that’s just one app. Enter any number of captioning and photo editing apps that take no longer than 5 seconds to find browsing the store and you [take care of 4 and 5](https://itunes.apple.com/app/skitch-for-ipad/id490505997?ls=1&mt=8).

    If the argument is simply *more* cumbersome and not impossible, then yes at times it is more cumbersome on the iPad — but my text editor of choice on the Mac doesn’t have a link button living above the top row of keys like most iOS editors do on the software keyboard.

    Because Gassée can actually do what he thinks he can’t do on the iPad, the question becomes: is the iPad truly more cumbersome to use?

    *Some* things are harder to do on the iPad, while others *are* easier — that I think we can all agree on. What I find interesting is that tasks often are at the same level of “cumbersome”. The reason the iPad can seem more cumbersome is that there is an ideological shift required by your brain when you move from OS X to iOS. If you can accept this ideological shift between the two then you can begin to realize that things aren’t necessarily harder, they are just different.

    Ask a computer user, that grew up only using the iPad, five years from now which is more cumbersome, Mac or iPad, and I think the iPad will be handily winning that competition.

    Gassée, though, is arguing that a Pro model is needed for business use, but I don’t think a Pro model is needed as much as a shift in the way IT departments work is needed. Instead of saying that all files live in this non-iPad accessible thing: the more user friendly shift is not to make the iPad more complex, but instead to make the systems *less* complex.

    Because if you ask me the better solution is always the solution that keeps things simple for users.

  • ‘We Should Only Work 25 Hours a Week’

    [Niels Ebdrup reporting on a new theory about working hours](http://sciencenordic.com/we-should-only-work-25-hours-week-argues-professor):

    >“We’re getting older and older here in Denmark. Kids who are ten years old today should be able to work until the age of 80. In return, they won’t need to work more than 25 hours per week when they become adults,” says Professor James W. Vaupel, who heads a new research centre at the University of Southern Denmark, which opened earlier this week.

    It’s an interesting theory: working less when we are younger, and thus more able to do stuff, with trade off being that we work well past the 60/70 age mark that has defined retirees for most of our life times. I fully agree with the sentiment and the idea because it sounds fantastic.

    The ‘but’ comes into play with paying employees. How, as a society, do we afford this? Do we pay two people half a normal salary to do one job? Do we pay one person a full salary to do half as much work?

    Effectively we are cutting weekly working hours almost in half with this idea. So half the amount of work will be getting done (not exactly, but you get the point). In order for this to work in society at large one of two things must happen:

    1. Costs of living have to be substantially reduced for every person so that living off of a 25 hour salary is possible; or
    2. Salaries must be maintained, where a 40 hour work week pay is the same as a 25 hour work week pay.

    The thought of being able to accomplish either of those things sounds insurmountable to me.

  • BlackBerry 10

    RIM killed itself and reemerged as BlackBerry — good luck saving the company by changing your name… Anyways, the BlackBerry 10 OS is out on the new Z10. The hardware looks nice, the OS looks nice. Keyword being “nice”.

    Khoi Vinh upon [seeing the interface](http://www.subtraction.com/2013/01/30/blackberry-10s-user-interface) and its me-too attitude:

    >In fact, they demonstrate a startling lack of character, almost a willful desire to be mistaken for any other random operating system.

    To my eye BB10 looks like a bad clone of Android, which in itself is an OS that I view as a decent-but-getting-better clone of iOS. That’s to say: BB10 is a copy of a copy. ((And the Z10 is a copy of Android’s copy of the iPhone 5. [Man am I going to get email.]))

    BGR has a review up of the device and the OS, [here](http://bgr.com/2013/01/30/blackberry-z10-review-306613/). I didn’t read much of the review, I did look at the photos, but the section I read was on the keyboard.

    Jonathan S. Geller thinks the BB10 keyboard is “borderline great”. I’m not sure why, but he does mention the predictive text method:

    >For example, if I wanted to type “Good to meet you,” I would type the word good, and then on the keyboard over the letter T would be the word “to.” You can slide your finger up on the letter to accept a predicted word, so sliding up on the letter T would have entered good “to.” Then on the letter M the word “meet” is positioned above it, so sliding up would accept that, and finally on the letter Y would be the word “you.” Slide up again and you’ve typed a sentence with one hand by only really typing one word.

    That sounds like a mess and his photo of that “feature” in action shows just how messy it is to learn (more on this is bit).

    Predictive text on mobile devices is huge. Android shows the text directly above the keyboard — something I have always found cumbersome to use — while iOS shows predictive text below the word as you type (you just hit space to accept it). The trade offs of those two methods are:

    – On Android it’s less fluid to select a predicted word, but you get a few options.
    – On iOS you only get one option at a time to select, but it’s fluid to select that option.

    There’s good and bad to both systems. On BB10 the words aren’t even going to appear in the same spot each time. So instead of just knowing where to look (at the words you type on iOS, and at the top of keyboard on Android), you have to look all around the keyboard.

    I haven’t used it, so I can’t say for sure, but this sounds like a clusterfuck. It’s a predictive text function that looks good in demos, but long-term I don’t think it will be as good as Android or iOS. I certainly want to try it, but I’m not holding my breath.

    The hitch with the BB10 system is the slide motion to the word. If you just tapped the word, that’d be neat, as it sits above the next letter you naturally would go to for the word, but having to pause your typing to slide up seems cumbersome at best. Now in the example from BGR, it sounds clever to only tap out one word and then complete the rest of the sentence with gestures, but I’m not sure that is practical in a day-to-day situation.

    For example, on my iPhone, I can tap out a text message with 80% accuracy without looking. That’s not something you could do with BB10 because you would have to find the letter, stop and slide, then go to the next — the only reason I am that accurate on iOS is because of the predictive text fluidity. Don’t discount how important the software keyboard is — it’s a huge part of the OS.

    Beyond that I haven’t much else to say until I actually play with a Z10. Speaking of that, are there BlackBerry stores somewhere?

  • ‘Facebook Isn’t Worth It’

    [Richie Siegel writing about the value of Facebook, in the excellently designed, and new to me, Seersucker](http://seersuckermag.com/opinion/read/facebook-isnt-giving-back-what-we-put-in): ((PS: Where the fuck are the RSS feeds?))

    >The result of weak ties and the broadcast economy is that Facebook is also chipping away at the concept of effort. The energy I have to exert to like something and be in the know is at a record low. At the most I have to type a bit to learn something. Even easier sometimes I only have to click. And easier than that, sometimes I can just look because everything I could ever want to know is right in front of me, constantly updating. This all contributes to the increase in superficial satisfaction and knowledge and is altering the fundamentals of relationships.

    Take the time to read Siegel’s full article as it is very astute. The problem isn’t just with Facebook, lest you assume I am just piling on to my hatred of the service, no this problem is endemic of all social networks (those that you find online at least). I often refer to Facebook as the ultimate stalking tool, not just because of the creepiness level, but because of the type of engagement.

    You can learn a lot *about* someone from stalking them (I assume, never having done it, well, other than on Facebook), but you don’t actually end up *knowing* the person. So while you may be able to discern what that person likes to eat, you won’t understand why that person likes to eat those things. (Maybe they are nostalgic for someone who has passed, maybe they can’t cook.)

    I see and hear this all the time from those around me on Facebook — this distance from what you see on Facebook, to the reality of that persons world. The conversation usually goes like this:

    Person A: “I just got a new job, it’s great.”
    Person B: “Oh yeah, I saw you post about that on Facebook.”

    Usually this is where the conversation hits a snag. Person A can’t tell if Person B knows the reasoning why, but doesn’t want to assume too much. Often I see conversations fizzle out at this point, or take an interesting turn:

    Person A: “Yeah, I just couldn’t stand the old job.”
    Person B: “I thought you were fired?”
    Person A: “No, I was harassed.”
    Person B: “Woah, that wasn’t on Facebook.”

    Well, no shit.

  • ‘Apple Has a Porn Problem, and It’s About to Get Worse’

    [Joshua Topolsky in a post on *The Verge* worth reading](http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/27/3922500/apple-has-a-porn-problem-and-its-about-to-get-worse):

    >A cursory search of #porn and related hashtags within the Twitter iOS app unearths a cornucopia of adult material, yet Apple has taken no action in the case of that app. The existence of pornography on Twitter and in similar apps is also not a recent occurrence — Twitter in particular has long been used for such sharing. Yet Apple has made much out of its tight partnership with Twitter, adding native Twitter functionality into iOS as part of a recent update to the software.

    >The situation draws even more attention to the vague and sometimes confusing rules of Apple’s App Store guidelines, and more clearly showcases the sporadic and often unusual criteria the iPhone-maker uses to decide the fates of applications

    I did the `#porn` search on Vine as well, don’t do that. ((Why? Lots of penises for one.)) I personally don’t think Apple should restrict pornography on the App Store, just allow users to set controls to block their kids from it if they so please, but a rule is a rule. I don’t like double standards — which is what Apple has here — and Apple needs to start enforcing rules equally.

    There’s a fine line between pornography and art. One could argue that 500px’s app (banned from the App Store for pornography) was art and should be allowed the same as Flickr is allowed. This opens up the real problem that I see: is Apple’s policy anti-nudity, or anti-pornography?

    From what I can tell, 500px is guilty of nudity, but not pornography. Whereas Vine is truly guilty of pornography, not just nudity (so too is Twitter, and all associated apps — have you *seen* how many porn stars are on Twitter posting pics and videos?).

    This is going to be a tough call for Apple to make — which is why the rules are so odd right now — there is no easy call to make. Allowing pornography of any form is bound to make the devices viewed as less family friendly, but unequal enforcement of the rules will hurt the developer community.

    If the rule becomes, flat out, no pornography. How do we reconcile apps like Instapaper, Pocket, Chrome, email, web browsers, that all users to easily seek out those types of content? I think we now know why the rules are so, erm, willy-nilly.

  • The Holy Grail

    I applaud Yahoo for hiring Marissa Mayer as CEO, but it [sounds like she has fallen into a futile search for the holy grail on the web](http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-25/yahoo-s-mayer-sees-future-in-personalized-mobile-web.html):

    >“There is a way that you can introduce advertising such that it’s not intrusive, it actually adds value to the end user, and it actually enhances the experience,” Mayer said. “And that’s what we need to work on.”

    I wish her the best of luck on the pursuit, but it seems like a fools pursuit to me. An ad is an ad. There are good ads, and there are bad ads. The problem is that there exists only a precious few companies willing to take the time and money to create the good ads.

    It’s not a problem of placement, or display, it’s a content problem. Until we reach such time that bad ads no longer work, advertisers will have little motivation to go out and create a truly good ad. Mayer can try to force this, but ultimately she still will need bad ads to pay the bills.

    I’d offer up iAds of proof of this. You don’t see many, but when you do they are much better than most other ads on iOS. That said, Apple seems to be having a tough time filling the spots.

    Apple is having a tough time with it.

    Facebook and Google don’t care enough to even bother. So can Mayer succeed where Apple has seemingly failed?

    Yes, she can, but it won’t be easy or fast. I also wonder how lucrative it will be given that you are asking for more money to be spent making better ads, so will advertisers really be willing to pay the same high rates for placement? I’m skeptical.

  • ‘Who is She?’

    I was born and raised in Tacoma, WA — it’s a small city, and at times a not very great city, but it is home. As a kid my parents took me along to the mall — which wasn’t touring the mall — truly we only went to Nordstrom and [Excalibur](http://www.excaliburcutlery.com) (so I could look at the knives). The fondest memory I have of Nordstrom is the little guy who sat and played the piano while we shopped, tired, and I waited for my parents to be finished.

    I would say that he played the piano at Nordstrom my entire life, but that would be a lie. In truth, Juan Perez, played the piano at the Tacoma Mall Nordstrom for 27 years of my 30 year life. [This past Sunday (1.27.13) he was let go](http://www.thenewstribune.com/2013/01/27/v-printerfriendly/2452005/nordstrom-pianist-ends-27-year.html):

    >Where once Nordstrom shoppers in many stores shopped to the music played by a live pianist, today only 30 of the stores nationwide provide such upscale ambiance. Nordstrom spokeswoman Tara Darrow said the Tacoma Mall outlet was the last such store in Washington.

    Until today I never knew his name. Until today I never knew the incredible story behind the man that played Sinatra while I shopped. Today I am amazed by Perez.

    On his audition:

    >They were dressed, he said, as if they had shopped at Nordstrom. He was not. They were carrying sheet music. Perez did not, and does not, read notes. He plays by ear.

    >“I was the first one to play,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting they would hire me, and I was dressed in a regular shirt. I started playing and playing as the store opened up. I didn’t even have an application.”

    He had the job by the time he got home. Amazing.

    This little tidbit is priceless:

    >TV star Linda Evans once walked up to have a word. “She came to me but I didn’t know who she was. When she left the ladies from cosmetics came up to me and asked, ‘What did Linda Evans tell you?’ I asked, ‘Who is she?’ ”

    Through his job at Nordstrom, Perez and his wife, have put 9 of their 10 kids through college, while the last is finishing high school at a private school. His story is amazing, and worth a moment of your time if you enjoy people who have mastered their craft.

    ***

    It’s sad to think that Nordstrom believes they are better off with recorded music blasting the same ten songs all day long. It’s sad to think that shoppers prefer that to the melodic tones of Sinatra being played live while they shop. Perez speaks a lot about changing the mood of the store based on the songs he chooses, something that he can do on the fly as he observes a need. Perez talks of people starting to dance has he plays — now Nordstrom will go the way of Old Navy, with the same boring music played too loudly to think, or shop, let alone dance.

    Wouldn’t it be great if Apple stole these fantastic pianists from Nordstrom, stuck them in Apple Stores around the world. The music could be played on a keyboard hooked to an iPad, the notes shown live above them, recorded into Garageband — inspiring another generation. [The stores might just be a bit calmer, and a bit more enjoyable](http://www.macworld.com/article/2026223/why-i-dread-going-to-the-apple-store.html) too.

    **Update:** [Looks like](http://www.thenewstribune.com/2013/02/09/2467907/piano-man-has-no-shortage-of-job.html) he is doing just fine.

  • The HiRise Stand for MacBooks

    A while back I vowed to not buy anymore Twelve South items and sold off everything I owned from them. I recently caved when [the HiRise](http://twelvesouth.com/products/hirise_macbook/) stand was launched — it seemed like it would be better than any other laptop stand I have used in the past.

    I’ve now been using that stand since November 5th, 2012. It’s an expensive stand at $69.99 and as with all Twelve South items it is very well made.

    ## What I Like

    I really like that this stand holds the laptop flat, with no rolled edges. There is no chance that this stand could mark up your notebook and that’s great. There’s also no stupid angle being used to try and maximize desktop space.

    Additionally the ability to raise and lower the stand is fantastic. The stand is far more adaptable for different workstations and individuals than any other stand I have used.

    As I mentioned above, the quality is top notch — the stand feels solid and well made.

    ## What Annoys Me

    Unfortunately there’s a lot about the stand that annoys me. ((And I really wanted to like this stand.))

    – Often I find that my MacBook Pro sits slightly crooked, and needs to be adjusted by tapping on the high side — no really I mean tapping. This happens at least twice a day and is a result of the adjustable piston that raises and lowers the stand height.
    – The bottom of the stand is not grippy, so it moves all about my desk when I take my computer on and off the stand — requiring constant repositioning.
    – The stand still doesn’t go high enough for me.

    ## Buying Advice

    If you are shorter, and don’t mind your laptop leaning a few millimeters to one side or the other, this is likely the best laptop stand you can buy. However, if like me, you mind those things then stay far away from this stand. I don’t hate the stand, I just don’t want to use it.

    For my money (and I’ve tried at least half a dozen different laptop stands) the [mStand is the best you can buy](http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000OOYECC/ref=nosim&tag=brooksreview-20).

  • ‘Dropbox Selective Sync’

    [*The View From Fuji* posts a great tip](http://theviewfromfuji.tumblr.com/post/41329858242/dropbox-selective-sync) which allows you to store your files in Dropbox, but not on any Mac. It’s a clever solution to a problem that [I see with Dropbox](https://brooksreview.net/2013/01/archiving-cloud/), but it’s not the best solution.

    Essentially you add files and folders to Dropbox as normal, and after they are uploaded you use the Selective Sync feature to no longer sync that folder with your Mac. Thus all that data is just in the Dropbox cloud.

    The problem? This works well for iOS, since you can browse all the files in the Dropbox app, but it doesn’t work well on the desktop where you would have to browse those files on the Dropbox website. So yes, the files are not on your Mac (or any Mac), but they also are now not easily useable on any Mac.

  • “Analyst”

    What is the job of a stock market analyst, you know the people who set lofty expectations for financial performance of publicly traded companies (i.e. the people who set forecasts that Apple never meets), what is their job?

    I found a lot of definitions, but [let’s go with The Free Dictionary’s](http://www.thefreedictionary.com/market+analyst) (([I much prefer this definition](http://caps.fool.com/Blogs/definition-of-a-stock-analyst/318193).)) :

    > an expert who studies financial data (on credit or securities or sales or financial patterns etc.) and recommends appropriate business actions

    In other words it is the job of these analysts to do a couple of things:

    1. Study and know the market.
    2. Recommend actions.

    That means that these analysts need to make the most accurate guess that they can for the future performance of a company so that investors, whom the analyst works for, can make the most informed decision of when to buy and sell a particular stock. (Close enough, well, closer than analysts get to doing their job anyways.)

    Given that definition, why are stories worded: “Company A missed expectations”? Shouldn’t the correct wording be: “Analyst John posted a bad guidance”? Of course it should be, but no one actually cares about that analyst’s ability to predict the future, because trying predicting the future is futile. So instead we look at who failed to meet a goal set by a person with a business card that reads “analyst”.

    *Side Note: I just promoted myself to “Senior Analyst” here at The Brooks Review, please cite me using that title, so that my words carry weight with the likes of CNN, NYT, WSJ, Reuters, et al.*

    When people refer to “guidances”, “expectations”, and so forth, they are really just referring to an outsiders best guess, formed by analyzing historic data. In other words: this is not the company themselves saying where they expect to be next quarter, it’s just a third party saying where *they think* a company should be based on an analysts best guess.

    And yet, these guesses are being reported as if the company actually has a duty to meet them — and has failed if they do not meet them.

    This is really like readers trying to guess how long my next post will be, and then getting mad at me if they are wrong about that guess. In other words: it’s the dumbest fucking thing I can think of to try and predict.

  • ‘Depression and Me’

    [Relly Annett-Baker writing about her own depression](http://rel.ly/2013/01/depression-and-me/):

    >That’s what depression does. It takes something that should be joyous and challenging and full of discoveries, and turns it into a time of loneliness, fear and a desperate feeling of not being good enough. Of shredding every last ounce of self-esteem and self-respect. It turns you into your worst enemy. It feeds off your inner self doubt.

    Fascinating read, and scary to think how “silent” depression is — something that many people don’t know they have and those around them may not be able to help with. Even then, even with all the help, sometimes, well sometimes…

  • ‘Lame Duck Board’

    [Bill Rigby reporting for Reuters](http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/01/22/us-microsoft-book-idUKBRE90L04320130122):

    >”For Microsoft to really get back in the game seriously, you need a big change in management,” said Joachim Kempin, who worked at Microsoft between 1983 and 2002, overseeing the sales of Windows software to computer makers for part of that time. “As much as I respect Steve Ballmer, he may be part of that in the end.”

    This is a very damning report about Ballmer and Microsoft’s board. There’s a few things about it that make me take the report with a large grain of salt:

    1. Kempin left in 2002, which means Ballmer was only CEO for two years while Kempin was there. I’m doubtful that was enough time to form the opinions he currently holds, which means his insight into Ballmer is less insider and more outsider with insider reports.
    2. I know nothing of Kempin and so this could be like listening to advice from Warren Buffet, or Donald Trump.

    Even given those caveats, if true, this is a damning statement:

    >”They missed all the opportunities they were talking about when I was still in the company. Tablets, phones…we had a tablet going, we had tablet software when Windows XP came out, it was never followed up properly,” said Kempin.

    I assume he doesn’t mean a convertible PC, but I think there’s a simple reason why Microsoft wouldn’t want to release a tablet back in early 2000-2002 — they wouldn’t want to cannibalize PC sales. Whereas Apple doesn’t care if it is their own products cannibalizing sales, Microsoft does. ([See this post](http://rampantinnovation.com/2013/01/15/one-strategy-one-pl/) for reasons why.)

    Still, I agree, [Ballmer is going to run the ship into the ground](https://brooksreview.net/2012/11/microsofts-guy/).

  • ‘How to Pair Socks From a Pile Efficiently?’

    [Amit on Stack Overflow asks](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14415881/how-to-pair-socks-from-a-pile-efficiently):

    >Given a pile of `n` pairs of socks, containing `2n` elements (assume each sock has exactly one matching pair), what is the best way to pair them up efficiently with up to logarithmic extra space?

    What a great question and the answers don’t disappoint. Of course the easiest way to do this is just to buy all of the same socks — or just a few different socks so that there are fewer variables — but that would be no fun.

    Speaking of socks, you guys know what you [should be matching your socks with right](http://www.gq.com/style/style-guy/accessories/200204/sock-match-debate)?

    Personally I try for socks that have a base color that matches my pants of the day with an accent color that either matches something else I am wearing, or just adds some life to a boring color palette that I may be wearing that day.