Category: Links

Chris Gayomali:

The year-long project, set to officially begin July 1st, will divide some workers into two groups. One enviable test group will work shorter days, while their colleagues will work eight hours each day. It is unclear how this will be decided exactly, but it is an experiment designed to test growing assumptions that fewer, more-focused hours could be a boon for employee productivity.

It will be interesting to see what they learn. A lot of people love working “Four Tens” where you work four ten hour days instead of five eight hour days. However research seems to point to that being a poor choice overall for workers. I’d be a big fan of six hour work days overall, as I am pretty sure that is about the total amount of productive hours I get out of people.

Cliff Mass on the Seattle School Board’s vote to remove bullshit math courses from Seattle elementary schools:

Finally, Seattle students will be spared  fuzzy, discovery math in which senseless group learning, essays, and excessive calculator use have been the rule.

This makes me happy.

Serenity Caldwell:

Apple has made a promise here: The future of computing should be free of file limitations and processor speeds, of screen sizes and portability. It should render the hardware invisible and put the focus on the work you’re doing.

It all comes down to how well the system works. It must always work or people will stop trying to use it.

Interesting thoughts, but nothing that we haven’t heard. I can’t speak to non-retina displays, but for a retina display MacBook Pro, I don’t see any issues with Helvetica.

Though, I still don’t like to read articles set in Helvetica.

Todd Bishop:

An overhauled version of the Mac OS X Spotlight search will rely on Bing for web searches, the Redmond company confirmed this afternoon, after Apple listed Bing among the service providers powering the feature earlier today.

Apple knows that the general consumer has too big an affinity for Google to change the default search in Safari, but by doing these little changes with Siri and now Spotlight, Apple is really squeezing Google. If Spotlight starts gaining traction, that is. And that's a big if, as it isn't widely used now (from what I see).

I watched this last night with my wife and it is just perfect. Nothing new for those following the topic, but very well put and something the average person can understand and get behind.

Really great tutorial for SKRWT which is an awesome app. One thing I didn’t know was that you could tap the dial for incremental adjustments — very clever. Great app.

Matt Gemmell:

I’m looking for focus, and freedom from noise. More than that, I’m looking for stability; a metaphorical place where I have a chance of doing my best work.

Maria Konnikova on open offices:

What’s more, Evans and Johnson discovered that people in noisy environments made fewer ergonomic adjustments than they would in private, causing increased physical strain. The subjects subsequently attempted to solve fewer puzzles than they had after working in a quiet environment; in other words, they became less motivated and less creative.

She also notes that research shows headphones having no effect in counteracting this. The only thing that helps is a strong ability to block out distractions.

Which is likely why I am fine with these environments — I just forget about everything around.

Viticci has some nice iOS 8 features for you, this one is particularly cool:

Travel time was previously exclusive to OS X Mavericks, and it’ll come to iOS 8 through (optional) notifications that’ll suggest you the best time to leave for your next calendar event. It’s not clear whether iOS 8 users will also be able to turn on travel time and get inline Maps previews when creating new events in Calendar, but notifications are a good start.

That’s awesome. So too is the emergency ID card, but it’s pretty convoluted to get to right now.

Jamie on the Signals v. Noise blog:

It’s always harder to take away features that are already there. But, I have no doubt Apple will try to continue making iOS easy-to-use while they layer on new power user features. At the same time, Google’s not afraid to take away features. Maybe Google will keep simplifying Android, pushing all you need to know from their sentient “cloud”.

That’s an interesting comparison, but I think it misses a big point. Google is pruning features not for clarity, but to push users to use their cloud services (Google Now) for everything. It’s an “let us know everything and we can make your life easier” approach.

Apple on the other hand is saying: “Look we have a dead simple system and we are slowly adding in features that make it really powerful to use daily.”

The approaches are misunderstood if only broken down by number of features, or simplicity. Apple wants you to easily be able to do a lot of things, eventually. Google wants to tell you what you need without you asking.

That latter is massively creepy.

Bob O'Donnell on Tech.pinions:

Most people have a mixture of OS platforms—some Microsoft, some Google and some Apple. Of course, I’m sure that part of Apple’s strategy is to increase the all-Apple households (which their new Family Sharing feature should help with as well), but their vision could be made much more effective if they could somehow bring other non-Apple OS devices into the group.
To do this, Apple would have to take a more comprehensive view around multi-device services and figure out business models that enable them to benefit from people owning other devices.

This is going to be a common argument for the next few months or more. It's wrong though.

It's always reasonable sounding to say that Apple needs to open up and offer its services on more platforms, but in the long run it won't matter for Apple. Apple always wants its best customers to have the best experience and those customers are all Apple, all the time.

iCloud drive will have a web based component and that will be good enough just like Apple has done with Pages. What will be key is how well all of this works once launched, it has to be seamless or no one will be compelled to get the devices they need to use it all the time.

The power of Editorial is amazing.

This seems all sorts of crazy to me. Yes, I get it, Google wants more internet users so they have more targets, I mean, customers. Makes senses, but what's the payback period on spending one billion dollars to acquire 100-200 million potential new users?

My initial math was way off, pointing to a larger number. But if Google can capture 200 million users then it will only cost $5 per user. That seems reasonable, but I’m skeptical it’s a good use of money.

Google plays a game to increase revenue by pennies per user. Where companies like Apple play the game to increase revenue by tens of dollars per user.

John Gruber on Google's branding problems:

“Don’t be evil” is now a punchline.

Or put another way, which company are most people (even me) likely to find creepier: Google or Facebook?

It's hard to say which really is creepier, but Google by far has the more creepy reputation.

Justin Williams:

While there, I’ll be running around with an iBeacon in my backpack that you can use to locate me at parties, sessions, or any other event you may be at.

Nerd. ((What a great idea too!))

Not to be outdone, Readdle updated PDF Expert — which is hands down the best PDF app on iOS — to version 5.1 and added:

The iPhone version is finally as powerful as the iPad one. Now you can create freehand drawings and figures, manage pages and merge PDFs, select annotation groups and edit them, share files via SMB, and mark your files with colors and stars. All that powerful functionality is wrapped into gorgeous flat design.

They also note they sped up the app, which is crazy because it was already faster than anything else.

Speaking of Editorial, Viticci has an epic review of the latest update (which is bigger than the version number would suggest). I haven’t read through this post yet, I am saving it for when I can really read it in-depth.