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Leica Sofort 2June 13, 2024
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Recent Articles

  • About John Siracusa’s Mountain Lion Review

  • Apple Claims Google Warned Samsung Against Copying iPhone, iPad

  • ‘Is Twitter a Media or Technology Company?’

    Me thinks the latter is the case, as Nick Bilton reports: >Mr. Costolo said he wanted to migrate away from developers building more external Twitter apps, to a world where developers and companies are building products inside the Twitter platform — a move, he argued, that would create a better experience for users. That sounds…

    Me thinks the latter is the case, as Nick Bilton reports:
    >Mr. Costolo said he wanted to migrate away from developers building more external Twitter apps, to a world where developers and companies are building products inside the Twitter platform — a move, he argued, that would create a better experience for users.

    That sounds an awful lot like Facebook apps to me, than it does iOS apps. How many Facebook apps do you depend on daily, or are willing to pay money for? I actually don’t know the answer since I don’t use Facebook, but I’d guess that the answer is less than how you feel about iOS apps.

    I think that none of this comes as a shock, and the bigger question is not whether Twitter wants developers building Twitter clients (they don’t), but whether they will ever cut off access to existing third-party Twitter apps. I’ve long thought that they would have to cut off access, otherwise how do you stop developers from building new Twitter apps?

  • Quote of the Day: Oliver Reichenstein

    “Thinking about how to deal with files prevents me from working. And this annoys me.” — Oliver Reichenstein

    “Thinking about how to deal with files prevents me from working. And this annoys me.”

  • The iCache Geode

    Garrett Murray on the [iCache Geode](http://www.icache.com) that he backed on Kickstarter: >Frankly, I’m surprised the iCache Geode is legal to sell in the United States. It could effectively be used as a skimming and cloning system. The price point of the iCache Geode is low enough that nearly anyone could afford to buy it and…

    Garrett Murray on the [iCache Geode](http://www.icache.com) that he backed on Kickstarter:
    >Frankly, I’m surprised the iCache Geode is legal to sell in the United States. It could effectively be used as a skimming and cloning system. The price point of the iCache Geode is low enough that nearly anyone could afford to buy it and go around cloning credit cards.

    I had missed this device/case when it went through Kickstarter, or at least I missed it, but Garrett Murray will save me the trouble of buying. Noting that he only has had 20% success rate with the card and it takes about 30 seconds to get ready. The above quote though is very concerning — it is already a known issue that less than reputable wait staff have card skimmers that they use. The difference is that these villains have used skimmed card data to sell to people, the Geode basically makes the data instantly useable to them — on the spot.

    That alone is enough reason for this product to not be legal.

    Luckily though, as Murray notes, it doesn’t work all that well.

  • Mountain Lion Miscellany

  • ‘Apps Must Be Cross Platform!’

    *Note from Ben: I added the exclamation point, because after reading this post I really felt that the exclamation point was need to denote the ridiculousness that ensues in the post.* Charlie Kindel writes for GeekWire, in what I assume is a guest opinion post, that mobile apps “must be cross platform”. Hmm, really? Let’s…

    *Note from Ben: I added the exclamation point, because after reading this post I really felt that the exclamation point was need to denote the ridiculousness that ensues in the post.*

    Charlie Kindel writes for GeekWire, in what I assume is a guest opinion post, that mobile apps “must be cross platform”. Hmm, really? Let’s take a look at his argument, shall we?

    Wait no, first I should mention who Charlie Kindel is, from his bio on GeekWire:

    >Charlie was previously the GM for the Windows Phone 7 app platform at Microsoft. During his 21 year tenure at Microsoft, Charlie built a broad range of products and technologies ranging from Internet Explorer to Windows Media Center, Windows Home Server, and Windows Phone 7.

    That’s his past, not his present, but it’s all you really need to know before writing this post. He knows mobile, yes, but he knows mobile as it exists in the Microsoft sphere — the sphere that held the iPhone funeral a while back.

    Ok, on with his post:

    >Maybe there are a few Robert Scobles out there who still believe that a significant number of successful apps in the future will be unique to any one client platform.

    Count me among the few, how often do you see apps launch, at least initially, only on the iPhone? A: A lot. How many do you see that for Android? A: Not many. Windows Phone? A: ha.

    So Kindel is swinging at balls right out of the gate, then he follows up with:

    >Connected experiences across all devices is where the growth is and it would be insane for anyone, from a major brand to an early-stage startup to believe they don’t have to build for at least iPhone, iPad, Android phones, Android tablets, and Windows 8 tablets.

    I agree that ‘connected experiences’, if I understand that term correctly, is important, but what herb are you smoking to believe that Windows 8 tablets — they that have yet to ship — are on par with the iPad in importance? I am ok with including Android, but including an as-of-yet released tablet is just stupid.

    Kindel goes on to talk about three options for coding for multiple platforms, and gets to HTML5, where he states:

    >However, HTML5 is not in Apple’s best interest and they are obviously dragging their feet with compatibility and [performance](http://arstechnica.com/apple/2011/03/confirmed-some-web-apps-not-seeing-ios-43-javascript-speedup/).
    >Why? Because websites that run as apps break Apple’s strangle-hold on their walled garden.

    Now that link takes you to an Ars Technica post from a year ago about the problem. I agree that Apple may be dragging their feet on this issue, but to say that such implementation would “break Apple’s strangle-hold on their walled garden” is utter crap. Let’s not forget that Apple initially tried to sell developers on making web apps instead of native apps, and had to reverse course on it because no one wanted them.

    If anything Apple is dragging their feet on this because it simply doesn’t matter to Apple’s customers.

    What’s funny is that later on Kindel mentions how poorly Android is fairing in HTML5 support, yet doesn’t lambast them for “dragging their feet” — must be because Android is open.

    Kindel’s purpose with this post is to show that the best way forward is what he calls “Mixed Model Mobile Apps”. Built with tools like Mono — using RDIO as the prime poster child. Indeed RDIO is a nice app, but I counter with Instapaper — built specifically for iOS and Android, native on both platforms. Those too are nice apps.

    Kidnel’s main problem is that he passes off “Mixed Model Mobile Apps” as the best way forward, when it is simply the second best way forward. The *actual* best way forward is to create native apps for each platform, and despite what Kindel says, it just may be the case that not every app should run on every device.

  • Google’s Unmerited Damage From Oracle v. Google — The FOSSPatents Factor

  • ‘Money Dollars’

    Interesting point from Brett Kelly, wondering how read later services can impact the bottom line for sites that sell features like single page views and PDFs. Kelly notes that last year he bought an Ars membership just to download the Siracusa review in a single PDF, but this year he doesn’t need to buy it…

    Interesting point from Brett Kelly, wondering how read later services can impact the bottom line for sites that sell features like single page views and PDFs. Kelly notes that last year he bought an Ars membership just to download the Siracusa review in a single PDF, but this year he doesn’t need to buy it because Instapaper will grab all the pages.

    I can relate to the problems caused by all the tools available on the web when I designed the paywall for this site. I quickly came to the realization that no matter what I did there would be ways around the paywall — that’s just a fact. And as a publishing entity, once I realized that I just embraced that fact. Any member can share a link to a paywalled post, that allows those that click on the link to read it — so instead of banning that behavior, I just embrace it as a way to attract new members.

    And I think that realization is applicable in this case: if someone wants to circumvent paying you, then they will always find a way, so best to just not worry about it.

  • Fantastical Goes Retina

  • .Mail Is Coming to Your Dock and We Would Love to Have You on Board.

  • Mountain Lion

    Mac OS X, 10.8. The iterative update to Apple’s OS X, 10.7. I have been using the beta build of Mountain Lion for a long time now and I think that there are some really interesting things taking place in Mountain Lion. Some of those items: – iCal becomes ‘Calendar’. – Address Book becomes ‘Contacts’.…

    Mac OS X, 10.8. The iterative update to Apple’s OS X, 10.7. I have been using the beta build of Mountain Lion for a long time now and I think that there are some really interesting things taking place in Mountain Lion.

    Some of those items:

    – iCal becomes ‘Calendar’.
    – Address Book becomes ‘Contacts’.
    – Save As makes a guest appearance.
    – Tweeting is a part of the OS.
    – Omnibar.

    The biggest change though: the completely useless Notification Center. So let’s talk about that.

    The Notification Center serves two purposes:

    1. To notify you as the user of events that occurred on your Mac, or reminders that you have set.
    2. To notify others of things you want them to know (via Tweeting and such).

    This is obviously an addition made in response to the overwhelming demand for a notification center on iOS, but the problem is that I find it completely unnecessary in OS X. The reason I find it unnecessary: there aren’t any notifications I get on my Mac that I would need to look at some point later in time, which is not the case on iOS.

    I can see upcoming events in the Notification Center, but Fantastical serves that role, and does a better job. I can see recent emails, but that’s only practical if I get a few emails — besides theres a numbered badge on the Mail icon (and I don’t use the inbox to count “new” messages).

    I can see Twitter mentions or DMs, the latter of which is actually nice — except that when I click it Safari opens Twitter.com, even though Twitter for Mac and Osfoora are there. That pretty much makes this irrelevant for me.

    Aside from that, there’s nothing in the notification center that is worth it. Now you just have another menubar icon (to the right of Spotlight) that you cannot remove.

    Hopefully third party developers will find a way to make this a useful feature, but I am just not seeing it at all.

    What is nice about notifications though, is that you no longer need Growl to have nice notifications roll down from the top of the screen. Just like in iOS, you can also control which apps can send notifications in System Preferences — this is actually useful.

    However this could have been added without a full notification center. Much like on iOS I spend a few moments every so often to clear out the Mac notification center — not once have I seen a notification that I had missed, or one that I was glad was ‘archived’ somewhere.

    The difference between Mac notifications and iPhone notifications is that Mac notifications are really only relevant when they happen if I am at my Mac. Mountain Lion doesn’t treat these notifications like that though, they are treated as just as important as the ones I get on my iPhone. That just seems off to me.

    ### Things to Not Complain About

    Now that my main complaint is out of the way, here is a quick rundown on my thoughts of various things in Mountain Lion, in no particular order.

    – I like that iCal is now just Calendar, but I wish that more than just a name change had occurred. Even so, the naming is better — so too with AddressBook becoming Contacts.
    – The omnibar in Safari is something that takes a couple of hours to get used to, but once you are used to it there is no going back. I really dig it.
    – In Finder, when you delete an item the next item in the view is then selected. Previously in 10.7, when you deleted an item in any view, no other items would be selected. This is an amazingly nice touch if, like me, you often use Quick Look to peruse the files sitting in a folder, while hitting `CMD+Delete ` to get rid of the ones you no longer want. Now you don’t have to find the spot you were in, you can just keep on going.
    – AirPlay — this was a *finally* feature for me and almost eliminates a need for a Mac mini connected to my TV. I haven’t made the full on switch yet, but it’s only a matter of time at this point until most video I play on my TV is streamed from my Mac and not the Mac mini attached to the TV.
    – `CMD+Shift+Opt+S`, welcome back Save As…
    – Share sheets: just like in iOS, you can now hit a button in Safari to share the page you are looking at. This is great for Tweeting links to things you are reading, but it seems far less useful on the Mac than on iOS. (Pro tip: `SHIFT+CMD+D` sends the tweet.)
    – Dashboard: amazingly Dashboard is still alive. I thought for sure it would quietly go to a nice farm where it can run free, but nope it’s still here. Good deal too, I use it a lot.
    – Dictation is going to be the hidden gem for many people. I use the piss out of it on iOS and I bet I will end up using it a fair bit on the Mac too. No, it’s not great if others can hear you, but the implementation is done well and the service just seems to work.
    – Inline download progress indicators in Finder, this is one of those: why didn’t we have this all along items. Very nice to not have to jump back to Safari to see how far along the file is.
    – Speaking of Finder, there’s one more: you can now Encrypt any disk from Finder. Go encrypt all your disks.

    Lastly, two items that I have yet to try but hope they work as advertised:

    – Power Nap: where your Mac can do stuff even when in sleep. (Think backups and email checking.) If this works I will be really happy about it.
    – Multiple Time Machine backup locations. I really hope this works, because it’s annoying to have your machine not backing up when you are at work, or home, so here’s hoping this just works.

    ### Buy It

    The update is $19.99 and I can’t see a reason to not update. Apps are going to quickly start to support 10.8 first and assume that a $20 update price isn’t too much for the majority of Mac users to pay. There’s far more good than bad in this update and if you are an iOS fan you are really going to like some of the changes — if you aren’t, then the changes are easy enough to ignore that they shouldn’t bug you much.

  • ‘Turning Off Ads in Parallels’

    Michael Tsai stumbled upon the dirty secret of Parallels: they spam their users. Both in the VM with offers from different 3rd party manufacturers, and by email — I get a reminder seemingly every week to update to some new version of Parallels that they rolled out. The updates are great, but as a customer…

    Michael Tsai stumbled upon the dirty secret of Parallels: they spam their users. Both in the VM with offers from different 3rd party manufacturers, and by email — I get a reminder seemingly every week to update to some new version of Parallels that they rolled out. The updates are great, but as a customer it feels like I no sooner update than a new one is out, it’s worse that staying up to date with Apple goods.

    I like Parallels otherwise, but I will be buying Fusion instead of upgrading Parallels.

    The thread is amusing to read with some good screenshots of what I am talking about, my favorite part is that Parallels kept responding only in private messages — that’s bad form, in fact all the Parallels responses are shitty.

    **Update:** [Here’s how you turn them off](http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20120724235352514).

  • Raise Your Prices

    I have no first hand experience with this, but I think we can make some reasonable assumptions about the underlying problems. I think it best to start with [this post from David Barnard on the App Cubby blog](http://appcubby.com/blog/the-sparrow-problem/), the post was all over the web when he posted it and it makes all sorts of…

    I have no first hand experience with this, but I think we can make some reasonable assumptions about the underlying problems.

    I think it best to start with [this post from David Barnard on the App Cubby blog](http://appcubby.com/blog/the-sparrow-problem/), the post was all over the web when he posted it and it makes all sorts of assumptions. I have been told by a couple of people now that Barnard’s guesses at Sparrow’s revenue were not accurate at all, [Barnard seems to be hearing the same thing](https://twitter.com/drbarnard/status/227799912459407360):

    >It does seem like I got the Mac App Store profit wrong and that the app was more profitable than I assumed

    That doesn’t actually matter much for the debate at hand, Sparrow is not representative of the app market. I think the main point that Barnard was trying to get across is best expressed in this line from [his post](http://appcubby.com/blog/the-sparrow-problem/):

    >The age of selling software to users at a fixed, one-time price is coming to an end. It’s just not sustainable at the absurdly low prices users have come to expect.

    That’s a sentence that really hits home for me and at the same time bugs the crap out of me.

    I go out of my way to *spend* money on apps, so I hate hearing that what I spent wasn’t enough to help fund the app’s development. But, I also think that isn’t a problem that I created, it’s a problem of the market place **and** the developers. As Barnard says, expectations of cheap software have been firmly planted in the consumer mind, but who set them?

    In Apple-land the expectation for inexpensive software has been set, by Apple itself first. The lowest price you can charge: $0.99. If Apple wanted to, they could have made that base higher.

    Then came a flood of developers who looked at that price and couldn’t imagine, themselves, paying more than a buck for an iPhone app. By the time it was clear that people are willing to pay for iPhone apps, and are willing to pay more than a buck, the expectation of $0.99 apps had already been set.

    I get that, we all do. It’s odd when an app is over $2.99.

    But while Apple may be responsible for the minimum price a developer can charge, the developer is the one responsible for choosing the price. This problem may look like it’s Apple’s fault, but developers chose $0.99, maybe not *you* but those before you did.

    I have seen a few people chime in arguing for recurring payments to solve this — like the monthly membership here — where it keeps revenue coming in. This, though, only makes sense for apps that are really portals to a service, such as:

    – Twitter
    – Facebook
    – Path
    – Instapaper
    – MLB At Bat
    – Day One

    What it doesn’t make sense for are apps that one could call a service, but more likely just assume are *only* an app, such as:

    – OmniFocus
    – Soulver
    – Mail
    – Agenda
    – Scratch

    These are all great apps, apps that deserve to make their creators a living, but they aren’t apps that even I would be willing to pay for every month. They are apps that I would be willing to shell out more than $9.99 for when I initially purchased them, but that’s about it. If that’s your app and you can’t make a living selling at that price point, then you have to think about whether the app is worth it or not.

    Over the past week I have told at least half a dozen people that they aren’t charging enough for their time, service, app, or product. It’s not just a problem in iOS or the Mac, but it’s a problem across the web. People seem more willing to compete on price, than on quality.

    So what bugs the crap out of me is that developers are whining about not making enough money, when they are the ones in charge of the pricing. If you need more money per customer to hack it, charge more. If people aren’t willing to pay that, well, unfortunately you have your answer.

    People will pay for good software, the Omnigroup proves this point, but you have to offer compelling and unique software in order to demand such prices. I am not saying that App Cubby thinks it is the consumers fault, but it sure sounds like that to me — and that bugs me. I don’t like when people charge too little to make a living and then complain about charging too little.

  • Washington Admits Surveillance Violated Fourth Amendment

  • Your Airport Is a Petri Dish

    Brian Fung reports on a new study about the spread of germs in airplanes and airports, finding this interesting tidbit about the air inside an airplane: >Between drawing in clean, fresh air from outside the cabin and passing old air through high-quality filters designed to catch 99.999 percent of germs, the air inside a cabin…

    Brian Fung reports on a new study about the spread of germs in airplanes and airports, finding this interesting tidbit about the air inside an airplane:
    >Between drawing in clean, fresh air from outside the cabin and passing old air through high-quality filters designed to catch 99.999 percent of germs, the air inside a cabin is replaced some 20 times an hour — far more often than in office buildings or in houses, which exchange air every 12 and 5 times an hour, respectively.

    Moreover planes are designed to drop the recycled air back into the same row from which it came — I had no clue. So what then did MIT find in their study? The airports are disgusting places to be, but then again we all knew that (right?). So which are the worst offenders of grime?

    >Leading the list: New York’s JFK International, followed by Los Angeles, Honolulu, San Francisco, Newark, and Chicago’s O’Hare and Washington’s Dulles International Airport.

    Sounds like you should book your next stop in Seattle instead.

  • How Many People Use Twitter’s Own Apps?

  • Apple to Update iPod Touch With 4-Inch Display, A5 Chip, Buffed Aluminum Rear Shell?

  • USB Power Delivery Spec Upped to 100W

    Michael Gorman, for Engadget, reporting on a new USB 2/3 spec: >That’s ten times what Thunderbolt can do, and it means that you can charge up your laptop or power most any peripheral via Universal Serial Bus. That could change the way a lot of peripheral gadgets work, but it also causes problems for laptop…

    Michael Gorman, for Engadget, reporting on a new USB 2/3 spec:
    >That’s ten times what Thunderbolt can do, and it means that you can charge up your laptop or power most any peripheral via Universal Serial Bus.

    That could change the way a lot of peripheral gadgets work, but it also causes problems for laptop users. If you are powering your monitor off your USB port, I would imagine your laptop battery would drain pretty fast.

    The brings me to something else that has been bugging me and an ask on Twitter yielded no answers. Why aren’t both sides of USB cables the size of microUSB ports instead of the huge rectangular annoyance that they currently are? Is it a speed/power issue on the smaller connector, or just a silly standard that no one has bothered to question?

  • Photo Archiving and Remote Photo Libraries

    A few days back now a reader asked a question that I get surprisingly often: how do you store and manage all of your photos? I have been constrained to 256GB SSDs since 2010, so I know how to manage GBs of photos, without having to keep them on my hard drive. I figured it…

    A few days back now a reader asked a question that I get surprisingly often: how do you store and manage all of your photos? I have been constrained to 256GB SSDs since 2010, so I know how to manage GBs of photos, without having to keep them on my hard drive.

    I figured it was about time to share how I do all this — since it seems to be a question that many are interested it. The answer is actually pretty simple, here’s how:

    1. Get a big ass, fast as you can, external HD.
    2. Choose the photo management app of your choice.
    3. Archive the photos onto that external by moving the library folder (or the equivalent for that app) to the drive.
    4. Create a new library named after the current year.
    5. Every year move that library to the external drive and create a new library.

    I have been doing this for a while now, well before the HD constraint, as a way to keep library sizes down and thus the app running smoother.

    So why by year? Two reasons: one to make the app run faster when you load the library (especially if the library needs to update because of a change in the app) and secondly to make it easier to find *that* image when you need to. I don’t bother sorting out old years, instead I just massed moved it all to one file (for me I started in 2007).

    So why bother with this, well I shoot in RAW wherever I can, here’s the break down of the library sizes that I have:

    – pre-2007 through 2007: 55.23GB
    – 2008: 41.65GB
    – 2009: 21.26 (no clue why the dip).
    – 2010: 40.56GB
    – 2011: 177.9GB
    – So far for 2012: 30GB

    That’s why I can’t keep these on one computer, and those are only the library sizes of my Aperture library, most of 2012 has been shot in Lightroom.

    *[As I mentioned in a earlier post](https://brooksreview.net/2012/07/amazon-goflex/), I am now using a Thunderbolt HDD for this storage and it is fantastically fast.*

    ### A Word About Photo Apps

    As you can see I used Aperture exclusively for a while, but I am only now still using it because it is retina ready, while Lightroom is not. I actually prefer Lightroom to Aperture for the better noise control alone.

    However Aperture does make it very easy to store photos this way. Lightroom makes it easy to export out a folder of images to another drive and still be able to view them in the current library — when that drive is attached. Of course this can lead to a lot of images in Lightroom, but both Aperture and Lightroom have advantages.

    All this to say: it doesn’t matter what program you use, just figure out a reasonable way to off load the data in an easy to find manner. I prefer Lightroom because of the noise control and better image adjustments, but I prefer the layout and workflow of Aperture much more. It’s a mixed bag.

    ### For Photo Heavy Years

    I can assure you that I did not keep that entire 175GB library on my laptop at once. For times when the library starts to get bloated part way through the year, I will off load projects/folders inside the library to an archive library. Thus allowing me to keep *most* of this year’s library on my machine, while keeping storage requirements down.

    This is a pain in the ass to manage at year end, so I usually just keep two libraries for that year in the archive — which always comes back to bite me when I am looking for an image later. I don’t recommend this kind of laziness.

    ### Backups

    My obligatory note: external HDDs fail and fail often. Make several redundant copies of your data.

    ### Finally

    My workflow is very simple and fairly common for this task. The main objectives are:

    1. Get the GBs off my SSD.
    2. Make recalling a photo as simple as knowing the year it was taken.

    With camera file sizes growing, this is likely to become an issue for more and more people — even if all you use is iPhoto.