January 2012
12 posts
5 tags
An Awesome Idea, Accidentally →
Title of this Ars Technica article: HP makes printing to an iPad easier with Wireless Direct printing.
I’m pretty sure that “printing to an iPad” was a typo and they meant from, but think of how awesome that would be: what better way to go paperless than to have an iPad masquerade as a wireless printer, accept documents “printed” your PC and turn them into...
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The Automation Revolution →
The New York Times on the current state of the U.S. economy:
On the other hand, corporate success has not necessarily benefited American workers and consumers so far in this recovery. Today, the economy produces more than it did when the recession began in 2007, but it manages to do so with six million fewer jobs.
I don’t see this ever getting any better. What are we going to do in...
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Launch Center →
Worth the 99 cents for the speed dial alone, Launch Center is a very nice-looking app. More importantly for an app intended to speed up various tasks, that nice-looking UI is very fast and smooth. You can also use it to launch any URL - which is handy for apps that have registered their own URL scheme. It even has support for scheduling these actions to show up in your notifications at certain...
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Apple's Stunning Quarter →
MG Siegler:
Apple now has $97.6 billion in cash.
Think about how big that number is. Apple could cease all business operations now, take 10,000 of its employees, pay them each $100,000 a year for doing nothing, and not run out of cash until the year 2110.
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Where It Hurts
Marco Arment and MG Siegler have a point when they say that SOPA is inevitable. Public outrage in America is like a videogame superweapon: it destroys anything in its path, but it can only be used sparingly. Unfortunately, unlike the average citizen, lobbyists are paid to be relentless.
Marco’s suggestion to not watch MPAA videos is the right idea, but not the best approach. A more...
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Why I Hate Android →
MG Siegler explains how Android turned a do-no-evil company into sellouts.
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Comments Commentary →
If you’re debating whether to include or exclude comments on your blog, the best thing you can do is to read Matt Gemmell’s latest article about the topic, as well as the first two he wrote that started the conversation. Matt both proves that you don’t need comments to communicate effectively with your readers, and also addresses just about every concern that you can think of...
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Microsoft To Offer Incentives to Sell Phones →
John Gruber:
If this strategy was on the table, why didn’t Microsoft start this a year ago?
If it was Apple, which makes hundreds of dollars per phone sold, then a $15/phone incentive would not be a desperate gamble. Microsoft only sells the OS, though, and if a quick Google search is right, that’s about the price Microsoft is charging manufacturers to license their OS. Though the app...
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My Speculation on Platforms That Probably Got Way...
Let’s say you’re an electronics manufacturer hoping to build the next great gadget. What do you have to do to go about it?
Basically, you need demand for your product. However, getting that demand isn’t as simple as building the better product in a vacuum. You need to build a product that gives your target customers the maximum value - and thanks to the developer interest issue...
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No Comment
It’s time for the semi-annual tech blog “Comments are horrible!” series of posts. And here’s mine!
Do you have something to say in response to someone? Own your words. Post it on your blog, or on Google+, or even Twitter (or email if you must share privately) and notify the writer via Twitter or email. Tumblr asks & messages are a great way too (particularly with...
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Misconceptions About iOS Multitasking →
Fraser Speirs wrote a well-written, in depth post about multitasking on iOS. However, while correcting the misconception, it doesn’t quite address why it exists.
If you were going to explain background applications on iOS to a normal person, you would have to say something like this: “Apps don’t actually run in the background. Unless you’re playing music from them. Or if...
December 2011
7 posts
5 tags
Kindle Fire vs. iPad 2 →
I like this comparison. Not quite sure which of these is better… one of them is cheaper, but one of them is not described with adjectives like “frustrating”, “mostly crap”, “infuriatingly awful”, and most damning of all, “needs improvement”.
Also, grab your popcorn and head for the bunker, I just submitted this to Reddit. Should be good flame...
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HP Open-Sourcing WebOS →
Translation: “We didn’t find any suckers who were willing to license it.”
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Twitter's Redesigns →
While I’m a huge fan of Tweetbot’s amazing presentation and feature set, the new Twitter app is certainly less intimidating for new users. While I’m less willing to use the native Twitter app over it, I do think they went in the right direction. The tendency to bolt things on without thought to the overall experience is very prevalent with every other web apps, and I love to see...
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Minimal Mac's Response to that Pinboard Post →
What if, 1% of the users of a particular free service of 36 million clients and growing, were to decide to drop $10.00 cash every month into an envelope and mail it to said service? What if that envelope had no return address? Perhaps there was an note inside that begged them to create a model to let us pay them to use the service.
So, here is the address I’m sending my unmarked cash with...
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Don't Be A Free User - Pinboard Blog →
Linked to, as always, with Tumblr, the world’s greatest free blogging service.
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Good and Cheap, and Just Cheap
On the most recent episode of Build and Analyze, Marco Arment rebutted Andy Ihnatko’s criticism of his review of the Kindle Fire. I wasn’t too satisfied with how that rebuttal went, because at the end Marco’s co-host Dan Benjamin was still hung up on the whole iPad comparison thing - the idea that Marco’s review would have been more positive if he hadn’t been...
November 2011
10 posts
5 tags
Angry Birds Developer Turns Down $2,250,000,000... →
The only people crazier than the ones offering billions of dollars for the Angry Birds franchise are the people who turned it down. It’s an epic fad of Pokémon proportions, except Pokémon was at least a much better mobile game. 1
In fact, I’d still say it’s the best mobile game of all time. ↩
Jeff Broderick's Settings Profiles for the iPhone →
It’s really cool that you can do stuff like this without jail breaking the device. It’s not seamless, exactly, depending on URL’s to function, but it’s definitely handy. The icons are well done, too.
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The Right Guy for the Wrong Job
The latest episodes of Hypercritical and The Talk Show talk about the official Steve Jobs biography, giving it serious criticism. On Hypercritical, John Siracusa calls him the wrong guy - because he had no interest in technology, and that the book should have both been more accurate and also have made a better effort to educate the reader about the ins and outs of the things that Apple and NeXT...
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A Fictional Apple Store Conversation
Shopper: “So, why should I get an iPhone instead of one of those Droid phones? The specs are so much higher.” Employee: “The specs don’t matter, it’s the experience that matters.” Shopper: “OK, so should I get an iPhone 4 or an iPhone 4S?” Employee: “Well, I would recommend the 4S because… hmm.”
For all the talk that specs...
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News in the Digital Era →
Right now, most news organizations are trying to stay relevant without actually changing their structure, which is a terrible decision on everyone’s part. The industry is built around the idea that every news organization has limited reach - local, regional and national organizations, with more relevant but lower quality material at the bottom, and high quality but general material at the...
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Kindle Fire Review →
So, an Android tablet, with an even more confused UI, an even worse app selection (coupled with a developer-hostile enviroment) and mediocre & limited hardware. All this is attached, however, to a pleasant content purchase & use experience and, most importantly, a $200 price tag.
The big question is: is it any good at doing the things that, say, an equally expensive iPod Touch...
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Innovative Startup Forced to Shut Down Production... →
Sensationalist? Not sensationalist enough. They got burned because they couldn’t afford to prove that they were right. At the very least, there needs to be reform so that small companies can afford to fight back when the USPTO makes mistakes.
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Apple Kicks Out Researcher for Discovering Hole,... →
If the guys at Microsoft’s developer relations group gave any thought to this, then this is actually a subtly ballsy move. They’re not just allowing, but encouraging Charlie Miller to go to its OS and poke holes in it. This is coming from the same company that built its flagship desktop OS and web browsers out of swiss cheese and unlocked screen doors.
October 2011
19 posts
4 tags
Contentifying the Apple TV
The opinions from people like John Siracusa, John Gruber and Marco Arment about the next Apple TV have been that Apple needs its own content ecosystem, not to be chained to someone else’s. However, I don’t think that the opportunity exists for Apple to do that, and the benefits of doing so aren’t very clear.
The music and book publishers were not providing digital versions of...
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"No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." →
Ten years ago, the iPod was released. A few minutes later, Slashdot found out. It’s fun reading people’s thoughts of the iPod ten years ago.
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It's Coming
I think it’s a sure thing now, though the timing won’t be. Between my own earlier speculation of an Apple TV with Siri integration, the noise that MG Siegler and Dan Frommer have been making about TV’s, and (most importantly) Steve Jobs’s own comments about an Apple TV, I think it’s safe to say that Apple is going to release a TV within a year or two. An A5 Apple TV...
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QR Codes - Looking for its Problem
QR codes, the ugly square barcodes meant to let you pull up lengthy info quickly on your mobile device, aren’t doing too well. In the survey that Sean Cummings did, only 5% of the people he talked to were able to decipher a QR code and get the information, and it took them an average of 47 seconds to do so.
I see three good reasons why this is the case.
It’s not obvious to most...
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"I Finally Cracked It." →
MG Siegler:
That’s what Steve Jobs revealed to Walter Isaacson in an interview for his forthcoming biography.
What was he talking about? The often rumored (and just as often dismissed) Apple television. Not the Apple TV, the current product, a full fledged television.
Ten bucks says that the crack was a usable no-hardware user interface.
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JimCloudman.com, 2012 Edition
Even before the unfortunate events of Tuesday night, my blog was due for a redesign. In retrospect the blog redesign last year might have been more minimalistic and perhaps even better quality in its creation, it didn’t convey fun at all, and the header always looked a bit awkward. The first point was the most important: no matter how nice the writing is and how clean the elements of the...
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Oopsies!
The other day I made the switch to EasyDNS from Dreamhost for hosting my domain name for this site. I didn’t think I was using the hosting for anything, but I saw DNS entries for media.jimcloudman.com. I thought to myself, “There’s nothing that I could possibly be using in there, right?”
Turns out, all the media files for my theme were stored there. They’re gone...
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Ice Cream Sandwich →
In screenshots, Android is starting to look pretty damn good. I think Apple actually took a few steps back because of all those “skeuomorphic” app designs, while Microsoft takes the opposite approach and pretty much forbids their developers to actually design their apps except within tight restrictions1. Their design ideas seem to be a much more pragmatic balance between the two.
...
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Instapaper 4.0 →
I was really hoping that we’d see an interface like that for the iPad. I expect when I get a chance to use it (I’m having issues connecting to the App Store at the moment) that it’ll be as good as Reeder’s interface, perhaps better. Can’t wait to try it out!
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It's The Network →
Shit That Siri Says:
User: “Tell me a joke” Siri: “Two iPhones walk into a bar… I forget the rest.”
I can complete this! Two iPhones walk into a bar. Then the one that isn’t on AT&T walks into four more bars.
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That's the Wrong Response
Marco Arment, four months ago, talking about Reading List:
As far as I can tell there’s no offline storage in Apple’s Reading List function, which Instapaper has.
So what did Apple do with iOS5? Disables offline storage for everyone. Brilliant!
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Too Damn Small →
It sure seems like pretty much everyone agrees on one thing Apple got wrong with iOS 5: the close buttons in Notification Center are way, way, way too small. I too misclick nearly every time.
A simple solution to the problem: they should have made the button 44 pixels wide (88 Retina display pixels) at a minimum. If it’s not that big in any dimension then it’s too small - the HIG...
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Siri and the Apple TV
If you haven’t watched the Apple Keynote, you’ll want to open it up and jump to about 25 minutes before the end. This is the point where Apple introduces Siri. As a feature for the iPhone 4S, it’s a great addition, but I think its true potential lies not with the iPhone, but with the Apple TV. I truly believe it could be Apple’s next great reinvention.
On the iPhone, Siri...
This Is The Life →
I had been listening to Dream Theater’s latest album for a few days now, but after reading the many inspirational quotes from Steve Jobs last night on Twitter and elsewhere, particularly this one, the lyrics of this song suddenly stood out to me. It could easily have been written to be about Steve Jobs and the way he lived his life. If you can tolerate a powerful guitar solo here and there,...
Steve Jobs Passes Away →
The candle that burns the shortest burns the brightest.
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Compelling Choices
Here’s the one-sentence explanation as to why most phones & tablets are failing to attract sales: they aren’t providing compelling reasons for people to buy them.
The iPhone 3G was the first really compelling iPhone:
It provided all of the features people really needed (3G, GPS)
It had the iPhone OS, which was very much better than what came before it
Apps had just been...
September 2011
9 posts
5 tags
Patent-sharing
With Microsoft being able to suck money out of any Android-using company, I have to wonder:
Do Microsoft’s patents cover specific Android features, or do they apply to iOS, too?
If so, is Microsoft taking money from Apple?
If so, does Apple even care?
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Things I've Bought in 2011: A Retrospective...
Things that have worked out beautifully:
The leather iPhone backing by Valentine Goods: Many months later, it still is holding up. Any other iPhone that I hold feels naked - having the back on it not only makes it look nicer but it also provides much needed grip, as well as impact absorption when the phone is set down. I love it.
The Griffin A-Frame iPad Stand: The iPad’s Smart Cover...