Jim Cloudman

Exclusive Betas

Wed, 08 Feb 2012 20:51:00 -0600

The new Tweetbot for iPad app was released to the public today, and it’s a great app. Here’s something I’ve noticed about what the blog writers are saying about it, though:

David Chartier:

I helped beta test both versions and there’s a ton of great new stuff.

MG Siegler:

I’ve been testing out Tweetbot for iPad for a few weeks now, it’s brilliant.

Shawn Blanc:

I’ve been using it for the past several weeks and the more I use it the more I like it. Highly recommended.

Though I miss the days of public betas - when for a little extra work and a little extra patience you could have all of the coolest stuff fresh off the build server - I understand why those days are over. For one, Apple won’t even let you publicly distribute an app beta, and that conflicts with the practice of never revealing a product until it’s ready to buy. Also, there are advantages to hand-picking beta testers. Above all, though, nobody will argue that the quality of apps have suffered as a result - well, at least I wouldn’t.

However, I’m a bit perturbed by how so many of the popular and highly-respected blog writers were in on the beta. Is it really a beta, or an exclusive preview disguised as a beta? Are the writers being let in on it because they’re good beta testers (which they probably are) or because they’re more likely to drive traffic to their new app than anyone else? It smells fishy to me.

MG Siegler: Now, What About Chrome For iOS?

Tue, 07 Feb 2012 13:15:22 -0600

MG Siegler: Now, What About Chrome For iOS?:

Still, a Chrome app for iOS would likely be largely what the other browsers available on iOS are: re-skinned versions of Mobile Safari (a wrapped for UIWebView). But that might not be all bad — Mobile Safari still offers a smoother browsing experience when compared to this new Mobile Chrome, as I laid out in my review.

It would be nice to have, but the biggest problem alternate browsers have with iOS is the OS-level integration. Unless your app has its own browser or is directly calling a specific app - and none of Apple’s built-in apps do - links opened anywhere can only be opened in Mobile Safari. Creating home-screen web app icons is also a Safari-only trick. Chrome’s inability to become the default browser will lead to a lot of frustration if it makes it to iOS, whereas Mobile Safari is so interwoven with iOS that it makes Internet Explorer and Windows look like a bitterly divorced couple.

Sample Data

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:33:00 -0600

 public static IEnumerable GetSampleShippingData()
        {
            return new List{ new ShippingData
               {
                   Carrier = "Planet Express",
                   DateShipped = new DateTime(3000, 1, 1),
                   ServiceLevel = "Next Day Intragalactic"
               }};
        }

Hey, gotta have some fun at work.

An Awesome Idea, Accidentally

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 13:29:02 -0600

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 PDF’s? Somebody make this app please, or direct me to one that exists!

The Automation Revolution

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:42:49 -0600

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 two or three decades down the road, the only available jobs that computers or impossibly cheap labor haven’t replaced are the ones that require imagination to do? Either everyone’s going to be in a design or programming role, or we’re going to have unbelievable unemployment. What we need to be asking is how to rework our economic system for a “utopian” future where the economy doesn’t require people to drive it.

Launch Center

Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:15:00 -0600

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 times.

Apple's Stunning Quarter

Tue, 24 Jan 2012 19:05:20 -0600

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.

Where It Hurts

Sat, 21 Jan 2012 11:41:00 -0600

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 practical way to ruin the MPAA and RIAA, however, is something that the tech industry is better positioned than anyone else to pull off.

The MPAA is an association of old-school content distributors more than anything else. Who else has content distribution networks? Apple, with iTunes and the Apple TV. Microsoft, with Xbox Live and the Zune store that backs that up. Google, with their Google TV. Netflix. Amazon. Hulu. Roku and Boxee, even. The fatal flaw in all of them is that the MPAA and RIAA provide the content.

Let’s leave the US government out of this, and assert that the greatest enemy to the Web - and therefore to the companies that rely on it - are the MPAA/RIAA. Given that, it would only make sense for the tech industry to remove their reason for existence. They can offer artists better deals for their music. Offer moviemakers bigger budgets. Offer to buy seasons of TV shows. They can become the new all-in-one distributors and compete directly with the recording industries.

Those industries would cut them off from their content to try to stop them, but they’re making one hell of a gamble: that a smaller music and movie selection is worse for the tech industry than having the internet seriously disrupted. Perhaps for Apple and Amazon this is a hard choice, but it should be a no-brainer for Google and Microsoft. And Netflix is already up to no good. We’ll see what comes next soon enough.

Design news of the day: Ford pulls a Samsung on Aston Martin.

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 12:38:00 -0600

Design news of the day: Ford pulls a Samsung on Aston Martin.

Why I Hate Android

Mon, 09 Jan 2012 22:57:50 -0600

Why I Hate Android:

MG Siegler explains how Android turned a do-no-evil company into sellouts.

Comments Commentary

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 17:03:30 -0600

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 with removing comments. It’s definitely lengthy, but if you don’t have your mind made up by the end of the article, then you’re better off flipping a coin to decide.

Microsoft To Offer Incentives to Sell Phones

Sat, 07 Jan 2012 14:38:00 -0600

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 market on Windows also generates Microsoft some revenue, it’s probable that they’re gambling away the majority of their revenue to gain marketshare.

All Windows Phones - including pre-7 ones - have less than 2 percent of all smartphones sold as of September. Desperate moves like this are a good sign that Microsoft doesn’t think that will go up very much without some help¹.

This is where I could say “Why does Microsoft even bother? The money’s obviously in the hardware.” However, IBM said that to Microsoft once and that didn’t end up being very accurate. ↩

My Speculation on Platforms That Probably Got Way Out Of Hand But Here It Is Anyway

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 22:13:00 -0600

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 that comes with the new world of apps, newcomers often find that it’s a physical impossibility to deliver better value when they cannot offer a range of applications out of the gate. There are two realistic plans.

Plan A: Right On Time with the Best Product

If you’re fortunate, the market will be untapped when you have your idea. In this case, you have to consider who exactly your customer is. This is not the obvious answer. An example can be taken from the phone market: the customer is the combination of customers and carriers. While in general consumer demand drives carrier demand, they’ll still try to arrange a situation that’s better for them first, consumers second.

I believe this is where Android derives much of its success: the carrier has a lot of control over the device’s makeup, the manufacturers are many small companies which have less individual bargaining power, and they have flexibility to differentiate against other carriers. The iPhone provides the exact opposite, because they degrade the consumer experience.

The result is that carriers promote Android where they can. Consumer demand helps correct this because not having the iPhone results in negative differentiation: customers prefer other carriers instead. When every carrier has the same phone, however, the iPhone is doing nothing to convince customers on other carriers to switch back, whereas an all-Android market gives good operators the power to be better or worse than the others. It keeps them from becoming nothing but a wireless ISP, with all the appeal of a utility company.

The way this played out was that the iPhone was first to the market with a next-generation smartphone. Eventually Android came along with a more carrier-friendly system, and this enabled it to take the marketshare lead. For Google, it seems to have worked out great, because marketshare is most important to them: the more users, the more ad money they make.

Apple had a smarter plan, though, in terms of profit: because they are one huge manufacturer with heavy consumer demand, they have huge bargaining power, which drives up their profits. On top of that, the focus on user experience over carrier convenience drove users who prefer to pay for quality applications over to their platform, amplifying the App Store profits. This wouldn’t allow Google’s ad-driven model to work as well, so they have the carrier-friendly approach instead.

So why didn’t this work for Microsoft? They tried to compete in the same market, but they can’t compete on carrier friendliness because of their focus on user experience, and they can’t compete on user experience because they’re not doing a good enough job to overcome the lack of functionality caused by being late to market and not having apps as a result.

I wouldn’t count Microsoft out, because they’re the most business-friendly of the three, and in 23 years when corporations finally buy new phones Microsoft could gain a lucrative niche there - unlike WebOS, which provided only minor theoretical advantages. However, this path is not for those looking for a quick buck and who are late to the market they want to enter. For that, it’s time to go to Plan B.

Plan B: Late, but Using a Parallel Market to Gain Traction

This is the Amazon route: build a product with a different primary goal, with enough attributes shared with the market in question that you can migrate it into that market later with something close to a mature platform and user base. The Kindle e-reader is a better platform for reading than Android/iOS¹, and it was something that Amazon built on when it built the Fire.

The Fire is interesting, because it’s widely considered to be a mediocre product. Once (well, if) we have a measure of its success, we can answer an important question: whether a mature platform is all that matters for success, or if a mature platform won’t save you if your product stinks.

Companies that can take this route are companies that have the hardware and software ability to make a device in the really big market, but have a primary focus on something else that they dominate. Two other possible examples are Nintendo and Facebook. Nintendo would be well advised to make a device in the iPod Touch’s class that is built for gaming first, apps second. It should provide better value to kids and teens who are more interested in games than Twitter clients - if they see that Nintendo’s device does games really well and apps OK, many will prefer it to the iPod Touch which does apps really well and games OK. Unless their gaming platform is compromised so much by this that a dedicated gaming platform is a better value proposition for those kids, it would give Nintendo a platform that they can build on, moving up to the TV/console level, and beyond.

Facebook could also do something similar, though it’s significantly harder for them since social network integration on existing devices is hard to beat. Theoretically, though, a phone that does social networking first and apps second could find a devoted niche to provide its platform a home.

Platforms of the Future

It’ll be really interesting to see how Google/Apple TV will come to life in the next couple years. Though I still think that a Siri-powered Apple TV, with improvements, would be a real innovation, Google also has the ability to make something similar, and Google’s advantage is that TV is more similar to the phone market than the tablet market. While there’s nobody standing in the way of what TV you buy, the integration with the media you watch on the TV is dominated by cable and media companies. Google is not afraid to buddy up with them, while Apple prefers to force them into submitting to their will.

I’ve grown pessimistic thinking about it. While Apple has relationships with media companies that Google does not, who is to say those are friendly relationships? Google is perfectly positioned to give them what they want and still get what it wants. Apple will have to work a little harder to achieve that - and Google has learned from Android. They must know that they can’t let Apple be first to the market, and they need to be competent with their user interface, and they have to have better content - especially on a media-only device like a TV.

The best case scenario for Apple is that their product puts whatever Google is working on to shame - giving the industry its dreadnought moment and forcing everyone else to start from scratch. The worst case scenario is Apple releases a TV several months after Google TV is out on store shelves, and Apple can’t extract comparable media deals with the content publishers because Google made them better offers.

What I’m worried might happen is that Apple will make the better product, but it will sputter out in the market because external forces conspire to make an inferior product the better value proposition. It has happened before, and it will happen again.

Well, everyone else says it is a better way to read. I like reading on a phone, though - easier to hold than a book or a Kindle, I think, and it keeps the text down to a nice, narrow and scannable width. ↩

No Comment

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 20:56:00 -0600

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 their fan mail feature coming up) for sharing with Tumblr bloggers. If they’re thoughtful replies or useful additions, that blogger should - if he/she is good people - mention you in an update.

I do have a couple points to make, though. First, what I see too often is that replies are only linked to if the original blog poster has something to say about it. Not every post is something you can add to, though. There’s a trap with blogging that applies to comments too: the idea that you can’t link to something unless you have useful commentary to add to it. I don’t agree with it - good replies should be worthy of promotion regardless of what you can think you can add to it.

I think it would be very cool if blogs without comments had, underneath each article, a list called “Great Replies” and then a list of hyperlinks to various replies that the blogger added because he/she thought they were great reads. It allows you to promote valuable input without having to think about it. The only downside is that doing this with Tumblr is fairly difficult since you basically have to add the links to the post itself - maybe that’s a feature to request.

Of course, that gets into the argument of whether you should be promoting people who reply to you. I don’t have a problem with it personally - if the input is good, then I think it’s deserving of promotion - but I can understand how some might think this is just feeding readers who already feel too entitled. I think popular bloggers who promote others who write good words are doing the right thing - they aren’t giving away their attention to others, they’re sharing it with them, and nothing rewards a good writer like a burst of attention.

My second point: if you have the time and patience, perhaps moderated comments aren’t so bad. You’ll have to deal with more input, good and bad, than without comments, as the barrier to entry is lower. However, you still control the message and discussion on your own site. The benefit is the same as the downside: the barrier to entry is lower, so you get more feedback, and if you don’t get much feedback then maybe it’s not a bad idea.

My blog currently averages, oh, 40 hits per post and has 250 followers, so my barrier to entry doesn’t need to be very high at all. So will I implement moderated commenting? Probably not. Why? I’m lazy. Twitter is a lot easier to manage than a comment engine. And I’ll wager that’s half the reason why comments are falling out of fashion.

Misconceptions About iOS Multitasking

Mon, 02 Jan 2012 14:18:59 -0600

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 they are a Skype-like app. Or if you’re getting turn by turn directions from one of them. Or if it’s one of the built in apps that doesn’t play by the third-party development rules, like Mail.”

Put simply, the misconception exists because it’s easier to explain than the correction. Really, the only acceptable way to think about background apps on iOS is this:

“Don’t worry about it, the apps aren’t going to kill your battery when you’re not using them.”

Kindle Fire vs. iPad 2

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 21:43:00 -0600

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 war fuel.

I can’t believe they actually put in “iForgot”...

Sat, 10 Dec 2011 22:26:19 -0600

I can’t believe they actually put in “iForgot” as an option with this dialog box. So cheesy…

HP Open-Sourcing WebOS

Fri, 09 Dec 2011 16:21:37 -0600

HP Open-Sourcing WebOS:

Translation: “We didn’t find any suckers who were willing to license it.”

Twitter's Redesigns

Thu, 08 Dec 2011 22:16:00 -0600

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 Twitter standing against it, while still providing options for power users.

(Little update: That doesn’t mean that they executed it properly, of course.)

Now TweetDeck… they went in the same direction, but that was an app that was intended for power users right from the get-go. This app, I’m not so sure they went the right way.

Minimal Mac's Response to that Pinboard Post

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 19:20:00 -0600

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 the note in the envelope with no return address.
Tumblr, Inc., 35 East 21st Street, 9th Floor, New York, NY, 10010

In other news, Tumblr has announced a new job posting: Mailroom clerk. The winning candidate will be paid in unmarked envelopes.