The Occasional Blargh

Speaking of theft, Lukas Mathis asks that Apple steal some features from WebOS.

He found that he uses the HP WebOS tablet more for work and the iPad for entertainment. This seems to be the case for most iPad owners, despite how much ✪ protests otherwise by presenting outlier after outlier. (It was funny how he missed the implication of this study). I really suspect two major things that keep the iPad from being much more than a consumption device (ignoring the noted outliers) is its still poor multitasking facilities and the lack of a file-system. iCloud and synching are two of the latest kludges to get around the fact that Steve Jobs was stubborn in his desire to kill the file-system. (He thought Spotlight could be an adequate substitute back for OS X before people convinced him otherwise.) I'll post thoughts on the file-system thing, later.

I’m back home.

Here’s a piece I find fascinating. Hopefully, you won’t think it is a fluff piece.

Jobs called Android a “stolen product,” but theft can be a tricky concept when talking about innovation. The iPhone didn’t emerge fully formed from Jobs’s head. Rather, it represented the culmination of incremental innovation over decades—much of which occurred outside of Cupertino. . .

If Google is guilty of using Apple’s ideas, Apple is equally guilty. Many researchers and companies invented technologies that predate the iPhone but made it possible. As Microsoft’s Buxton points out, Wayne Westerman (the multitouch researcher who sold his startup and became an Apple employee in 2005) cited the work of numerous early multitouch researchers in his 1999 PhD thesis. The iPhone incorporated key innovations pioneered by Bob Boie, IBM, Jazzmutant, Jeff Han, and others.

While Android clearly adapted some important iPhone innovations, Google’s engineers also added refinements of their own where they felt Apple’s approach lacked them. For example, the early iPhone notification system left much to be desired. . .

Google came up with a more flexible notification scheme. Rather than presenting them in a modal dialog box requiring immediate input before a user could proceed, Android displayed notifications briefly at the top of the screen, then added an icon atop the screen to signal existing notifications. When a user was ready to respond, she simply pulled down the notification bar to see a list of all pending notifications.

The picture above inadvertantly summarized Armin Vit’s review of the Windows 8 logo: “I don’t like Windows.”

Gearing for its latest OS release — after a couple of lackluster and user panned versions in Windows Vista and Windows XP (and continued mockery from OS X users) — Microsoft has been slowly releasing previews and developer versions of Windows 8, a complete rethinking of one of the most frightening computer-using experiences. . .

By the end of February, Microsoft will release a consumer preview (don’t call it Beta) of Windows 8. . .

Moving away from the more flag-like icon seems like abandoning two decades of equity — crappy equity, but equity nonetheless.

Unlike the complaints by Gene Steinberg on Consumer Reports, this review of the Windows 8 logomark by Armin Vit at Brand New really is biased. He can’t put aside his dislike for Windows to not pepper his review on the logo with insults about the operating system (with one blatant inaccuracy) – irrelevant to a review about a logo. That he throws in those jabs and the inaccuracy (being that Windows XP was panned by users) makes it very hard to view the review as impartial. Of course to add insult to injury, it turns out the logo was not the true Windows 8 logomark. (The logo text had too thick a stroke, as though the text was set to bold erroneously.)

For what was a mythological problem, Apple is offering actual hard cash to deal with it, albeit not very much. If you bought an iPhone 4 before Friday, you can soon again request a free bumper or ask for $15. It's more of a moral victory for the claimants than anything else. Anyway, I do have an ulterior motive for bringing up this bit of news. Some in the Apple press has since converged on a version of the tale where the big bad media blew up a common and minor defect into a huge scandal to bully Apple, possibly out of an anti-Apple bias. In other words, Gene Steinberg is still mad at Consumer Reports. What’s the story as of last week, Morning Glory? (Emphasis mine)

A notable example is the curious way in which they handled the alleged “Antennagate” scandal, involving the original iPhone 4 and the possibility that you could kill reception with what became known as a “death grip.” Despite all the visual evidence that a similar phenomenon could be easily duplicated on other phones when held in somewhat different ways, CR decided that only the iPhone 4 was at fault and, despite getting the highest numeric rating in a smartphone feature, still wouldn’t recommend the product.

Well, I guess the statement can be considered technically accurate, as practically strangling other phones is a somewhat different way to hold a phone as compared to the way Apple illustrated to people as to how to hold the iPhone 4.

Erik Wemple finds it curious that The New York Times’ invitation to Apple for Mountain Lion seems to have gotten lost in the mail.

An exclusive, of course, cuts two ways. Payoff for the recipient and pain for the shunned. Heading up the latter camp is the New York Times, arguably the most aggressive pursuer of Apple-related news on the planet. The paper has a hulking tech pod to evaluate its products and has dug deeply into the business of Apple via its iEconomy series.

And in the process, the paper has come up with a shovelful of human suffering. This story on an Apple facility in China includes this explosive graph:

Employees work excessive overtime, in some cases seven days a week, and live in crowded dorms. Some say they stand so long that their legs swell until they can hardly walk. Under-age workers have helped build Apple’s products, and the company’s suppliers have improperly disposed of hazardous waste and falsified records, according to company reports and advocacy groups that, within China, are often considered reliable, independent monitors.

Hard-edged reporting of that sort carries a price when it comes to a company like Apple. You may not be on the short­list the next time the company debuts one of its products.

He notes that The Daily ✪ still has its preferred access.

This seem like an important charge from Jason O’Grady.

Apple’s public relations department is notoriously tight-lipped and only responds to a limited subset of the mainstream media, and usually only the outlets that write positive things about its products.

If you dare to write an unflattering piece about Apple or — heaven forbid – post a rumor you’re almost guaranteed to lose your access to Apple. I know this firsthand because I’m the poster child of Apple’s PR blacklist.

(O’Grady ran PowerPage which was subject to a lawsuit by Apple in 2004 over information published about a product Apple was working on in secret.)

The article then goes on to the case surround Path, and how it accessed the iPhone’s contact data which, while against Apple’s written rule, appeared to be secretly tolerated by Apple. Reaction to this by the tech press was interesting, and not because of the spectacle of MG Siegler’s breakdown. Discussions about Apple's role was very muted. Admittedly, the past two weeks I’ve been somewhat preoccupied and I was not following the tech press as deeply as I do typically, but I did not recall seeing much discussion about what was the apparent failure of the app-review process. Well, not until MG Siegler in a last ditch attempt to defend Path came out to claim that everybody else does it too. I’d expected that charge to have lead to some pointed questions to Apple, but instead we got some muted defenses (though criticisms here and there were levied).

But yeah, it does feel like good cheer is required to retain good relations on this beat. On that front, the left coast is not at all different from the right coast.

I have returned from New York which was a trip dedicated to having some fun. Though I now will prepare to leave for Detroit for a more solemn occasion, to say farewell to my father. After four years, he had succumb to cancer. As such, you likely won’t see new posts for a while.

 

It’s good to know that MG Siegler believes in himself, because I can confidently say no one else will.

Good morning, readers. I am in beautiful, frozen New York on a brief sabbatical from the infuriating tech press. Thanks to a victory from a Twitter raffle, I will get to attend a preview of Justice League: Doom, from which the above picture comes from. (And that is the excuse I’m using to post a pic of Wonder Woman here.) The direct-to-video movie, written by the late Dwayne McDuffie, is an adaptation of the JLA comic book miniseries Tower of Babel written by Mark Waid.

Batman has been secretly coming up with plans to take down other members of the Justice League. You never know when Superman may go rogue, or just become a dick. Of course, you may never know when the league’s enemies will get those files. (OK, honestly, that’s the type of thing you’re not supposed to write down.)

Still, I’m hoping it is a good show. It’s one of the last things written by the beloved and acclaimed McDuffie, and it is a sort of reunion for the vocal cast of Bruce Timm’s Justice League animated series. (Timm now produces these direct-to-video movies, as well as the upcoming Green Lantern animated series.)

The movie goes on sale on February 28th.

Dude so stole the picture I was going to illustrate my next post with. (Insider secret: I actually look for pictures to post first, then decide what the subject of my blog post will be based on the picture. You may think it’s a stupid system, but it’s my stupid system.) Anyway, I see I’m not alone in seeing someone being a bit two-faced about a particular iOS developer and its gathering of user data that users were not aware that the developer was gathering.

One of the problems of an industry press is there is usually far more pages to fill than there are stories to fill them. This is true in almost every industry, and this was true even back before the Internet took away the physical limit of pages. Thus, the phenomena of “press release” stories. Make a provocative claim, whip up some statistics to prove your claim, and blast out a press release; reporters desperate to fill the unfillable news hole will make some nominal rewrites, maybe quickly think up an opinion to sprinkle in to help differentiate from the other reporters, and send the article to be published.

And with that, we present the Techmeme-friendly report that claims “Apps have created a half-million new jobs”. What is an “apps” job and how do we know how many jobs they created in the economy? They just counted how many job postings mention things like “iPhone” or “app” or “Blackberry”. Such a rigorous methodology. The same standard could prove Microsoft Word has created millions of secretarial jobs. (The report does not seem to consider the possibility that some of those jobs may have just shifted away from other, declining programming disciplines.) Then it adds in multiplier effects in order to argue that increases in other industries came because of those newly created jobs. (This is not a poor assumption to make, but they have not done much to prove the direct increases, much less these indirect increases.)

As weaksauce as this report is, it touches all of the correct biases of the tech-press. Smartphones and related businesses are the future. The idea we’re in a new tech-sector gold-rush. We will see this report (PDF) cited over and over again.

✪ comments on European computer sales.

I wonder if there could have been some external economic shock that may have impacted. . . oh why do I bother?

✪ Reactions to Gruber follows an even more ridiculous dust up between the Apple hive-mind and Violet Blue, where we learn that fact-checking is completely optional when you're selling commentary and outrage.

I'm sure David Foster Wallace would be proud.

(Also: I can finally retire!)

I don't like to go into my personal life here, but for anyone who was curious as to why I have been inconsistent in writing here, last month my father had suffer further complications and finally succumb to cancer.

Now, you know why I missed the interesting reactions by the Apple press to the sweatshop stories breaking through into the mainstream press. (Sending it over to Raging Thunderbolt who raged in real time. I'm sure Daring Fireball dared him to in real time.)

Will Kujawa of OKedition seems to think I just don’t understand. If that's so, you have to wonder why Apple still claims ownership rights and restrictions on the output of the file (just not the words itself, thanks to the rewrite).

If you want to charge a fee for a work that includes files in the .ibooks format generated using iBooks Author, you may only sell or distribute such work through Apple, and such distribution will be subject to a separate agreement with Apple.

This is still akin to Adobe preventing you from selling PDF books except only through an Adobe store, or Windows Live Writer or MarsEdit preventing me from posting nicely formatted blog posts here, or Typepad preventing me from exporting these nicely formatted blog posts to another service.

Sorry, I think Will just don’t understand. This feels like another attempt by Apple, partially thwarted, at locking authors into the iOS ecosystem. There is precedent, here. Why again did they initially mandate all iOS applications be created in XCode only?

It should also be noted, the contract as now written leave us an oddly curious loophole. As Michael Tsai writes:

Apple is apparently OK with you using iBooks Author to create e-books and then convert the .ibooks files to .epub and sell them. You can also use (hypothetical) third-party software to create .ibooks files and sell them. But you’re not allowed to create and sell .ibooks files with iBooks Author—although it’s not clear how Apple would be able to determine which app created the file.

It’d be interesting if somebody put this little loophole to the test.

Oh, and I have a new reader! Hi, Will.

If they are so smart, then why do they keep doing stupid things and creating such controversies? Lawyers don’t typically publish draft contracts that have to be revised when the client notices that — “Whoops, this contract may inadvertently sign to us all of your intellectual rights in all of perpetuity.” Lawyers pride themselves on writing contracts to mean exactly what they want them to mean. I’m sure Apple doesn’t hire sloppy lawyers.

MG Siegler is right in one respect — Apple Is Not Fucking Stupid.  So it is odd he then immediately argues that Apple put out a fucking stupid contract. I find it more likely Apple had the contract written as maximalist as they thought they could get away with, but then walked it back when they found out which parts would be unacceptable to its users — as we’ve seen before.

The Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Jobs and the Temple of Cupertino

In reading this article several months ago — “The ‘Year of the Linux desktop’ isn’t coming” by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes — I was struck by how many words were spent heaping praise on Linux, as though the opinion was rancid cabbage that had to be doused in chocolate and whipped cream in order to be accepted. I never quite understood why writers had to spend three sentences with praises for every sentence of criticism. Well, now I can see why tech writers succumb to that impulse.

Two days ago, Ed Bott wrote a short and simple article.

What was the point of that article?

To make it even easier for readers to figure out, he wrote a thesis statement — well, a thesis question — in addition to the summary that ZDNet places at the top of each blog-post:

The data paints a vivid picture of where each company’s revenue comes from.  Microsoft is a software company. Apple’s a hardware company. But what business is Google in?

Following that statement was three pie charts, one for each company, to illustrate from where each company’s revenues come from.

So, what was the point of this article? Did you answer “It’s an attack on Apple!”? If so, you are a knight-templar of Apple, like MG Siegler. MG Siegler read the article and saw an attack on Apple no one has made. “The pie-charts are the same size, so Ed Bott must be trying to imply the three companies make the same amount of money. THAT IS A LIE! A LIAR LIARLY LIE! Apple MUST BE AVENGED of this SLUR on her name!” Siegler goes on to write two posts to rebut this imaginary attack. Then he went on to mock Steve Ballmer, for this latest campaign against the temple of Apple failed.

Living the life of a knight templar of Apple must be trying. To hear every murmur as a possible slur on Apple. To see every criticism as an act of open rebellion on Apple. To internalize the paranoia of the organization can’t possibly be enjoyable.

On a serious note, MG Siegler’s behavior is similar to that of groups like Accuracy in Media and the Media Research Council. Rather than balance, these actors want its respective corner of the press to vindicate the position it holds dear.

*Lame photo illustration by me based on this picture.

UPDATE: Reread this post and ran it through a spell-check. There were too many typos to list. “Liarly” stays though.

Ambivalence is today's and this week's second most searched for word at Merriam Webster. I'll be vain and think it is because you all missed me. I'm told people prefer bloggers with inflated senses of self-worth and vanity. I'm doing it for you.

“Raging Thunderbolt” on Gruber:

The implicature is that opinionated viewpoints, like Gruber’s and MG Siegler’s, are the way to go. The implicature is also that MG Siegler’s recent attack on The Verge and the subsequent ultra-defensive stance are perfectly justified.

But if Gruber scrolled down, he would also find Rosen saying that:

I think it’s wiser to be ecumenical about this. A great deal of progress can be made with a pluralistic solution. Let’s have View from Nowhere people flourishing side by side with “here where I’m coming from” journalists, and see what happens. Ease up and let both systems operate– sometimes within the same news organization.

This is the second time John missed something because he did not scroll to the end. Gruber, please turn on those scroll bars. You are not used to bar-less Lion, yet.

Though perhaps it’s deliberate...

Of course, there’s no room for ecumenicality in the world of dogmatism. So that part of Rosen’s view is conveniently elided.

Yeah, I guess it was always curious that the parts that alter or negates the argument Gruber puts forth are always out of view, never to be quoted.

...

Nah, John just needs to turn the scroll bars back on.

Jim, you’re not even that original.

I’ve regularly found that the people who write these anti-definitions for “fanboy” to try to turn the accusation around really are in fact fanboys. (I see Jim pulled Marco off the wagon.)

Fun refresher from the Vox days: Building Better Fanboys.