Links
- How is encouraging the development and maintenance of multiple simultaneous versions of an app going to be helpful to developers?
- Doesn’t each version come with its own bugs, complaints, and quirks?
- Don’t developers want easier ways to incorporate device flexibility into a single binary?
iDermal: The Magnetic Implant iPod Holder
iDermal: The Magnetic Implant iPod Holder
Welp, absolutely no potential for unfortunate consequences there.
Microsoft To Make Same Privacy Change Google Was Attacked For; No One Seems To Care
Microsoft To Make Same Privacy Change Google Was Attacked For; No One Seems To Care
This is a good piece by Danny Sullivan of Marketing Land about the lack of coverage Microsoft’s privacy policy consolidation got this week compared to what Google got on a similar move earlier this year.
Mr. Sullivan’s analysis is thorough and worth a look, but I noticed a broader issue here for Microsoft:
Google matters and Microsoft doesn’t.
I’ll elaborate. Google got hammered by voluminous coverage because, in the minds of the tech press and many consumers, what they do with data matters. Microsoft, on the other hand, is not seen as an important player in the consumer data space. That perception may be inaccurate, particularly with the generally positive reaction to, if not widespread adoption of, SkyDrive and the new Outlook.
But it’s there: when it comes to privacy, Google is search and email and Android. Microsoft is, well, not much. Windows 8 and Surface may change that, but no one is holding their breath. In short, this looks like a case in which Microsoft got let less critical press coverage than they may have wanted: people complain about the things that are important to them. The unimportant things get ignored.
Councilman Kenney Bashes Immigration Laws
Councilman Kenney Bashes Immigration Laws
Philadelphia Councilman James Kenney made the following comment at the Restaurant Industry Summit, quoted by Randy Lobasso at Philadelphia Weekly's PhillyNow blog:
After 9/11, everyone became a ‘terrorist’—including that Mexican guy on a bike going from his lawn care job to his restaurant job. He is no threat to me, whatsoever. He is no threat to this country, whatsoever.
Kenney doesn’t like the immigration policy pushed by some “lunatics in Harrisburg” and wishes they would “exempt the city of Philadelphia” when they pass harsh immigration measures. Further, he stated that if he were mayor he wouldn’t cooperate with Immigration and Customs Enforcement (presumably beyond what the law requires).
I think there are more eloquent and nuanced ways to make the argument against strong immigration restrictions and criminalizing undocumented immigrants, but I respect the hell out of Kenney’s verve for the issue, which he said reminds him of problems his Irish ancestors faced in the earlier days of our nation.
Tumblr Puts More Focus On Photos With Photoset, Its New Standalone iOS App
Tumblr Puts More Focus On Photos With Photoset, Its New Standalone iOS App
Drew Olanoff, at TechCrunch:
By not forcing you to log into your Tumblr account, the company could attract a brand new set of users who just want to pull photos together without the hassle of creating a page, tagging things or worrying about how to share them.
Maybe this will work, maybe not. But I like Tumblr’s people because of stuff like this.
US Is Bleeding High-Skilled Immigrants
US Is Bleeding High-Skilled Immigrants
Gregory Ferenstein, writing at TechCrunch about Vivek Wadhwa’s latest research:
Nearly a quarter (24.3 percent) of engineering and technology companies had at least one foreign-born founder; in Silicon Valley, it’s nearly half (43.9 percent). Nationwide, they’ve helped employ more than half a million workers (560,000) who contributed $63 billion in sales just in 2012.
Those numbers demand superlatives: they’re staggering. The common assumption is that immigrants do jobs US citizens don’t want to do. This research would seem to turn those assumptions upside-down: immigrants often do jobs for which US policy, educational institutions, and deeply-ingrained social strictures simply leave our young people unprepared.
My Citizenship and Immigration class meets twice weekly, on Monday and Wednesday evenings. It really is a fascinating class, and offers a broadened perspective on a hot political issue this election season.
One thing I’ve learned from Professor Peter Spiro (of Opinio Juris and much scholarship), and from research like Mr. Wadhwa’s, is that immigration policy is not as amenable to applause-worthy one-liners as political candidates would prefer it to be.
The angle on Mr. Wadhwa’s recent research, and Mr. Ferenstein’s TechCrunch post, is that immigrant participation in US entrepreneurialism may have peaked already. I wonder, not cynically or rhetorically, but genuinely wonder, whether the US will be able to replace them with adequately-inspired and prepared citizens of its own, and whether the nation wouldn’t benefit from incentivizing continued and increased opportunities for citizens and immigrants alike.
I don’t know what that policy direction should look like, but I think it’s worth thinking, and most importantly, talking about.
Twitter List Copy
I just completely overhauled my Twitter lists, a few days after impulsively unfollowing everyone who didn’t follow me back. I deleted many lists and added many users to the ones I kept. I used Twitter List Copy to import all the users on other people’s lists into pre-existing lists of my own.
It uses oAuth so it’s password-free, and despite the disclaimer on the site, it seems to merge imported users with your pre-existing lists just fine. Thanks to Noah Liebman, who built this awesome tool. Follow him on Twitter or check out his website.
Why We'll Never Stop Talking About Steve Jobs
Why We’ll Never Stop Talking About Steve Jobs
Mat Honan, writing at Wired:
Jobs, like the titans of industry before him, realized that when we think about how the world works, we are actually thinking about the way people have made it to work. And that means that if you don’t like the way the world works, you are free to change it. Which is exactly what he did.
Honan’s was my favorite “one year since Steve Jobs died” post. It is, in many ways, the most insightful. It’s also, most importantly, the most respectful.
HP CEO Meg Whitman calls it like it is: bad
HP CEO Meg Whitman calls it like it is: bad
Meg Whitman, as quoted by Sean Gallagher at Ars Technica:
We aren’t as effective internally as we should be because of poor systems. We are not as competitive as we need to be in how we go to market because of our IT systems. We haven’t been using a compelling customer management or CRM system for years.
She has received some harsh criticism from industry watchers like John Gruber and MG Siegler for pushing back HP’s expected mobile phone launch to 2014 at the earliest.
That criticism is justified, especially given HP’s epic Palm/webOS fail.
But this is the most encouraging thing I’ve seen from HP in years: honest self-aware, long-term leadership commitment.
I say well done, Ms. Whitman. Now, call the caterer and lock some engineers in a room for the next year.
Talk by Steven Jobs - IDCA 1983
Talk by Steven Jobs - IDCA 1983
This Steve Jobs talk from 1983 (I was less than a month old…) is a series of astoundingly accurate predictions about the future of computing. The audio was sourced from a cassette tape, cleaned up a bit, and posted to Soundcloud by Marcel Brown. Read his post about it on his blog, Life, Liberty, and Technology.
The Honest Design Age
Allan Grinshtein of LayerVault, design software, designed for designers:
It would be crazy to call these designers lazy — there’s an awesome amount of work and detailed involved in recreating beautiful “rich corinthian leather.” Still, it is laziness to not continue to refine. Remove the unnecessary embellishments and keep stripping until you’ve almost gone too far. We believe that elegant interfaces are ones that have the most impact with the fewest elements.
As a user who wishes more designers would refocus their talent away from skeumorphisms and toward the elegance Grinshtein describes above, I couldn’t have said it better myself.
Kindle Library Bulk Delete
I want to thank Mr. Nathaniel Robertson for pointing people in need of cleaning up their Kindle archive to this bookmarklet that allows you to bulk-delete entire pages of Kindle Library content. Many thanks to the person behind Japanese blog Net Buffalo for solving this problem.
I, like them, needed to get rid of months of Instapaper cruft. This bookmarklet did the trick. Instapaper’s Kindle integration is wonderful, but I wish Amazon would let us auto-delete recurring content.
The Problem With Early Reviews
The Problem With Early Reviews
John Biggs, writing at TechCrunch:
In the end, the real reviews are the ones that percolate up out of the forums and blogosphere.
That’s absolutely true in my experience. Reviews by 20-/30-/40-somethings blogging from their basement or posting on their favorite forum are almost always more useful to me than the popular reviews. I still read the latter, but I rely far more on the former.
USPTO Third Party Prior Art Submissions System - Now Live!
USPTO Third Party Prior Art Submissions System - Now Live!
This looks, on its face, like a good thing. I wonder (sincerely, not sarcastically) how patent attorneys feel about it.
Amazon heads off app fragmentation on Kindle Fire, Android
Amazon heads off app fragmentation on Kindle Fire, Android
Kevin C. Tofel, writing at GigaOM:
This could mean vastly better tablet apps for the higher resolution Kindle Fires similar to the improved iPad apps that iOS developers made instead of scaled-up iPhone software.
I think he’s right: assuming developers embrace this change, it can only bode well for the quality of app experiences for consumers.
But that’s not the only angle here, is it?
I’m not a developer, so I have some questions. My questions imply their own answers, so correct me if I’m wrong:
What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology
What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology
Andreesen Horowitz co-founder and career CEO/investor Ben Horowitz offers some great advice in this 2011 post at his personal blog.
The best part about it is that, while it’s aimed at aspiring CEOs and entrepreneurs, it really applies to any major life project.
Here is one piece of advice from Horowitz that stuck out to me:
The first problem is that everybody learns to be a CEO by being a CEO.
The best way and, in many cases, the only way, to truly learn anything is to do it, cataloging and routing around or mitigating damage from your mistakes as you go forward.
And another:
If she can separate the importance of the issues from how she feels about them, she will avoid demonizing her employees or herself.
Our emotional responses can be helpful, but there are many decisions which it is inappropriate to base solely on emotion. We need to learn when and how to make emotion secondary to logic, or at least find a Spock-like middle ground.
It’s definitely worth a read.