The Confusatory

The cult of personality around Steve Jobs has mislead many. Articles looking to reminisce about his...

Tue, 01 May 2012 10:22:47 -0700

The cult of personality around Steve Jobs has mislead many. Articles looking to reminisce about his time at Apple in the mid-’80s tell big stories of his “mercurial asshole” tendencies. They overemphasize his insistence to simplify, and misstate it as “simplify until there’s nothing left”. It’s easy to forget that his early days at Apple could be summarized as “success in spite of himself”, and that he was fired from the company he co-founded.

The second Steve Jobs, the hitmaster at Pixar and Apple, is the one we should dissect and understand. Fast Company’s May 2012 cover story is about his “so-called wilderness years”. I can’t pull-quote it, because it’s a deep, arcing thematic discussion, not a series of punchy anecdotes. Go read it. The internet will still be here when you’re done, don’t worry.

If you didn’t read the Fast Company article yet, here’s a story about the Steve that no one should emulate.

Behind the Scenes of Apple’s ‘Think Different’ Campaign (via Buzz and implodr):

We played the spot once, and when it finished, Jobs said, “It sucks! I hate it! It’s advertising agency ****! I thought you were going to write something like ‘Dead Poets Society!’ This is crap!”

Clow said something like, “Well, I take it you don’t want to see it again.” And Steve continued to go on a rant about how we should get the writers from “Dead Poets Society” or some “real writers” to write something…

The original script we presented to Jobs is below. As you can see, it’s very close to the final script that would eventually go to air… “Jobs has seen a ton of scripts, and he’s gone full circle… we’re moving ahead with your ‘Crazy Ones’ script.”

Buzz Andersen discusses the Cult of Jobs at length, and has this to say:

The biggest thing that bothers me about the “Cult of Jobs” is that… people often seem to mistake the unfortunate, frequently counterproductive, side effects of the personality that made him great for the very cause of his greatness.

… An entire generation of entrepreneurs is learning the folkloric lesson that the secret to success is to be a mercurial asshole who abuses everyone and listens to no one.

There’s a reason people like Steve start successful companies: because they believe in themselves, envision their success unwaveringly, and don’t compromise. But there can be a dark side to that fanatical self belief: a disdain for the ideas of others.

I suspect one of the biggest [reasons for Steve’s late-in-life success at Apple] is that he finally managed to surround himself with brilliant people… who knew how to handle him, curb his worst tendencies, and present important ideas to him in a way that he would accept.

With those fresh in your mind as Steve Jobs, the CEO Anti-Pattern, read Fast Company’s story and round out your worldview.

Paintballing with Hezbollah

Fri, 13 Apr 2012 14:48:28 -0700

Paintballing with Hezbollah:

nullarysources:

Mitchell Prothero, writing in Vice Magazine:

We figured they’d cheat; they were Hezbollah, after all. But none of us—a team of four Western journalists—thought we’d be dodging military-grade flash bangs when we initiated this “friendly” paintball match.

This is one of the most fascinating pieces about the Middle East I’ve read, well, possibly ever — certainly this year. Read every word.

Colin nerd-sniped with this at 1 AM a couple of days ago. I will never forgive him for it.

CEOs and the Candle Problem

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 15:14:42 -0700

CEOs and the Candle Problem:

A monetary reward will help your employees focus. That’s the point. When you’re focused you are less able to think laterally. You become dumber.

(via handbecomesclaw)

Face Hallucination

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 00:37:51 -0700

Face Hallucination:

Machines simulating the human process of “up-rezzing” a face. Spooky, mostly. The Seinfeld example is particularly almost-right.

Machine Pareidolia: Hello Little Fella Meets FaceTracker – Ideas For Dozens

Wed, 11 Apr 2012 00:35:29 -0700

Machine Pareidolia: Hello Little Fella Meets FaceTracker – Ideas For Dozens

"The future we were promised, of living in space, of jetpacks and pellet foods, is simply not going..."

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 23:36:44 -0700

“The future we were promised, of living in space, of jetpacks and pellet foods, is simply not going to happen. … while we reject the macho dark survivalist future of envirotechnological collapse, we also must give up the NASA-Concorde extopia we have been pining for forever: these are the futures of an extinguished past, a worldline that didn’t work out, a dead end.”

- http://booktwo.org/notebook/hauntological-futures/

"Hauntology is a coming to terms with the permanence of our (dis)possession, the inevitability of..."

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 23:36:00 -0700

“Hauntology is a coming to terms with the permanence of our (dis)possession, the inevitability of dyschronia.”

- Hauntological Futures | booktwo.org

I’m in the midst of an adventure through the New Aesthetic. Pardon the pull quotes and...

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 23:23:39 -0700

I’m in the midst of an adventure through the New Aesthetic. Pardon the pull quotes and half-structured thoughts and mumblings, I’ll make sense of it all soon enough.

"His explanation for why his novels have snapped to the now is that there’s not enough solid..."

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 23:21:50 -0700

“His explanation for why his novels have snapped to the now is that there’s not enough solid present around on which to erect a plausible future. There are too many wild cards around. Writing something set in 2060 demands you address so many issues that we know about now, but can’t imagine how they’ll pan out, that convincing prediction becomes impossible.”

- russell davies: something something something

Why New UI

Wed, 04 Apr 2012 10:57:00 -0700

iOS has been a playground for new and novel user interfaces for the last four years. Many experimental ideas for navigation and actions have been invented, and while not all of them have been intuitive enough to ship or stayed popular over time, many now-obvious and common interface elements started when one developer deciding to try something “a little different”. I’m not interested in writing a long-winded history of UI creation and evolution on iOS, though: instead, I’d like to examine one part of a new application in detail. I think there’s value in understanding the tiny changes between two similar applications, and in this particular case, it’s interesting to see a conscientious design decision forcing changes across an entire application.

Sparrow is a new email client on iOS. It has a couple significant interface and interaction differences for users accustomed to iOS’s Mail. While it may seem like rearranged furniture just to appear different, these small design changes had a measurable impact on how quick and easy it is to perform some actions.

I’ve used Mail on my iPhone and iPad for a long time. I have a deep hatred for the time devoted to the “throwing away this message” animation, since it prevents me from interacting with the application, and ~~I still await the day I can create a mailbox or folder on an iOS device and not my Mac~~ [Ed: mailbox creation was added in iOS 5.0]. I’m happy there’s a development studio that not only made a great mail client for iOS, but tried to one-up Apple’s efforts in many tiny ways. It’s valuable to look at a few of their changes in greater detail to understand the trade-offs made by each application.

Sparrow has a laundry list of features worth liking (I list mine in the Features Addendum), but there’s one change in particular that I love: it has no bottom toolbar. This has been a trend in iOS applications recently, and I support it: it maximizes how much screen is available for the main view of the application. To be more efficient than a standard toolbar or tab bar is easy: if you don’t devote 10% of the screen to static pixels, you’re in the lead. However, this requires a serious re-evaluation of each function performed by buttons or labels in those bottom bars. In Sparrow, removing the toolbar forced a basic rethinking of what each button does, when they’re most used, and where they should live.

There’s two places where Sparrow removed the toolbar: in the message list, like an inbox, and in the message view, when you’re reading an individual message.

The Message List Toolbar: to kill it without removing any functions that Mail contains, Sparrow needed to find a home for three items: a way to refresh the mailbox, a display of the refresh status, and a way to compose a message.

Refreshing the mailbox and the refresh status can be neatly combined and moved to the top of the messages list, into a pull-to-refresh header. Compose, interestingly, stayed put, but moved from having a roomy toolbar all to itself and into a floating Compose button.

The Message Toolbar is a much tougher interface item to remove: it has Refresh, File message to a mailbox, Archive or Delete message (depending on the account’s preference), Reply to message, and Compose a message.

Refresh, once again, is the easiest: simply kill it. (Why was this ever in a message view, I can only wonder.) Reply moves to the navigation bar. Compose, Archive, and some other functions migrated into a floating button similar to the one in the message view. When selected, that button shows a small pop-out bar that temporarily covers the space normally taken up by a toolbar. Compose and Archive are on this pop-out, along with a few actions that Mail lacks: Delete (which Mail only exposed if archiving was disabled for the account); a dedicated button for Forward; a dedicated button for Flag. (In Mail, Forward is an option under the reply sheet, and Flag is an option under “Mark”.)

These changes affect the number of taps required to perform these actions. Compose has gained a tap: tap to show the pop-out, tap to Compose. Forward has neither gained nor lost taps, but, by moving into the pop-out, it got out of the way and made Reply faster: Reply is now one tap instead of two. Flagging helped out Unread in a similar fashion: Flag is still two taps, but Read/Unread is fast. (Again.) (Before Mail supported flags, the message view’s unread indicator was a one-tap Read/Unread toggle. It was glorious.)

Now these small changes have had even more cascading effects. Filing of messages into a specific mailbox was removed from the message view, and has to be done from the folder view. Printing is gone (but unmourned). (In Mail, it was, quite unnaturally, under the reply sheet.) Reply has replaced the next and previous message buttons in the navigation bar which are now gone.

I do not blindly celebrate this redesign: I liked filing a message while viewing it, and even worse, Sparrow doesn’t support cross-account filing at all. But other changes made my common email actions quicker, smoother, and much less dialog-based: one-button reply and one-button mark-as-unread are my favorites. I’ve heard similar mixed feelings from other users as their common actions got slower: compose and archive are now two taps instead of one, and the next and previous message buttons saw more use than I had guessed.

Sparrow’s changes have their strong and weak points. It’s not a redesign for the sake of a redesign, though: it’s a subtle and careful improvement of lots of actions and common movements through the application. I appreciate the work they did, and applaud their willingness to throw a common interface affordance away and see where it leads them.

A Features Addendum:

Sparrow also has lots of small UI animations and a few big features that Mail doesn’t. When you mark a message as unread, its unread dot doesn’t just change from blue to white, it “pops” out while changing. The layout of “From” and “To” has a tennis-like back-and-forth to it (ed: add screenshot) instead of being vertically linear. The message’s time stamp shows the day of the week. It indexes All Mail and Sent, so message threads not only contain all messages in a folder that are related to each other, but also include earlier messages that you’ve filed away and your replies. It integrates with Facebook, putting icons next to each person’s email in the “From:” and “To:” displays instead of showing the (often-blank) Address Book icon for just the message sender. Instead of drilling into a thread from a folder, and then to a message, you go straight to the message instead, and the “x of y” label at the top of a threaded message is tappable, and shows the whole message thread.

On my iPad 3, I’m seeing “bent lines” when...

Mon, 19 Mar 2012 12:22:00 -0700

[Flash 10 is required to watch video.]

On my iPad 3, I’m seeing “bent lines” when scrolling text or tableviews in portrait. You can see this for yourself: scroll any view with lines of text at a constant speed, and watch how they “bend” or “tilt” with your direction of motion: they’ll run downhill left-to-right when scrolling your finger from bottom-to-top, and uphill left-to-right when scrolling the other direction. This doesn’t seem isolated to UIWebView-based content (i.e. Safari or Instapaper, where I first noticed it): it’s also quite perceptible in native table views in their headers or cells.

Twitter feedback:

Peter Hosey asked if I was seeing this in landscape at all. I’m only seeing this in portrait; in landscape, lines of text appear to compress or expand vertically, but don’t exhibit any shearing/bending effects.
Other commenters said they noticed this on their iPad 1 and 2; I hadn’t used my iPad 1 that much and never noticed.

This effect was easy to capture on video in both the regular and Reader views of text in Safari, and in the Reader animation itself about halfway in. Note: despite this being shot with my iPhone 4S, which is known to use a rolling shutter, this video accurately captures what I’m seeing in person.

(Pushing 9 MB screen buffers 60 times a second is hard, let’s go shopping? (Assuming a 2048x1536 screen at 8 bits of color depth for each red, green, and blue sub-pixel, just updating the screen at 60 frames per second requires 540 MB/sec of buffer copies.) )

[Edit at 12:29 PST: added blurb about portrait vs. landscape.]

[Edit at 5:40 PST: added blurb about previous iPad hardware.]

Birth of a chair. (via BlogLESS)

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 23:37:00 -0700

Birth of a chair. (via BlogLESS)

iPhoto for iOS

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 09:22:47 -0800

I tried to install iPhoto on my iPad this morning.

“This app requires a front facing camera.”

Marketing language is hard.

I think I understand what they’re trying to do: iPhone 4/4S and the iPad 2 all include 512 MB of RAM and an A4 or better processor. The original iPad has 256 MB of RAM and a less-beefy GPU (both are big contributing factors to its slowness running iOS 5). iPhoto also doesn’t run on the 4th generation iPod touch, despite it having an A4 and a high-res display… but it only has 256 MB of RAM, so this theory about RAM still holds.

But choosing to use feature gating is odd. A lot of customers figure out what’s going on: you don’t have the newest hardware, so you don’t get the new toys. The sidebar on the App Store even explicitly states it requires an iPhone 4/4S or an iPad 2, but it seems circumloquacious to use device features instead of stating outright, “Sorry iPad owner, this only works on an iPad 2.” This seems like a byproduct of marketing’s efforts to shield users from knowing how much RAM is in their devices.

And what language do iPod touch users get?

“This app requires a digital compass.”

Things To Read

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 17:10:34 -0800

How did we get to a state where corporations seem to have more legal (and financial) access to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness than the average citizen?

Douglass Rushkoff discusses the rise of the corporation.

The prison-industrial complex is large, lucrative, far-reaching, and totally out of control. Americans in particular should read this: almost 1% of your fellow citizens are behind bars, and most of them are there for nonviolent crimes. Consider the long-term practicality of a society with strict moral rules regarding victimless crimes: I don’t think it’s a sustainable stance beyond a couple of generations.

Pauseless garbage collection is not impossible: it is merely very, very hard. Azul has being doing it for several years, but they had to solve some underlying assumptions and problems in very novel ways to do it.

Coaching, that is, the objective feedback of an individual familiar with the activity you’re performing, can drastically improve an individual’s performance in a variety of fields. So why do we only have coaches for sports? Atul Gawande discusses his experience with a surgical coach, and examines the practicality and benefits of coaches in education and other skilled fields.

Apple’s newest store in Amsterdam (pictured here) has another...

Thu, 01 Mar 2012 11:08:32 -0800

Apple’s newest store in Amsterdam (pictured here) has another one of their now-famous glass staircases. This photo reminded me of a comment my girlfriend made at the Upper West Side store: store designers at Apple sure don’t seem to mind involuntarily showing off their underwear. Or they don’t wear skirts very often.

"It seemed that only the machines were still alive, possessed of some perverse will that..."

Wed, 29 Feb 2012 16:55:27 -0800

“It seemed that only the machines were still alive, possessed of some perverse will that wouldn’t let them give up on this body.”

- Feet In Smoke: A Story About Electrified Near-Death

"Sustainability can be about money or quality or love. But however you aim to achieve sustainability,..."

Mon, 27 Feb 2012 17:16:00 -0800

“Sustainability can be about money or quality or love. But however you aim to achieve sustainability, it matters. You can have the greatest, loveliest product in the world, but if it dies, then you’ve failed.”

- apenwarr - What is the definition of success?

A script for Xcode to make your life suck a little bit less when you have API keys

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 16:42:14 -0800

A script for Xcode to make your life suck a little bit less when you have API keys:

Patrick and I co-wrote (he wrote, and I re-wrote and documented) a nice little script for Xcode. It lets you keep API keys in a file outside of your project’s version control system (great for open source work or for multiple developers with different keys). It’s nice. I hope it makes your day a tiny bit better.

Football is destroying itself

Mon, 13 Feb 2012 16:05:00 -0800

(via Kottke) Grantland has two articles, one by Jonah Lehrer and one by Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier, about how concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) may end the sport of football in the near future.

Remember “punch-drunk” boxers? It turns out they were literally pummeling their brains into an Alzheimer’s-like state of neuron death. Chronic exposure to concussions and subconcussive impacts tears apart the brain’s neurons and eventually causes it to destroy itself from the inside out. No one knows why or how, but it’s becoming clear that it’s trauma-induced brain damage, and it’s completely irreversible.

Why Science is Failing Us

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 18:12:52 -0800

Why Science is Failing Us:

Science is all about telling a story that fits a set of data points. These stories cut corners and ignore small pieces that don’t fit, because the complexity of explaining every bit puts you in a bind to figure out the whole gig, down to every last detail. The problem is, sometimes those small details matter a whole lot, and it’s why medicine (and, in my opinion, economics) is having a tough time understanding, much less improving, the modern world. (via paul)