Posts

Posted on

Does Anyone Want a Smartwatch?

Does Anyone Want a Smartwatch?

Reading this an hour before Apple’s extremely hyped event, the answers provided to the questions asked in this article are the ones to look for:

What’s notable is the percentage of people who don’t see what makes a smartwatch particularly useful. While MP3 players could be marketed as a replacement for CD players, and smartphones could be sold as better cell phones, smartwatches have nothing to displace. Companies have to persuade people to add a device to their lives. And given that, people aren’t going to buy smartwatches unless they do something that existing devices, like smartphones or fitness trackers, don’t do—or, in any case, unless they do it better.

So far, no smartwatch has accomplished this. Sure, you can put your Galaxy Gear to your ear and make a call, or hold it in the air and take a photo, but you can do all that—and without all the calisthenics—with a smartphone. Pop-up notifications about e-mails, appointments, and missed calls can be useful, but they can also be overwhelming, and many of the existing smartwatches are worse than smartphones at letting you customize the alerts. Fitness features like heart-rate trackers are nice, but specialized fitness devices like the Fitbit already do all that.

The question is whether Apple can introduce a watch that does more.

Posted on

The Jennifer Lawrence Leak: Who Is at Risk Now?

The Jennifer Lawrence Leak: Who Is at Risk Now?

The larger security problem, it seems, comes from a general misunderstanding about how a smartphone differs from, say, a large online forum. Most discreet people know not to upload nude photos onto the Internet but are unaware that a photograph shared privately, through a text message or e-mail, is hardly private at all. “Storing data on a phone carries an inherent risk,” Felten wrote. “The complexity of the software on our phones, and the network and cloud infrastructure to which they connect, makes it difficult to identify, let alone secure, all of the points of vulnerability. It’s prudent to assume that anything on your phone is potentially at risk.”

I wonder how much of this was caused by the simple fact that iCloud Photo Streams have always had a messy and confusing mental model. If you send a photo to someone directly from the Messages app, for example, by default it saves that image to the photo album. If it’s saved to the photo album, by default it uploads to your Photo Stream. Just like that, the image you meant to send to someone is also both in your camera roll and in iCloud. If you notice that private photo in your photo album and delete it, it’s not deleted from your Photo Stream, too. You have to switch over to that set of photos and also delete it there. It’s a mess.

Of course it’s possible some of these photos were meant to be kept, but I’m sure some, and maybe most, were meant to be ephemeral. I’ve never met a non-techie that understands what Photo Streams are, and it wouldn’t surprise me if that same confusion is why some of these photos were hackable in the first place.

Posted on

It’s like criticizing your children. Because I like Apple so much I want to make sure they’re not doing anything that will be a problem later. And this comes from the experience of Apple nearly going out of business in the ’90s. They’re no longer that underdog, but I’m looking at everything they do and saying, “Are you doing everything you should in the way that you should? Are your products living up to the ideals you set for yourselves?” I don’t write these reviews of Windows. I could never muster up the enthusiasm or indignity.

The Columbia Journalism School interviews John Siracusa.
Posted on

The two markets where iPhone sales are effectively at parity with Android are the USA and Japan, and those are also the two markets where the subsidy structure means that the iPhones is not at a big price premium to Android. This is probably not a co-incidence. Meanwhile, we also see strong indications that the second-hand market for iPhones, mostly in the $2-300 range, is also extremely strong. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to suppose that a new, attractive iPhone in this segment would be highly competitive. So, such a phone would sell, and sell well, and take a big chunk of the most valuable Android customers. Not, of course, the ones who value ‘open’ and the Google ecosystem above everything else, but true enthusiasts are a minority on both Android and iOS.

Benedict Evans, writing about cheap iPhones. It’s still a mystery to me why seven years after its introduction, Apple still hasn’t filled out the iPhone product line the way it did with the iPod and the way it’s starting to do with the iPad. Even more when you consider how much emphasis Tim Cook places on increasing Apple’s performance in developing markets.
Posted on

Anatomy of a Feature

I was recently reminded of an excellent post from back in 2009 by Brent Simmons called Anatomy of a Feature. In it, Brent walks through the seemingly trivial work required to add a “Save to Instapaper” feature to NetNewsWire. What seems at first like a simple call to a web service quickly expands into a number of non-trivial feature decisions that have to be made:

“Oh, it’s easy, just a quick http call. I could write a script to do it in like 20 seconds.”

But of course it’s not as simple as just writing a quick script. It’s tempting to think that adding a feature like this is just about adding the functionality — but there’s a bunch more to it than that.

So often people fail to grasp the inherent complexity of building software. In my line of work I often hear people talk about how easy it would be to throw in this or that feature with no regard to all the baggage that goes along with it. There’s very little intuitive understanding that software can be infinitely complex, that complexity is absolute poison to a software project, and that effective management of complexity is one of the key responsibilities of any project team. Even seemingly simple features can have implications that are far reaching.

Brent’s post is a really good examination of this issue viewed through the lens of a feature most software engineers can understand instinctively. It’s and worth a read if you work in or near software in any capacity, even if you’ve read it in the past. It’s a key principle that isn’t called explicitly out enough, yet it underlies so much of what we all do as part of software teams.

Posted on

Anti-Semitism Rising in Europe

Anti-Semitism Rising in Europe

One representative post:

My fears reached a high point on the eve of Bastille Day, and a day later on the anniversary of the Vel D’Hiv roundup of French Jews by the puppet Vichy government for transport to Auschwitz. On July 12 and 13, during a massive pro-Palestinian demonstration in Paris, several groups spread out to synagogues in the middle of Paris to threaten the Jews inside, while in Aulnay sous Bois, outside the capital, a synagogue was hit with Molotov cocktails. The mobs chanted “Death to the Jews,” and a politician from the Green party said it was “not surprising that synagogues are attacked when they support Israel’s policy.

Reading the somewhat terrifying anecdotes from that blog reminded me of a quote from Christopher Hitchens I read years ago on anti-Semitism:

I think that anti-Jewish prejudice is an unfailing sign of a sick and disordered person … It’s a horrible, conspiratorial, pseudo-intellectual, mean spirited, eventually lethal piece of bigotry.

When I first read that passage, it was the phrase “ultimately lethal” that stuck in my head. It’s troubling because it’s true, and seeing anti-Semitism flare up in pockets of Europe has it sticking in my head again now.