Posts

Posted on

Disney Movies Anywhere

One of the apps I worked on at Chaotic Moon launched today. This one isn’t just any app, though. It’s called Disney Movies Anywhere, and it allows people who have purchased Disney movies in iTunes to own them in Disney’s entitlement service, called KeyChest. A user downloads the app, links their Disney account to their iTunes account, and all iTunes-purchased Disney movies are automatically transferred to Disney’s system. All of the movies streamed to the app come from Disney’s cloud, not from iTunes.

In addition, if you have a library of movies in KeyChest, those movies will appear as purchased in iTunes. At that point they’re treated like any other purchased Apple content: they can be downloaded to iTunes on the desktop or to an iOS device, they’re available for streaming via iCloud, and so on. All you have to do is link your Disney account with your iTunes account and the rest happens automatically.

Apple is allowing another digital media entitlement system access to iTunes. Think about that for a minute. If this becomes a trend, it could change the nature of digital media forever.

One other thing I’d like to add is acknowledgement of the outstanding team of engineers that build this app. They put together a very complex piece of software in a very short amount of time, and at no point during the project were there any emergencies or fires. We worked at a sustainable rate throughout the project, and never had to go through crunch time where we were grinding through nights and weekends.

A huge round of applause to Dimitri Stancioff, Matt Klosterman, and Zef Houssney. Amazing work.

Posted on

‘American Hustle’ Is Overrated

‘American Hustle’ Is Overrated

Kevin Fallon in The Daily Beast:

All across the country, people are confessing. They are lurking with only their most trusted confidantes in shadowy corners. They glance around nervously to make sure no one is in earshot, because, from what they hear, what they are about to reveal should bring them great shame.

“I didn’t really like American Hustle,” one whispers, heart pulsing like Justin Bieber on drag race night.

When American Hustle came out, I read so many glowing reviews and read so many praising tweets that I had high expectations when I went to see it. I thought it was a good movie, but definitely not a great one. It reminded me of both Silver Linings Playbook and Argo. Both Oscar-nominated movies that were enjoyable but ultimately forgettable popcorn movies masquerading as serious art.

Posted on

Wouldn’t we be shocked and dismayed if the NSA wasn’t doing this? What did people think all those billions of dollars of funding were for? I increasingly feel like we’re all on some gigantic collective fainting couch. Oh my WORD I can’t believe that spy agencies SPY.

Everyone I talked to in 2002: “I can’t BELIEVE that the intelligence agencies didn’t ‘connect the dots’ to catch the hijackers before 9/11.” Everyone I talked to in 2013: “I can’t BELIEVE that the intelligence agencies are collecting and correlating all this information!” If I worked for the NSA, I’d be so confused right now. #1, catch the bad guys. #2, don’t spy. OK, now you go figure it out.

Marc Andreeson has a point.
Posted on

Apple’s App Store Usage Numbers Suggest iOS 7 Adoption at 74%

iOS 7 adoption is continuing apace:

After less than three months on the market, iOS 7 is installed on some 74 percent of devices connecting to the App Store, according to a chart posted on Apple’s App Store support page for developers.“

And later:

For comparison, as [noted by TechCrunch](noted by TechCrunch), the latest version of Android – KitKat – only reports a 1.1 percent adoption rate.

Nerds should much more outraged than they are about the extent to which Google seems okay with letting Android slide down the path toward long-term mediocirty. Just because nerds can root their device and get KitKat doesn’t mean overwhelming Android market share is in any way healthy for the long-term prospects of mobile. The last thing anyone should wish for is another mediocre hegemon with 90% marketshare, like Windows in the 90s.

Posted on

Bar None

Bar None

Emily Nussbaum reviews “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelpha” for the New Yorker:

In the fiftieth episode of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” two pathetic drunks, Dennis and Mac, brainstorm about an online personal ad for their deadbeat friend Charlie. When they get to his favorite food, Charlie tells them that it’s “milk-steak.” They stare at him, dumbfounded.

“Just put regular steak,” Mac says.

“Don’t put steak, put milk-steak,” Charlie says with confidence. “She’ll know what it is.”

Since it débuted, in 2005, “Always Sunny” has become the milk-steak of sitcoms: the perfect food that no one has ever heard of. In a fairer universe, it would be heralded as not merely the best sitcom on television but one of the most arresting and ambitious current TV series, period.

Sunny is easily one of my favorite shows on TV. When my son was born in January and I was up late with him, I’d buy a season from iTunes, watch episode after episode until the season was done, then move on to the next. It’s the only comedy I can think of that had me laughing out loud almost every episode. Truly a fantastic show, and as the review points out, it seems to fly completely under the radar.

Posted on

Why Android First Is a Myth

Why startups tend to build their apps for iOS first:

In the US, iOS market share is still extremely strong (even pre-iPhone 5s launch data showed Android having peaked, so Q4 data will be interesting with Apple’s refresh). Since the vast majority of innovative mobile startups come out of the US, Apple’s stronghold domestically has an absolutely massive impact on developer mindshare—e.g. even if China gains another 400M subscribers this year, this fundamental fact won’t change.

This is a point that gets lost so often when Android’s market share numbers are touted as evidence that iOS is on the wane. The U.S. market is completely different, and here the iPhone continues to grow market share.

All of my conversations over the past year with Android developers, 3rd party dev shops, more mature startups developing on both platforms and investors confirm a simple hard reality: building and releasing on Android costs 2-3x more than iOS. This is due to a multitude of reasons: less sophisticated tools, generally more cumbersome APIs, fewer exposed advanced features, enormous QA issues brought on by fragmentation, etc. The rough rule of thumb is for every iOS engineer you actually need two Android engineers—or twice the development time.

I’ve seen this personally over and over. Developing for Android is harder, and as a result costs more and takes more time. It’s just an objectively worse development environment.

Posted on

In short, these eighty members represent an America where the population is getting whiter, where there are few major cities, where Obama lost the last election in a landslide, and where the Republican Party is becoming more dominant and more popular. Meanwhile, in national politics, each of these trends is actually reversed.

In one sense, these eighty members are acting rationally. They seem to be pushing policies that are representative of what their constituents back home want. But even within the broader Republican Party, they represent a minority view, at least at the level of tactics (almost all Republicans want to defund Obamacare, even if they disagree about using the issue to threaten a government shutdown).

In previous eras, ideologically extreme minorities could be controlled by party leadership. What’s new about the current House of Representatives is that party discipline has broken down on the Republican side. On the most important policy questions, ones that most affect the national brand of the party, Boehner has lost his ability to control his caucus, and an ideological faction, aided by outside interest groups, can now set the national agenda.

Through redistricting, Republicans have built themselves a perhaps unbreakable majority in the House. But it has come at a cost of both party discipline and national popularity. Nowadays, a Sunday-school teacher can defeat the will of the Speaker of the House.

Dysfunction in Washington is now structural in nature. Gerrymandered House districts electing more extreme partisans unwilling to compromise, a Senate that requires 60 votes to accomplish anything substantive, and the loss of earmarks as a tool to enforce party discipline leads to a Congress incapable of acting. Under these circumstances, it’s only to be expected that the current Congress is one of the least productive in recent memory, or that we’re now a mere days away from a government shutdown, and have a non-trivial chance of defaulting on US debt in about a month.
Posted on

64 bits. It’s Nothing. You Don’t Need It. And We’ll Have It In 6 Months

64 bits. It’s Nothing. You Don’t Need It. And We’ll Have It In 6 Months

A pundit brushes off the 64-bit A7:

We’ll see just how good Apple’s marketing team is trying to leverage 64-bit. 64-bit add more memory and maybe registers. Period.

After benchmarks showed the iPhone 5s performance to be monstrous, the same pundit opines:

The improvements Apple made with the A7 are truly incredible, and they really went against the grain in their choices. With an industry obsessed with more cores, they went with fewer, larger and efficient cores. With people expecting v8 and 64-bit ARM in late 2014, Apple brings it out in 2013 with full Xcode support and many performance optimizations.” […] “Apple has done it again, but this time in unexpected fashion.

Unexpected to whom?