The smart-home's future

Posted on by Paul Jones

The “smart-thing” pattern is coming for all of our stuff: homes, cars, toasters, and more. Still, the smart home still is too confusing and expensive for many consumers. Dan Moren writes for MacWorld:

My home is dumb.

Part of the reason is that I don’t have a house—I have an apartment, which I rent. That limits the investment I can make into smart home technology: No rewiring thermostats or installing smoke detectors for me.

But the other part of it is that right now, the smart home industry is disjointed, fragmented. There are a ton of disparate gadgets and more competing and wackily-named protocols than I can shake a (smart) stick at.

I disagree. The Phillips Hue (and it’s “Friends of Hue”) program seems to me to be a popular standard, and it works very well. Apple’s HomeKit and Siri-integration works very well as a hub. And while I also rent and cannot touch my thermostat, there are plenty of consumer fire-alarms, scales, AI-assistants, locks, and blinds that work with iOS. In fact, because of the difference that Dan alludes to between a “smart home” and a “smart room”, I’d argue renting makes it easier and cheaper to get into home automation.

The biggest issue with the smart home is the price and the “long upgrade cycle” on things like locks.

Creative professionals and the Apple Pencil

Posted on by Paul Jones

The iPad Pro was reviewed by Amanda Summers on Medium, titled “A UX Designer’s Review of iPad Pro”:

We are confident in saying we are able to sit down with iPad Pro and Apple Pencil and create something just as good, if not better, than sketching traditionally using pencil and paper.

Apple Pencil feels completely natural in our hands. There’s no latency and the shading and pressure points feel all too real. The palm rejection technology works great, allowing us to rest our palm on the screen without worrying if it will mess up our drawing.

This is the most consequential review I’ve ever read of the iPad Pro, all of the reviews which came out on the first day were mostly to the tune of “Yeah it’s a big iPad, and the Pencil is cool but rather expensive.” If creatives are successfully using professional grade software to get real work done, this is an excellent sign of the potential of the platform. I do wonder though: is this a good sign for the form factor of the iPad Pro, or is it a good sign for the utility of a stylus on tablets generally? I suspect the latter, and we’ll see what Apple have to say in March about it.

Unrelatedly, I found the article’s placement and production interesting as a published piece. It’s under Amanda Summers’ name, but it’s “published in” her employer’s “organization” entity. I suspect that what MindSea Development get from having their employee’s publish to Medium is status and marketing, and it’s yet to be seen how Medium will make money from this.

Twitter is in fact changing the timeline

Posted on by Paul Jones

Twitter is changing their timeline to be algorithmic instead of chronological, rather like Facebook did some time ago.  Matthew Lynley reporting for TechCrunch:

Twitter today is unveiling a new Twitter timeline that shows tweets at the top that the service recommends, instead of the most recent tweets. They’re designed to be the best tweets that users may have missed based on what Twitter thinks you care about. […]

All this comes on the heels of a massive backlash against the move, which was first reported by BuzzFeed, in the trending topic aptly named #RIPTwitter.

If you don’t like changes a service you do not pay for makes, you don’t have any recourse other than leaving. I encourage you to do so.

Get off of GitHub

Posted on by Paul Jones

In recent months, we’ve seen the slow, gradual growth of open-source to quell the irony of GitHub: GitLab, a FOSS GitHub-style piece of software that also offers a subscription model, has been getting a lot of press. Perhaps relatedly, GitHub have been making organizational changes which do not strike me as innocuous. This would not be the first time that FOSS’s free (as-in-beer) hosting sweetheart has turned its back on the community: SourceForge, once a place much like GitHub today, made some changes that arguably opened the market for Github. From Wired:

In the years since career services outfit DHI Holdings acquired [SourceForge] in 2012, users have lamented the spread of third-party ads that masquerade as download buttons, tricking users into downloading malicious software.

There’s nothing inherently wrong about profit-seeking behavior, it’s only natural for a company to grow, to return value for its investors, and to, I suppose, conquer the world. What is a problem is when that companies product is, at least in part, software that was created with the utmost good intention: unconditional sharing. GitHub’s enterprise business of selling subscriptions per-repository to enterprise is great because programmers know-and-love GitHub, and enterprise IT can manage permissions and source code long after programmers move elsewhere. This was a magnificent aligning of incentives by GitHub: programmers get to share their code unconditionally (or whatever nerdy stuff they want to do), and their employers will pay to keep the lights on because the employees will ask to use the service at work. Superb.

A turn for the worse

What’s going to happen next with GitHub, however, I fear will not be so win-win. From Business Insider:

We also understand that [GitHub CEO] Wanstrath is working extremely closely with Andreessen Horowitz’s Peter Levine and Sequoia’s Jim Goetz, talking with one or both of them almost daily. These are two of the industry’s most respected VC investors.

One person familiar with Wanstrath’s relationship with these VCs told us they are “thrilled” with him and with the changes he’s been making at the company.

“Chris wanted to change leadership structure and he made a set of changes. You’re going to see a bunch of announcements where new folks are joining,” this person said.

The rest of the article discusses how GitHub are clearing house of longtime employees and removing the existing “meritocracy” in favor of “hierarchy.” In and of itself, I wouldn’t fear either of these changes: companies regularly undergo change and hierarchy is perhaps necessary at a certain scale. The reason this worries me with GitHub however is that they, in the eyes of the FOSS community and in the words of Obi-Wan Kenobi, were supposed to be the chosen one. Despite not being open-source themselves, GitHub have always (in my eyes) been a programmer’s company and a company of programmers, with great community outreach and geektastic stuff like Hubot. These changes and cosiness with VC people make me suspect that GitHub is looking to take on another round of funding and to monetize its “social” aspect.

At risk of self-aggrandizing, I’m going to quote myself from earlier today, where I was talking about Facebook:

I cannot imagine that a highly technically literate consumer base would be willing to subject themselves to the policies of many of today’s Internet giants. In particular, Facebook, and social media with similar business models, sell your attention to advertisers. In the early days, these services are great: they’ve usually received a huge amount of capital and provide a service users want to get their attention. When the capital runs dry, the investors want their 100x return, and the service has the user’s attention, they sell the user’s attention using information the users inputted themselves.

I may have to eat these words, because precisely what we have is a “highly technically literate consumer base” that’s “willing to subject themselves” to some VC-backed giant looking for “100x” return: me and developers like me. When I first began programming, I was so fickle, I bought fully into GitHub’s marketing of being a merit-based community of programmers, isolated from all the bullshit of corporate politics. Of course, there were problems with GitHub: it felt like the world stopped turning when it went down and there’s a whole slew of annoyances that maintainers of large projects have to deal with. But I looked past these because of the goodwill of the community.

The need to grow

The reason things have changed now and that it’s past time to get off of GitHub is that it’s not enough for groups like Andreessen Horowitz or Sequoia that company’s be merely profitable: an agency making Flash-based websites can be profitable. It has to be exponential. Here’s Matt Henderson, founder of Makalu, talking about what it’s like to take on venture capital:

[VCs are] not looking for a profitable business; instead, they’re looking for growth that provides the opportunity for a 100x exit. And their expectation is that you, the founder, will work to achieve that at any cost. And since their investment also brings the expectation of participation and inclusion in the running of the business, any company owner considering taking on investment would be well advised to make sure at the outset that everyone’s on the same page in terms of objectives.

Perhaps GitHub is seeing a downturn in growth of their enterprise business. Perhaps they fear competition from GitLab and need investment to fend it off. Perhaps they’re greedy and want to be as big as Facebook one day. I don’t know. But I’m certain that if the recent trend continues, we’re going to see GitHub positioned as a product that has the worst parts of LinkedIn and SourceForge. A programmer’s professional status will be tied to their open-source contributions and public side-projects, but when anyone downloads them, the software will come bundled with some browser plugin or “GitHub installer” or something ludicrous. Or maybe not, maybe GitHub will find a way to grow profit without selling out their users. I’m just not going to wait around to find out.

My thanks to Michael Tsai for the links.

Publishing to the open web

Posted on by Paul Jones

When it was difficult to publish writing, music, and video, publishers naturally came to exist because of the high barrier to entry for widespread distribution. But today no such physical or monetary barrier exists, the barriers that do exist are legal or technical ones. Perhaps the legal are some deliberate scheme to protect old money business models, but I find it more likely it’s more a matter of inertia.

The technical barriers will not last. There are many people who haven’t got nor desire the technical skills to publish their own media on Internet. I suspect this is at least part of the appeal of mainstream social media: you don’t have to be a nerd to interact with people on the Internet, it’s so easy anyone can do it with little effort. I’m hopeful that as more people become acquainted with the Internet earlier and technical education becomes more prominent, a DIY spirit to publishing will flourish. While this doesn’t ease the problem today of massive publishers owning the rights to what might justifiably be considered public domain, the next Mickey Mouse or Happy Birthday Song might not have the same problem.

This is rather like the infamous quip that “if you’re not paying, you’re not the customer, you’re the product.” I cannot imagine that a highly technically literate consumer base would be willing to subject themselves to the policies of many of today’s Internet giants. In particular, Facebook, and social media with similar business models, sell your attention to advertisers. In the early days, these services are great: they’ve usually received a huge amount of capital and provide a service users want to get their attention. When the capital runs dry, the investors want their 100x return, and the service has the user’s attention, they sell the users attention using information the users inputted themselves. To the degree that the service doesn’t want to lose users, it tries to keep them happy, but the incentives have misaligned, especially when the companies go public: it’s time to make profit grow. There’s nothing wrong with public companies seeking growth, but it does run the risk of harming user privacy and the Open Web.

A microblog of your very own

This is the raison d’être of Sudophilosophical: this is my attempt to live in the future,  to self-publish my thoughts, lofty and tiny alike, to the World Wide Web. There’s no pressure for 100x profits or to sell out my readers. I’m rather hopeful for that direct sponsorship and individual contributions will enable individuals to run sustainable content production now and in the future. Platforms like Facebook Instant Pages, Google AMP, and Apple News may be eating publishers, but I hope that technically savvy users will eat platforms next.

With this in mind, I’ve re-thought the structure of this website to accommodate for an important type of media: the microblog. As of today, in the sidebar, there are a couple of options for readers who would like to subscribe via RSS:

  • All – a is the feed of everything,
  • Articles – a feed of all long-form,
  • Microblog – a feed of all short-form,
  • Podcast – a feed of all spoken-word.

Dave Winer published a note about publishing long-form content where he muses:

Last night I posted a tweet: “Next time you want to post an essay to Medium, do the open web a favor and post it elsewhere. Anywhere. Tumblr. WordPress.com.”

I think he’s absolutely right, but not quite radical enough. It seems to me obvious to retort: Next time you want to post under 140 characters to Twitter, do the open web a favor and post it elsewhere. Specifically, your own website, not Tumblr or WordPress.com.

Publish-it-yourself

Detractors might argue that this is all well and good for individuals, but maybe not bigger organizations with loftier journalistic goals. John West argues for supporting publishers directly in “Death by a thousand likes”:

We need to stop pretending that content is free. Publications need to ask readers to pay for their content directly, and readers need to be willing to give up money, as opposed to their privacy and attention.

To the contrary, we need to stop pretending that publishers are necessary. I agree that the production of content can be quite costly, but the distribution of content in the digital age is basically free. The cost of hosting this site is about $25.00/month, and it managed to weather through a Hacker News hug-of-death (more on that later) of 52,000 visitors in 24 hours. I don’t see why publishers are necessary if everyone on Earth has access to the World Wide Web. Paul Krugman and disenfranchised minorities alike would be able to publish their thoughts at near-zero cost, and monetize their business directly by selling sponsorships, merchandise, speeches, or a variety of other goods and services.

These are very similar arguments as those that were trotted out with regards to Parse shutting down. I’d like to appropriate what Marcus Arment said about Parse for use here:

For whatever it’s worth, running your own Linux servers today with boring old databases and stable languages is neither difficult nor expensive. This isn’t to say “I told you so” — rather, if you haven’t tried before, “You can do this.”

Getting WordPress running on a Linode today, I admit, is beyond many people. But I look forward to the near future when people who want to express themselves don’t reach for a venture-backed advertising-platform-in-the-making, but rather their very own cloud server.

CloudKit now handles server-to-server networking

Posted on by Paul Jones

Right on the heels of Parse shutting down, Apple have announced they’re expanding the capabilities of their similar API, CloudKit:

In addition to providing a web interface for users to access the same data as your app, you can now easily read and write to the CloudKit public database from a server-side process or script with a server-to-server key. Learn more about generating a server-to-server key and composing web service requests.

Now users of CloudKit can interact with the data from their own server. To be a serious replacement for Parse, however, there needs to be a way for non-Apple clients to interact with it.

Parse and what it means for mobile app economics

Posted on by Paul Jones

Parse, the mobile backend as a service provider bought by Facebook, is shutting down, and there’s a lot of speculation around why it’s being shut down and what it means for the business of mobile apps. Allen Pike wrote an excellent article where he explains:

As much as Parse will try to get the word out that they’re shutting down, many apps’ owners don’t even know that they’re reliant on Parse. Parse’s overly generous free plan made them popular with freelancers and consultants building quick app backends for their clients. Many of those clients don’t know what Parse is, let alone that the little app they commissioned a couple years ago is a ticking time bomb.

There is an obvious danger in running a business in something you do not understand or can not control. This is hardly the first time that a platform has fallen out from underneath of honest business people at inopportune times. It’s happened time and time again, where a startup has shipped a product which relies on a titan’s API, only to have it pulled out from under them when the provider realizes the startup has worked out how to monetize their service or that it’s no longer strategically valuable for them to continue.

Nicholas Carr has a classic article where he outlines that the relation that Web 2.0 developers stand in with the titans is the same as the relationship that farmers stand in with the massive agribusiness corporations:

One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial.

This relationship works tremendously well when everyone’s interests are aligned: when developers are making things that are interesting, when users are paying for a quality product, and when the titans get their cut for hosting, everyone wins. In fact, there’s something very optimistic about it: indie developers are expressing themselves, earning enough to keep their hobby business in the positive, and letting the titans worry about the accounting.

But the App Store economics are changing. In the past, you could develop an iOS app, perhaps a Twitter client, that was genuinely good with unique features that differentiated it from the competition. Users expected to pay and were looking for quality software, and there weren’t many apps so a query for “Twitter” would probably reveal your app, and everyone would get paid: the user would get a quality app for the cost of a latte, and the developer and the host would get their cut. You could have a hobby with a decent return.

But today things are quite different. As Marco Arment, in response to Allen Pike, puts it:

One of the most damaging side effects of unhealthy App Store economics is that developers have little motivation or resources to keep apps updated.

In the flush early days, Apple could release a new screen size or entire platform (like the original iPad), and developers rushed to support it as quickly as possible because we knew we’d probably see a return.

Today, Apple’s shipping new platforms and screen sizes like they’re going out of style, but so many apps are rotting in disrepair that very few developers are adopting them.

This is where the problem with the Apple App Stores really lies: it’s not that Mac App Store is an unreliable web hybrid app or that the iOS App Store needs better discovery tools or that the tvOS App Store needs more apps or that the watchOS App Store needs a better SDK or that Apple need a framework like Parse – it’s that developers need a better business model. Indie developers no longer figure that they’re going to see a return on hobby project on iOS, and so they don’t start. On OS X, we’ve already the exodus from the up-front model happen, where high-profile apps are leaving to distribute their app themselves, with the intention of building their own upgrade or subscription model pricing. There, you can distribute your own apps, given that users need to jump through a few hoops to give your application permission to run. But on iOS and watchOS and tvOS, it’s not possible to distribute without conforming to the App Store’s economics, which are:

  1. Make your app free and get paid by advertising (Facebook, Twitter, iAd apps);
  2. Make your app free and get paid by in-app purchases (Candy Crush, Clash of Clans);
  3. Make your app free and get paid by outside subscriptions (Adobe, New York Times);
  4. Make your app free and sell physical things (Amazon, Ebay);
  5. Charge for your app and wallow in obscurity.

These economics, along with the fact that many large companies do not have the internal resources or knowledge to ship and app, is why Parse was so popular: contracted developers used Parse to ship faster and to make more money. Because the App Store’s economics have become a race to the bottom, developers have cut corners when developing the backend out of necessity. And just like when Twitter shut loyal developers out of their platform and Apple are complacent in the App Store’s race to the bottom and Google and Microsoft have taken land from sharecroppers in the past, Facebook taketh Parse now. As Sascha Konietzke, founder of Parse competitor Contentless, explains,

When Facebook acquired Parse back in April 2013, many people thought this meant Facebook goes all in on becoming a developer platform. If you recall, Facebook was at a crossroads back then, with a share price below IPO level, desktop traffic plateauing, and mobile revenues a big question mark. Enter Parse, which brought immediate mobile app developer reach, helping Facebook to distribute its SDKs and ensure developers are using Facebook’s login system. That in turn helped secure mobile adoption and a foothold in user profiles and mobile advertising. Fast forward to 2016, and Facebook essentially owns the mobile ads space, and its SDK is #1 in terms of mobile reach. Meaning Parse has run its cause as an SDK distribution vehicle. In other words, they never wanted to host your app, they just wanted you to use Facebook login.

It would be easy to read this post and think I’m endorsing never using a vendor to ship anything because you never can trust them. But of course that would be wrong, because many fruitful businesses rely and one another every day to create value. Instead what I’m endorsing is an awareness that developers are sharecroppers, and to have contingency and growth plans for your business ideas. Insofar as you can use social media or mobile platforms or advertisements or frameworks to grow your business, you absolutely should: but be ready for the day when you’re shut down, sherlocked, or acquikilled.

Apple's declining software quality

Posted on by Paul Jones

Software quality is a nebulous and divisive topic. There are many parameters to software quality – reliability, speed, user experience, design, discoverability, and more – and a move towards any of these virtues leads to sacrifices in others, especially on a limited time schedule. Additionally, a number of forces influence software quality over time, like accommodating for different use cases, changes in platform, changes in hardware, changes in design preferences, changes in market, changes in expectations, and more. Finally, software is not like digging a hole, say, where more people really can dig a hole faster than fewer people: in fact, more people can often slow down a software project.

Nobody knows this better than the technology titans of today: Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM, Oracle have all experience unanticipated software problems and regressions and high profile bugs. These are organizations with thousands of programmers writing and maintaining millions of lines of code for billions of devices. And these devices are machines which require perfection: one slight ambiguity of intent, any minor breach of contract, any single unexpected 0 where there should be 1 or vice versa … has the capability the bring down the whole system. In fact, it often does. Countless kernel panics, stack overflow errors, null pointer exceptions, and memory leaks are plaguing poor users and tired system administrators and overworked programmers right now. Machines are fast, but they can be awfully dumb.

And no company is feeling the pain of software’s nebulous nature and hardware’s mindless computing more than Apple right now. The underdog that many loyal fans rooted for is now the world’s (perhaps previous) most valuable company. With that, comes insanely high expectations: they need to grow the world’s biggest company every quarter to keep Wall Street happy, and even harder, they have to keep those nerds that kept them alive through the hard times happy too. And with release after release of the most revolutionary operating system ever, it’s tempting to picture Apple like an actual Titan, in particular Atlas, holding the world upon his shoulders. But it seems more and more every day that another Greek tale is more fitting: it’s time to admit that Apple have flown too close to the sun.

Walt Mossberg, technology journalism’s elder statesman, has this to say about Apple’s software quality:

In the last couple of years, however, I’ve noticed a gradual degradation in the quality and reliability of Apple’s core apps, on both the mobile iOS operating system and its Mac OS X platform. It’s almost as if the tech giant has taken its eye off the ball when it comes to these core software products, while it pursues big new dreams, like smartwatches and cars.

On OS X this is especially true: OpenGL implementation has fallen behind the competition, the filesystem desperately needs updating, the SDK has needed modernizing for years, networking and cryptography have seen major gaffes. And that’s with regards to the under-the-hood details, the applications are easier targets: it’s tragic that Aperture and iPhoto were axed in favor of the horrifically bad Photos app (that looks like some Frankenstein “iOS X” app), the entire industry have left Final Cut Pro X, I dare not plug my iPhone in to my laptop for fear of what it might do, the Mac App Store is the antitheses of native application development (again being some Frankenstein of a web/native app), and iCloud nee MobileMe nee iTools has been an unreliable and slow mess since day one.

This isn’t the first time that a prominent member of the Apple community has criticized Apple’s software quality. Here’s Marco Arment from January of 2015:

Apple’s hardware today is amazing — it has never been better. But the software quality has fallen so much in the last few years that I’m deeply concerned for its future. I’m typing this on a computer whose existence I didn’t even think would be possible yet, but it runs an OS with embarrassing bugs and fundamental regressions. Just a few years ago, we would have relentlessly made fun of Windows users for these same bugs on their inferior OS, but we can’t talk anymore.

This is still as true today as it was last year. Macs and iPhones have gotten thinner, more beautiful, and more powerful; the Apple Watch and the new Apple TV are magnificent additions to the product line up. But I’d speculate that part of the problem Apple is having is that if it took 1,000 engineers to write software for Mac when that was the only product, it doesn’t necessarily take 4,000 people to write software for four product lines. In fact, 10,000 of the same grade of engineers might not even do it, especially without proper management and unified goals. Apple may not have listened to rockstar developer Marco Arment, but Walt Mossberg will definitely get their attention. Here’s an anecdote about Steve Jobs from the last time that Mossberg complained about Apple’s software quality:

In Fortune’s story, Lashinsky says Steve Jobs summoned the entire MobileMe team for a meeting at the company’s on-campus Town Hall, accusing everyone of “tarnishing Apple’s reputation.” He told the members of the team they “should hate each other for having let each other down”, and went on to name new executives on the spot to run the MobileMe team. A few excerpts from the article.

“Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?” Having received a satisfactory answer, he continues, “So why the fuck doesn’t it do that?”

Jobs was also particularly angry about the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg not liking MobileMe:

“Mossberg, our friend, is no longer writing good things about us.”

It really is time for Tim Cook to take action as drastic as this regarding software quality on Apple’s existing platforms. What worries me is that AAPL the stock ticker and Apple the company are in a (self-driving) crash course with one another: AAPL needs to launch new products to drive growth and Apple needs to improve the products that have already shipped. The most valuable asset that Apple own is their brand, and that’s the brand that’ll drive sales of any car that may or may not be in development. If that brand name is tarnished by regressions and performance problems, what consumer would buy a car from the brand? In fact, anecdotally, talking to my friends, the Apple Car already has an uphill battle with the kerfuffle surrounding the Maps launch.

Jim Dalrymple, in response to Mossberg, writes:

I understand that Apple has a lot of balls in the air, but they have clearly taken their eye off some of them. There is absolutely no doubt that Apple Music is getting better with each update to the app, but what we have now is more of a 1.0 version than what we received last year.

John Gruber, in response to Dalrymple:

Maybe we expect too much from Apple’s software. But Apple’s hardware doesn’t have little problems like this.

The best thing for Apple to do is to re-take their position as a leader of software quality before it’s too late: consumers know that Apple’s hardware is the very best, but more and more they’re using apps made by Google and Microsoft and Facebook. If this trend doesn’t turn around, Apple will find their breakout product and all of its growth will be owned by competitors. And when the time comes to launch their car, they’ll find that loyal fans and everyday consumers have lost trust in the brand. Having said that, I’m still a Mac user at home and at work, my iPhone is a wonderful device that I enriches my life, and I’m still finding new ways to make use of Apple Watch. And to give credit where credit is due: Logic Pro X has improved a lot recently, and Music Memos is a welcome addition to Apple’s music line up. I even use Apple Maps. Apple can do this. It’s not too late. But for sake of all us poor users, and Apple’s tired system administrators and overworked programmers, I hope they started 6 months ago.

Fitbit announces the Alta

Posted on by Paul Jones

Fitbit have announced a new fitness tracker, from iMore:

Fitbit has announced its latest fitness tracker, the Alta, which is one of the nicest-looking offerings from the company. Pre-orders are now open for the tracker, with shipments beginning in March 2016. […]

Here are the Alta‘s features:

  • All-Day Activity
  • Auto Sleep Tracking
  • Reminders to Move
  • SmartTrack™
  • Auto Exercise Recognition
  • Tap Display
  • Call, Text & Calendar Alerts

And some pricing information from MacRumors:

Fitbit’s new wearable also has a few band accessories to choose from, including a $29.95 Classic Band, $59.95 Leather Band, and $99.95 Metal Bracelet.

Given that it’s launching in March, is a wearable, and has bands, it’s easy to see that this is FitBit’s response to the Apple Watch. Their smartwatch did not fare so well, but their other bands aren’t so fashionable, so I see this as the compromise positions of “stylish fitness band.”

It looks like a great product, and the auto-fitness and auto-sleep recognition are excellent features that, as an Apple Watch owner, I envy. However, there’s one critical feature that’s missing which would make this an impulse buy for me: HealthKit integration.

The reason is that Health is a non-networked, shared silo for health information. When or if Fitbit bite the dust and their apps and hardware aren’t supported, I want that data somewhere other than their servers. In fact, I’d prefer my data wasn’t on their servers at all.

Microsoft acquihires SwiftKey

Posted on by Paul Jones

Microsoft have made a number of acquisitions of popular productivity apps, most recently with the acquisition of Guiness typing word record holding keyboard technology SwiftKey.

Harry Shum, VP of Technology and Research at Microsoft:

This acquisition is a great example of Microsoft’s commitment to bringing its software and services to all platforms. We’ll continue to develop SwiftKey’s market-leading keyboard apps for Android and iOS as well as explore scenarios for the integration of the core technology across the breadth of our product and services portfolio. Moreover, SwiftKey’s predictive technology aligns with Microsoft’s investments and ambition to develop intelligent systems that can work more on the user’s behalf and under their control.

Federico Viticci:

Above all, SwiftKey is good tech for Microsoft. The acquisition gives them access to a large database of typing habits and patterns spanning 100 languages, and it’ll likely help them build text features on desktop and mobile. Long term, it’s hard to predict how Microsoft’s string of mobile app acquisitions will play out, but, right now, it’s clear that Microsoft is buying the best apps around.

This is why tech companies hoard money. Microsoft is now aware of its situation, of the waning popularity of Windows and the declining important of Office. The strategy of incorporating populist products into their admittedly still ubiquitous but stodgy product suite is a good idea, and their iOS apps in particular are arguably better than Apple’s now. Compare this to Apple’s strategy of acquikilling obscure startups for key technologies instead of whole products.

Microsoft want to replace every one of the default applications on your iPhone, they want you using their keyboard with their email client sharing documents from their productivity suite, and to do so their using their considerable cash hoard to fund development. Their in a good spot to do this, because Apple can’t compete with them on Android and Google can’t compete with them on native applications. I think the end game for Microsoft is to hook consumers on their products at home, and have them request support for them at work.

Of course, the other part of the SwiftKey acquihire is their machine learning talent, which is seriously competitive.

Porsche won't make self-driving cars

Posted on by Paul Jones

On how Porsche CEO isn’t interested in self-driving cars, Shawn King comments:

Even though some Porsches do come equipped with Apple’s CarPlay, it makes corporate sense to take this line. Besides, why would you buy a sports car only to let a computer have all the fun?

Just like manual cars exist despite automatic transmission for reasons of either cost or preference and feature phones still exist despite smartphones, the market for enthusiast’s cars will remain. It’s a bit different however, because I’d wager that Porsche owners, in general, don’t own just a Porsche, and I similarly doubt that they drive their Porsche to work every day. Absolutely, I’m not going to let to computer have all the fun when I’m driving my (still imaginary and rhetorical) Porsche down a beautiful country road, but computers can absolutely have all the fun of driving my (equally imaginary) Camry to work every day.

If I were in charge of Porsche, I don’t think I’d make self-driving cars either. But I would absolutely invest.

Power using email and email clients

Posted on by Paul Jones

Federico Viticci

Over the course of (almost) seven years of writing for MacStories, I’ve seen email pronounced dead (multiple times), reinvented, redesigned, and, most recently, made smarter with machine learning and cloud services.

Shawn King:

I consider myself an email power user (I get approx 2000 emails/day) and there is no way I would try and deal with that many emails on the iPhone or even an iPad.

Call me grumpy, but I’m not willing to re-learn how to use the email client du jour every time the companies that make them either get bought out and closed or go bankrupt. If you want to consider productivity, I’d argue there more email productivity lost in re-tooling every 6 months than there is gained by the tool. I need email to be in a stable client, with a reliable backend,  fast sending/receiving, with a consistent and familiar UI. I highly doubt that any indie app is ever going to match the development might that the tech giants can throw at their sunk-cost development of email clients, even Mozilla shuttered Thunderbird because it was dragging down Firefox.

Apple's ecosystem health and BaaS

Posted on by Paul Jones

Marco Arment:

Apple needs a healthy developer ecosystem now, more than ever, as customers clamor for their new platforms to have more and better software — but now they’re paying for their own neglect of healthy App Store economics and tense developer relations for so long.

I hope Apple sees that as a problem. With the recent consolidation of the entire App Store under new leadership (Phil Schiller), maybe they do.

Apple’s developer ecosystem is healthy, with two exceptions:

  1. Backend services: iCloud and CloudKit are to platform dependent and iOS developers aren’t (in general) competent in backend development;
  2. App review: compared to web development, taking up to 3 weeks to ship an app because of a review process is a huge burden.

These are no insurmountable challenges for the developer ecosystem, but it does pose some challenges for Apple. In order to provide an integrated backend solution that would really be an option for indie developers, they would have to risk ending the thermonuclear war and allowing Android and web to access the service. It’s apt that this discussion should arise on the shuttering of Parse, a Facebook-bought company, because this wouldn’t be a problem for Apple if they have bought Parse. But had they bought Parse, just like when they bought TestFlight and Siri, Apple would have immediately shut down the the Android component. The sad and ironic fact of the matter is that Apple are actually in a great position to run a service like Parse at a loss, because all of Apple’s software (in a sense) is the cost required to make the stupendous profit on the iPhone. Perhaps a reasonable compromise position for Apple to enter into the *aaS space would be to subsidize development by making iOS use of CloudKit free, and provide other platforms at cost.

On the second challenge, I’m not sure what challenges there are in scaling Apple app review process, but anecdotally, the last time I heard of someone going through the process recently, it took 5 days from submission to store. If this proves to be consistent this year, it still isn’t fast enough to submit hot-fixes like the web can, but it would definitely be a welcome improvement. But the pain of the submission process goes further than just the review process, it’s also the incredibly clunky iTunes Connect and the inconsistent enforcement of the guidelines. These complaints just cover the iOS App Store, however, Apple have a lot more (a less profitable) work to do on there other three App Stores.

 

Winter storm Jonas in Brooklyn

Posted on by Paul Jones

Winter storm Jonas was the largest snowfall on record for New York City. With two feet of snow falling from the sky in a matter of hours, the sky and the ground were just white fluffy blurs. I went out with my camera to document the event, and here are some pictures.

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As you can see some other people were out and about braving the blizzard, but this is a far cry from the busy streets of Brooklyn on a regular Saturday. Traffic and pedestrian signs were ignored more than usual.

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I had a hard enough time getting around on foot, but there were even a couple of cars trying to make it through the snow.

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By far the most fun was had at the park, however, where Brooklynites made use of the blizzarmeggedon (you’re welcome, previously untitled metal bands) to do snow sports and otherwise enjoy the weather.

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Parse shutting down

Posted on by Paul Jones

Parse, the backend-as-a-service for mobile and web apps, is shutting down, and Marco Arment explains one of the reasons he doesn’t use those sorts of things:

The short answer is that I can’t afford to — for my business models to work, I need to keep costs very low, a discipline I’ve built over time as one of my most important professional skills. […]

For whatever it’s worth, running your own Linux servers today with boring old databases and stable languages is neither difficult nor expensive. This isn’t to say “I told you so” — rather, if you haven’t tried before, “You can do this.”

I agree that getting a Linux box with one of the cloud-hosting providers is very easy, with numerous vendors and 3rd party tutorials provided to get you up and running. However services like Parse can offer peace of mind if you suddenly get 1,000,000,000 users and need to scale. Instead of having to learn how to deploy very complicated load balancers and shards, you can pay Parse to work it out and keep the lights on. Of course, that peace of mind can evaporate suddenly, as it did here, if they cannot keep the lights on with what you pay.

I predict the problem with Parse was also the reason it was so successful: the barrier to entry was so low, and the ratio of paying customers to free-tier customers was probably too low. What I don’t understand is that Facebook could probably afford to run Parse at a loss forever, and just keep tabs on up-and-coming apps.

Apple pushing forward hearing aid technology

Posted on by Paul Jones

From an FCC filing from Apple regarding hearing aid technology:

Apple is driven to make its devices truly accessible, and believes that consumers with hearing loss deserve a better experience than what traditional hearing aid compatibility technologies offer today. iPhones comply with existing HAC rules. But as the Commission has recognized, Apple has also invested heavily to improve accessibility by developing “a new hearing aid platform that relies on Bluetooth® technology.” 4 Apple believes that this Made for iPhone (“MFi”) hearing aid platform represents a substantial improvement to consumers over devices that are deemed accessible by today’s HAC rules.

This is the Apple that I buy products from. I find the discussion of the “Wall Street Apple” interesting, but the Apple I care about is the one that still seems to do things like this. Of course, it’s in Apple’s interest to make iPhones a great product for everyone, but I think there’s more the accessibility on the iPhone than business acumen: it’s the right thing to do. This is definitely inline with Apple’s initiatives in health, and I look forward to seeing how HealthKit develops.

The iPhone 5se and Apple's ecosystem

Posted on by Paul Jones

Rene Ritchie for iMore:

Tim Cook recently said that 60 percent of customers on an iPhone 5s or earlier have not yet upgraded to an iPhone 6 or later. When we polled our readership late last year, a majority of our readers told us they were happy with the current sizes — almost 58%. Of those who did want a smaller iPhone, 12% said it was important enough to them that they’d refrained from upgrading because the iPhones 6 seemed too big. Almost 13%, though, said they were interested in a smaller iPhone especially if it was less expensive than the larger size models.

Shawn King for The Loop:

Whether Apple does this in the spring or not, it certainly makes sense for the company to serve the end of the market that doesn’t need or want one of the ginormous iPhone 6 variations.

John Gruber:

A new 4-inch iPhone with an A9 processor and Touch ID solves a few problems for Apple, in one swoop. It gives Apple a modern iPhone to sell to people who really do prefer the smaller size, and it gives them a low-end-of-the-lineup model that is technically relevant for another 18-24 months.

I almost never like it when analysts harken back to Steve Jobs when it comes to Apple’s future, but I think we may be feeling his persuasive influence still. The notion that a 4-inch device is “perfect” because you can reach all of it with one hand still exists, and may very well be true for some consumers. In my experience, the Plus models are extraordinary. My 6 Plus has completely taken over from my iPad, and continues to gain capabilities that were previously reserved for my MacBook.

Having said that, it is expensive. And should Apple release the “5se”, I think it could be a real crowd pleaser. It predict it’ll be priced around the $500 price point, include Force Touch, NFC, an A9 processor, improved camera, and a 5-class screen at a 6 aspect ratio. Of those 13% who are “interested” and 60% who “haven’t upgraded” into new iPhone users. However, as a developer, I don’t really care if an Apple customer has a 5s or 5se, I’d prefer that Apple continue to convert Android users. To do that will require something more accessible that another phone upwards of $500.

Apple's engineering culture and hiring problems

Posted on by Paul Jones

Nellie Bowles for the Guardian:

Engineers look for “big problems” that will push them and for a culture that puts them at the center, Solomon said. He also noted that the best engineers like to work in “flow state” and keep creative hours, which Apple, with its long commute from San Francisco to Cupertino, doesn’t always allow.
“Apple’s not an engineering culture,” Solomon said. “Tim Cook’s done an amazing job running the company, but [Steve Jobs] was the guy everyone wanted to follow into battle.”

This is right for the wrong reasons – characterizing the challenges of the world’s most valuable company by how they’re perceived by a few professionals in the industry will inevitably fail to tell the full story. However, being that big is the source of Apple’s struggles in recruiting, retention, and quality.

Apple have a massive install base of massive software systems, and public expectations are the same as when they were selling iPods and represented 2% of the PC market share. And in order to retain their culture of “world-changing” perception, they have to keep everything a secret, presumably even from within.

That’s my charitable take on this peculiar piece from the Guardian. Apple likely do have problems attracting the world’s top talent, but when you have as much money in the bank as Apple do, it gives them a strong place to negotiate from. Additionally, engineers that bemoan the lack of free food and the rigid start times are likely not the kind Apple wish to attract.

John Gruber on the article:

The other problem Apple faces is that it’s not just any A-team talent that Apple needs, Apple needs A-team talent that understands and appreciates Apple’s design-focused culture.

As a software engineer, I’m very aware that right now, engineer’s have a lot of bargaining power because of their scarcity. Good engineers will always be scarce. That “engineering culture” that Solomon criticizes Apple for not having is probably more that Apple do not pander to entry-level candidates the same way Google or Facebook do with their silly hats and free lunches. But it won’t always be like this, as universities ramp up to meet the demand for software professionals, being a programmer will become more and more like being any other commodity professional. That’s my take of Apple supposed lack of “engineering” culture, because if you look at their actual engineering culture, it’s brought the world WebKit and Swift and, in many ways, the personal computer.

The Future of Twitter

Posted on by Paul Jones

John Gruber:

I do think Twitter has become far too complicated. The original appeal of Twitter was largely based on its simplicity. But I have argued for years that the fundamental problem is that Twitter is compared to Facebook, and it shouldn’t be. Facebook appeals to billions of people. “Most people”, it’s fair to say. Twitter appeals to hundreds of millions of people. That’s amazing, and there’s tremendous value in that — but it’s no Facebook. Cramming extra features into Twitter will never make it as popular as Facebook — it will only dilute what it is that makes Twitter as popular and useful as it is.

Walt Mossberg:

To potential new users, it’s a real challenge to learn all of Twitter’s often arcane little features. And even for people who have been using the service multiple times daily for years, like me, it can be tricky to decide when to use which feature and in which situation. For instance, new users might be confused about what a retweet is, or the difference between that and a “quote tweet” (where you say more about something you’re reposting). And they surely might not understand the need to place a period before the handle of a user, when that handle is at the very start of a tweet you compose, yet not elsewhere in the tweet.

Ben Thompson:

When it comes to “the empty spaces” most people don’t want to do work, but work is exactly what Twitter required. You had to know what you were interested in, know who to follow based on those interests, and then, to top it all off, you had to pick out the parts that you were interested in from a stream of unfiltered tweets; Facebook, in contrast, did the work for you.

There is an underlying tension in the recent dialogue surrounding Twitter: it’s too complicated for “most people” to use, but it’s simplicity is what makes it appeal to its “niche”, these writers would seem to have us believe.

I think Twitter’s problem is entirely different: when it first began, like Facebook before it and MySpace before it, it was hip. The corporations didn’t know about it, Wall Street didn’t care about it, there were no ads, there were just weird Internet people, doing weird Internet stuff.

Now every news outlet, government body, and multinational are on there tweeting around the clock and feeding you ads. By selling the product to Wall Street and the advertisers, which is exactly what I would have done if I ran Twitter, Twitter alienated at least me. Contrast this with Tumblr, which sold to Yahoo and is unlikely to be profitable, but still somehow manages to retain it’s hip tone.

I think Twitter shouldn’t aim to be profitable. I recognize it isn’t at all practical or at all useful advice to Jack Dorsey, but the reason I don’t think Twitter should be profitable is that’s it’s a public resource – like plumbing, the Internet, and roads – it’s the common discourse. Ideally the U.S. Government would foot the bill and protect it under First Amendment rights. Of course, in reality this would never happen, and if it did it’d likely lead to outrageous privacy abuses.