iPad and iPhone usage remains strong among US teens

Written by

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster just released data from their latest semiannual teen survey. Interesting read. Three things jumped out at me. In the three survey periods (Fall ’12, Spring ’13, Fall ’13):

  1. iPhone ownership climbed steadily (40%, 48%, 55%). Shocking numbers for a device Samsung portrays as uncool.
  2. Expected next phone purchase: iPhone as next phone increased (62%, 62%, 65%). Android also increased, but with a much smaller share (22%, 23%, 24%).
  3. On the tablet side, Android marketshare is growing (plan to buy an Android table: 16%, 24%, 28%), while iPad plus iPad Mini drops (75%, 68%, 64%). Why add iPad and iPad Mini? Seems right, since Android does not break out their numbers by form factor.

My gut reaction to the tablet numbers is that the tablet share change is due to the ongoing maturation of the tablet market. The iPad mini was not around for the first survey and Android tablet use is still finding its level, at the cost of the existing iPad. Looking forward to the next survey.

1985 Macintosh calendar

Written by

From the most excellent Scott Knaster:

Last week I posted about MAC: The Macintosh Calendar 1985 and included a couple of images from the calendar. Lots of folks asked to see more, so today I photographed the entire calendar and posted it. I apologize in advance to anyone depicted in this calendar who would rather not see these images again. It’s all done in the name of history.

Click on the calendar picture to jump to the gallery. You can zoom in once with the magnifying glass, then again with the + sign in the mini picture in the upper left corner.

Such great memories.

10 mobile app design tips

Written by

Design tips worth reading before you start your next app project. These aren’t perfect, they aren’t exhaustive, but good food for thought.

Bill Gates and the future of Microsoft

Written by

The Microsoft campus is buzzing about the coming changes in leadership. Everyone knows Steve Ballmer’s plans, but what about Bill Gates?

Mr. Gates’s role at Microsoft has been a source of wide fascination since he left his day-to-day responsibilities in 2008. But interest in it has grown in the past few years as Microsoft has stumbled, and it intensified sharply in the weeks since Steven A. Ballmer announced he would be retiring as Microsoft’s chief executive in the next year.

Some Microsoft employees say they have noticed Mr. Gates around the company’s campus in Redmond, Wash., more often since Mr. Ballmer’s announcement, leading to speculation — perhaps mixed with a dash of hope — that he might want to assume a bigger role and return the company to its past heights.

Clearly, there are a number of people who see Bill Gates as a hero and hope for him to come to the rescue, to return as chief executive. But there is certainly a faction who would prefer Bill Gates to leave altogether, to avoid a battle over strategy once a new CEO takes over.

Last week, news reports surfaced that three unnamed shareholders had begun pressing the Microsoft board for Mr. Gates to leave as chairman because they believed he would be an impediment to strategy changes by the new chief executive.

Any such push is very unlikely to succeed in forcing Mr. Gates to distance himself from the company, according to several people who know Mr. Gates and the dynamics of the board. Last Thursday, the Microsoft board recommended Mr. Gates’ re-election as a director, according to a company filing with securities regulators.

Good article, nice coverage of some of the CEO candidates Microsoft is supposedly considering.

Higgs and Englert win Nobel Prize for physics for Higgs boson work

Written by

Britain’s Peter Higgs and Francois Englert of Belgium won the Nobel Prize for physics on Tuesday for predicting the existence of the Higgs boson particle that explains how elementary matter attained the mass to form stars and planets.

Half a century after their original work, the new building block of nature was finally detected in 2012 at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) centre’s giant, underground particle-smasher near Geneva.

The Higgs boson is the last piece of the Standard Model of physics that describes the fundamental make-up of the universe. Some commentators – though not scientists – have called it the “God particle”, for its role in turning the Big Bang into an ordered cosmos.

Higgs’ and Englert’s work shows how elementary particles inside atoms gain mass by interacting with an invisible field pervading all of space – and the more they interact, the heavier they become. The particle associated with the field is the Higgs boson.

Way to go, guys!

Why Apple may win the gaming market

Written by

Apple is on the precipice of making real inroads into the gaming market. Certainly, there’s no question that there is a thriving iOS gaming market, but the vast majority of those are casual games at low price points. There are a number of compelling factors that might signal a real change in the balance of power between iOS and the consoles. Between SpriteKit and native iOS support for real gaming controllers, the only real barrier I see is a lack of storage space. Certainly not an issue on the Mac side, but how can a programmer access 50 Gb of cut scenes from an iPad or iPhone, even one connected to a TV. Wonder if some kind of network storage peripheral could solve this problem.

A bit heavy on conjecture, this is a good read nonetheless.

How Twitter is going to take a billion dollars from YouTube

Written by

Terrific analysis. Twitter has a big opportunity, especially if it adds a long-form video capability.

In a world with long-form video on Twitter, the next time a video advertiser wants to catch the attention of ABC’s “Scandal” audience, that advertiser will have a plethora of options for its ad buying, including YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, ABC and more. But think about the benefits that Twitter presents to an advertiser. All it needs to do is to post a tweet with the video, which will reach its followers for free, and then promote that tweet to people watching “Scandal” during its airing (which generates 2,200 tweets per minute and can be targeted via Twitter’s TV targeting). That video tweet will end up being more valuable than pre-roll on YouTube, as it’s targeting users watching “Scandal” across a variety of platforms, such as cable, Web and satellite, and it is ridiculously easy to embed across the Web. What started as a tweet to your followers ends up giving you hyper-targeting that reaches Twitter’s highly engaged audience in real time and has unlimited distribution via the rest of the Internet.

Twitter is already the medium of choice for event interaction.

In addition to its one-up with television, Twitter has a big step ahead of YouTube when it comes to direct engagement. Brands successfully engage with their communities in many different ways on Twitter. Major brands have customer service monitoring Twitter 24/7. They share updates, interact with fans, comment on Super Bowl power outages and more through the social network. Each brand’s account essentially turns into the public persona for that brand on the Internet.

The stakes are huge. Twitter’s next move will have a huge impact on both the cost and implementation of advertising over the foreseeable future.

Secrets of the iOS 7 keyboard

Written by

Some terrific shortcuts here. My favorite:

Typing punctuation can be a drag on an iOS device. Take the humble question mark. First, you must tap 123 key to get to the number and punctuation keyboard, then tap the question-mark (?) key, and then tap the ABC key to get back to the letter keyboard.

Here’s a quicker way to do it. Tap and hold the 123 key. Now, without removing your finger from the keyboard, slide your finger over to the question-mark key (or any other punctuation mark) and then release. The keyboard will insert your symbol and automatically switch back to the ABC keyboard.

This trick is even better if you want to type a special mark, such as the upside-down question mark (¿).

Samsung built a smartwatch but forgot to make it do stuff

Written by

I love this review.

The frequent “First!” cry of the Internet troll declares some strange pride in being the first to comment on an article. The commenter put little to no effort into the post; it added nothing to the conversation, and it was completely devoid of substance. The troll did secure the spot at the top of the thread, though, and every additional commenter will be forced to scroll past the pointless contribution.

The Samsung Galaxy Gear says “First!” in hardware form. Samsung has beaten Google and Apple as the first major manufacturer to market, but much like the Internet commenter, it has sacrificed substance for the sake of timing. The Galaxy Gear is a product (with some impressive internals, no less) that has such limited use and such crippling compatibility requirements that it is currently the equivalent of hardware spam.

Ouch. I wish I had written this.

Theft-proof bike lights

Written by

I love great design.

One afternoon last year, Menn and his business partner, Tivan Amour, headed out to Kendall Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, to invite passersby to walk away with their theft-resistant bike light. The team announced in poster board and Sharpie: “Free bike lights… if you can steal them.” Next to the light, Menn offered an array of bicycle light–busting tools: needle-nose pliers, an Allen wrench, lock wrenches and heavy-duty plumbing wrenches. If strangers could pry the light from the bike in two minutes (“No opportunistic thief will spend more than two minutes,” explains Menn), the light was theirs to keep.

Excellent way to beta-test.

Rob Schneider and Roger Ebert

Written by

Movie fan? Roger Ebert fan? Definitely read this great story from Chaz (Roger’s wife) Ebert’s blog.

Roger Ebert wrote a book called “Your Movie Sucks”. From the book’s Amazon page:

From Roger’s review of Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo (0 stars): “The movie created a spot of controversy in February 2005. According to a story by Larry Carroll of MTV News, Rob Schneider took offense when Patrick Goldstein of the Los Angeles Times listed this year’s Best Picture nominees and wrote that they were ‘ignored, unloved, and turned down flat by most of the same studios that . . . bankroll hundreds of sequels, including a follow-up to Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo, a film that was sadly overlooked at Oscar time because apparently nobody had the foresight to invent a category for Best Running Penis Joke Delivered by a Third-Rate Comic.’

“Schneider retaliated by attacking Goldstein in full-page ads in Daily Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. In an open letter to Goldstein, Schneider wrote: ‘Well, Mr. Goldstein, I decided to do some research to find out what awards you have won. I went online and found that you have won nothing. Absolutely nothing. No journalistic awards of any kind. . . . Maybe you didn’t win a Pulitzer Prize because they haven’t invented a category for Best Third-Rate, Unfunny Pompous Reporter Who’s Never Been Acknowledged by His Peers. . . .’

The story I linked to starts with the flame war turned book, but evolves into something surprising. I enjoyed it.

Apple adds iPhone tips page

Written by

Apple added an iPhone tips page to their site. Created and named for the iPhone 5s, the page’s tips seem useful for all iOS 7 users.

Tesla, the fire, the market, and Apple

Written by

Tesla founder Elon Musk knows from success. Musk started and sold Zip2, a web software company, pulling $22 million out of that sale. He rolled that into the company that ultimately brought PayPal to market, got about $175 million in stock when eBay bought PayPal. He used that nest egg to create Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) in 2002 and to fund Tesla Motors in 2004. Nothing but hits.

A lot has been written over the past few days about a fire in one of Tesla’s cars. A video of a burning Tesla S went viral, creating a large PR problem for the company.

Elon Musk took the wheel on this, so to speak. He wrote a calm narrative that laid out the facts, as he saw them. If you have any interest in electric cars, take a minute to read Musk’s blog post. Here’s how the accident happened:

Earlier this week, a Model S traveling at highway speed struck a large metal object, causing significant damage to the vehicle. A curved section that fell off a semi-trailer was recovered from the roadway near where the accident occurred and, according to the road crew that was on the scene, appears to be the culprit. The geometry of the object caused a powerful lever action as it went under the car, punching upward and impaling the Model S with a peak force on the order of 25 tons. Only a force of this magnitude would be strong enough to punch a 3 inch diameter hole through the quarter inch armor plate protecting the base of the vehicle.

Clearly, this accident was no fault of the car design.

The Model S owner was nonetheless able to exit the highway as instructed by the onboard alert system, bring the car to a stop and depart the vehicle without injury. A fire caused by the impact began in the front battery module – the battery pack has a total of 16 modules – but was contained to the front section of the car by internal firewalls within the pack. Vents built into the battery pack directed the flames down towards the road and away from the vehicle.

Read the rest of the post. The car is designed with safety in mind. Certainly no more dangerous than any of its gasoline-filled brethren.

So how does the market react? From the linked article:

Tesla’s stock had been on a tear after the company announced its first quarterly net profit and began expanding into Asia and Europe this year. But share prices declined 6.2 percent, to 180.95, the day the video was released, and kept falling the next day. (It closed Friday at $180.98.)

To be fair, if you read the article, there were a number of factors that influenced the market reaction. But I think the timing of that stock plummet rests largely on the release of the video showing the burning Tesla S. The market reacts quickly to news, slowly to reason.

Apple shares a common fate with Tesla in this regard. Some of the news that impacts Apple’s stock price appears made up of whole cloth, based purely on an analyst’s misunderstanding of market forces. That is unfortunate. Personally, I want people like Elon Musk, Tim Cook, Jony Ive, and Craig Federighi to worry less about analysts and spend their time making great products.

Security firm says iPhone bug can thwart remote wipe

Written by

When you are at or near the top of a market, you become a target. Microsoft lived that life for many years. Now, the emergence of the mobile market has shifted the spotlight, as well as the security risk, over to iOS and Android. Though the rigor of Apple’s app inspection and certification process does keep the iOS app ecosystem significantly safer than Android, iOS devices are just as highly valued a target for hackers.

The point is, these attacks are going to keep coming. Apple’s job is to keep tweaking their processes to keep the bad guys at bay. So far, Apple has done their job well.

This new attack takes advantage of a flaw in the “Find my iPhone” process. The video below does an excellent job laying out the scenario. In a nutshell, the thief steals an iPhone and immediately turns on airplane mode to prevent the iPhone from being remotely wiped. This gives the thief enough time to break into your phone and use your credentials to reset your Apple ID password, take control of your phone, Apple account, and other accounts.

The video also offers 5 suggestions for fixing this problem:

  1. Apple should make Airplane Mode inaccessible from the lock screen by default and require a passcode – not just a fingerprint – any time Airplane Mode was activated or the SIM card was removed

  2. During Apple ID creation, Apple should warn users not to store credentials to password-reset accounts on their registered devices

  3. On Find My iPhone, Apple should differentiate between likely-temporary and likely-permanent loss scenarios, and in the latter, should advise users to immediately revoke the devices’s access to all accounts it has credentials for, e.g. email-, social media-, and telephony accounts

  4. The iOS lock screen should not display whether the phone is protected by a simple 4-digit PIN or a more complex passcode, and on devices with Touch ID, it should not display whether fingerprint authentication is being used

  5. Upon reconnecting to the Internet, iOS should not allow email retrieval before the device’s wipe- or don’t-wipe status can be retrieved

As with every other legitimate problem of this nature that Apple has faced, the problem has a fix. No doubt, Apple will do their analysis, find the best possible fix, and roll it out quickly so we can all sleep safely again.

BlackBerry hit with securities shareholder class action

Written by

The news just continues to get worse for Blackberry. Shareholder Marvin Pearlstein filed this lawsuit in Manhattan federal court:

Pearlstein is seeking to represent a class of “thousands” of shareholders who bought stock between September 27, 2012, when the company touted its strong financial position, and September 20 of this year, when it revealed it would have to write down between $930 million and $960 million related to unsold BlackBerry 10 devices, according to the lawsuit.

Spanish language remake of Breaking Bad

Written by

Direct remake. In Colombia. Wild.

The explosive success of Breaking Bad was bound to generate some copycats shows, but Spanish language media company Univision took it a step further, decided to cut out all those pesky middlemen (I think they’re called “writers”), and do a direct Spanish language remake. The Univision version will be set in Colombia and called Metástasis, the term for the spread of cancer- I assume “breaking bad” doesn’t really translate. The project seems intent on keeping every iconographic piece of the show they can, down to “Walter Blanco” (yes, really) in his famous white briefs. They even named his wife “Cielo Blanco”- “Cielo” being Spanish for “sky.”

DPReview posts detailed review of iPhone 5s camera

Written by

Long time fan of Digital Photography Review. It’s my first stop before I buy any new piece of photography gear. Agree with them or not, there is always something to learn from their reviews.

Their final word:

The iPhone 5s, running Apple’s fresh iOS 7, is an excellent phone with a very good camera. Image quality under most conditions is among the top of the class of “conventional” smartphone camera units: you have to look to the Nokia Lumia 1020 to find something that’s hands-down better across the board, though in good light the best 13-megapixel sensors do capture more detail.

The camera app is supremely easy to use, and the 5s’ powerful processing makes for class-leading burst speed and excellent responsiveness. Users looking to upgrade from older iPhones shouldn’t be disappointed. That said, there’s nothing in the 5s that changes the fundamental balance of power in the mobile photography world: users committed to other OSes won’t necessarily see a reason to switch.

About what you’d expect, I think. To really get a sense of the iPhone 5s camera, take a look at the gallery of 78 images at the end of the review. To see a particular image at full size, download the original (click the link at the bottom right of the image). In my opinion, some of these shots are stunning.

Potential sanctions against Samsung

Written by

From Florian Mueller’s patent blog:

Three months ago I saw a filing by Nokia that related to some discussions with Samsung considered so secretive that it wanted even the very title of a document to be sealed. It was clear that Nokia and Samsung were talking about something that also related somehow to the 2011 Nokia-Apple settlement, about the terms of which nothing was known except that Apple described it, at a very high level, as “merely a ‘provisional license’ for a limited ‘standstill’ period”. One could figure that Nokia and Samsung wouldn’t talk about some other patent agreement without talking about some sort of patent deal between them — a license or an outright purchase.

On Wednesday evening local time, Magistrate Judge Paul S. Grewal of the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, whose writing style is well-liked by various patent litigation watchers including me, entered an order that finally sheds light on this. The order came down after a hearing held yesterday on a request by Apple (and possibly also one by Nokia) for sanctions against Samsung (and/or its outside counsel) for violation of a protective order, i.e., for illegal disclosure of (in this case, extremely) confidential business information.

I must say that I’m shocked.

The big question here is this:

So how did Samsung’s executives get access to contracts that were meant to be used only by its outside counsel (marked as “Highly Confidential — Attorneys’ Eyes Only”) for the purposes of litigation with Apple and absolutely positively not for the pupose of gaining unfair advantages in licensing negotiations with anyone (not with Apple, and much less with third parties like Nokia), when such disclosure would constitute an unbelievably serious violation of court rules?

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. These are pretty serious accusations.

Bryan Cranston’s advice for aspiring actors

Written by

OK, maybe I just am not ready to let go of Breaking Bad yet, but this is great advice and goes for any craft that is judged by others, like writing or building an app. Just focus on your craft and do what you can do.

Reinventing Microsoft

Written by

Big days of change are clearly ahead for Microsoft. The Board of Directors has some big decisions to make as the largest activist investors are applying pressure to see their particular agenda enacted.

The main issue is that Ballmer himself is leaving Microsoft in the next 12 months — he offered a tearful goodbye to employees at last week’s annual companywide meeting — and finding a new CEO to execute such a dramatic shift in the company’s strategy while maintaining its existing 16 billion-dollar businesses will be no easy task.

That task has been made substantially more difficult in recent days by activist investors — reports surfaced last week that a group made up of “three of the top 20 investors” was pushing for Ford CEO Alan Mulally to take over the top spot, and yesterday news leaked that Microsoft’s board was seriously considering him. At the same time, “three of the top 20 investors” were also credited yesterday with pushing to remove Bill Gates from the Microsoft board, which he currently chairs. That would include his removal from the CEO search committee, which is presumably moving forward on the Mulally recommendation at the same time. None of that feels particularly suited to a smooth transition.

Every time I hear someone complaining about Apple’s lack of innovation or pending doom or the crime of having too much cash, I just think about Microsoft, Dell, and Blackberry and thank heavens for Tim Cook and the rest of the team.

Short name setting for Messages app

Written by

Apple added a setting for iOS 7 to display short names (Lynn) or full names (Lynn Fullerton) at the top of your Messages window. This change to a short name default can be an issue, especially if you’ve got more than one Lynn in your life. Good tip.

Schools report iOS 7 strips filters from student iPads

Written by

Seems like something in iOS 7 is stripping the filters that schools set up to prevent students from accessing adult content.

“Apple did not realize that installing iOS 7 would remove our (and thousands of organizations across the country) safety protection measure, which now makes the iPad devices unfiltered when accessing the Internet away from school,” said a memo from the Manitou Springs (Colo.) School District 14 to parents, verified by AllThingsD. “In the short term, the district will be collecting iPad devices at the end of each day until the safety protection measure is reinstalled.” And Manitou Springs School District 14 is not an isolated case. According to Apple’s support forums and some external IT discussion boards, schools across the United States are grappling with the issue, which is causing a lot of angst and frustration for administrators.

Hopefully, Apple can get this fixed quickly, before it injures their reputation with schools.

Crazy water slide

Written by

Part of me marvels at the coolness of this water slide. But the other side of me is just plain scared.

Amazing web model of tearing cloth

Written by

Click on the link and a web page with a piece of cloth (looks like a piece of graph paper) will appear. Click and drag across the cloth and you’ll rip it. The simulation is very realistic, complete with gravitational physics.

Even better, if you right click (hold down the control key), your mouse turns into a cutting tool.

And as a pièce de résistance, all the code is there to play with and learn from, including the HTML, CSS, and Javascript. Absolutely brilliant.

Twitter founder tweet exchange with Iran’s President

Written by

Twitter has been a bit of a thorn in the side of the Iranian government, giving the world a seldom seen view of the political unrest in the country, especially during the 2009-2010 election protests, the so-called “Green Revolution”.

Social media is still banned in Iran, which made the Twitter exchange between Twitter founder Jack Dorsey and newly elected President Hassan Rouhani so newsworthy.

Dorsey first tweeted, “Good evening, President. Are citizens of Iran able to read your tweets?” And, in response, Rouhani said, “Evening, @Jack. As I told @camanpour, my efforts geared 2 ensure my ppl’ll comfortably b able 2 access all info globally as is their #right.”

Social media still banned. Will this exchange signify coming change? To me, this is a perfect litmus test. Turn on the social media for the people, or it’s just words.