Complete Jonathan Ive, Craig Federighi Businessweek interview

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This is the complete text of Businessweek’s interview with Jonathan Ive and Craig Federighi, parts of which appeared last week. Every bit as revealing as the Cook interview. I get a real sense of the excitement these two have working with each other. Clearly, they love what they are doing. This from Ive:

I have always found—and I know the ID team has always found—that the discoveries you make when you are lucky enough to sit next to somebody who represents a completely different expertise, those discoveries can be really profound, and they’re really exciting.

Federighi on process:

We would prototype. We would review how it felt. Did it really work in the way we hoped it did once it was in our hands? We would get versions of it that we would live on, and then we would get together and we’d say, “I’m using it and I like this, but this bit is not coming together quite the way we wished,” and we’d iterate. So a lot of those conversations are just driven by perfecting the product together.

Ive on the emergence of parallax:

One of the things that we were interested in doing is, despite people talked about this being “flat,” is that it’s very, very deep. It’s constructed and architected visually and from an informational point of view as a very deep UI, but we didn’t want to rely on shadows or how big your highlights could get. Where do you go? I mean, there is only so long you can make your shadows.

It wasn’t an aesthetic idea to try to create layers. It was a way of trying to sort of deal with different levels of information that existed and to try to give you a sense of where you were.

There’s so much great stuff here. Interesting to hear their back and forth on complexity and collaboration, on working for Tim Cook, and the changes Tim Cook brought to Apple’s supply chain. Brilliant read.

Stanford team unveils first computer made of nanotubes

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This is an important step. To give you some perspective on the size of a nanotube:

100 microns – width of human hair 10 microns – water droplet 8 microns – transistors in Cedric 625 nanometres (nm) – wavelength of red light 20-450 nm – single viruses 22 nm latest silicon chips 9 nm – smallest carbon nanotube chip 6 nm – cell membrane 1 nm – single carbon nanotube

Fascinating.

Fake reviewers snared in NY Attorney General sting

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Nineteen companies caught writing fake reviews on websites such as Yelp, Google Local and CitySearch have been snared in a year-long sting operation by the New York Attorney General, and will pay $350,000 in penalties.

Wow.

More iPhone slo-mo goodness

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Some of these are fantastic. My favorite? The hackey-sack guy in the Apple Store. Wow.

Fake “waterproof iPhone” ad wreaking havoc

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No. Your iPhone is not waterproof.

“Update to iOS 7 and become waterproof” claims the ad (see below) explaining that “In an emergency, a smart-switch will shut off the phone’s power supply and corresponding components to prevent any damage to your iPhone’s delicate circuitry.”

C’mon, people. Use your noggin.

The astoundingly agile quadcopter

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Back in 2009, I had the chance to spend some time with the folks at MIT’s Aerospace Controls Lab to watch some of the groundbreaking work being done with variable pitch quadcopters (basically, a helicopter with four horizontal propellors, each capable of operating at an independent speed). The thing I loved most about their setup was that the whole thing was controlled by an iPhone, communicating with a series of sensors mounted on the ceiling.

Things have really come a long way since then. Watch Raffaello D’Andrea throw this quad like a baseball and the quad instantly recover. Beautiful.

Tough times for Apple analysts

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Tim Cook’s promise to “double-down on security” seems to be working, at least as far as analysts are concerned.

Fast forward to this year’s iPhone lauch: Munster, after observing iPhone 5c & 5s launch day lines and taking notes, reiterated his firm’s prediction of weekend sales of 5 to 6 million, detailed as “2.5 million iPhone 5s” and “3 million units” of iPhone 5c.

In parallel, KGI analyst Ming-Chi Kuo predicted sales of 6 to 8 million.

When Apple announced sales of 9 million iPhones over the weekend, Munster told Bloomberg, “When I saw that 9-million number, I basically fell out of my chair.”

This from a guy who is traditionally on the high side when it comes to predicting Apple unit shipments.

iMessage for Android. Yikes.

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Jay Freeman, better known as Saurik, has taken a closer look at what’s happening under the hood with iMessage Chat and he raises the concern that your information might not be secure as it passes through the app maker’s servers in China before it’s sent on to Apple. Fellow developer Adam Bell claims the app is circumventing Apple’s restrictions by spoofing chat requests as a Mac mini.

Scary.

Watching the lights go out

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This is dark, sad, and powerful. About a year ago, David Hilfiker was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. This past January, he decided to blog about his journey. Here’s his self-written bio:

I am a 68-year-old retired physician and live with my wife in the nation’s capital. I practiced for seven years in an isolated rural area and then for ten years in an inner-city neighborhood. In 1990 we founded Joseph’s House, a home for homeless people with AIDS and cancer. I have continued to write, teach and lecture about poverty, politics and other issues. I am writing this blog to dispel some of the fear and embarrassment that surrounds Alzheimer’s.

And here’s a bit from his first post:

Garrison Keillor said recently, “Nothing bad ever happens to writers; it’s all material.” So, at least for a time, this Alzheimer’s disease will become material for my website and for this blog. I want to write about what Alzheimer’s is like from the inside. What is the experience of losing one’s mind? Do I still experience myself as the same “self”? Obviously, I don’t know how long I can do this, although my good friend Carol Marsh has volunteered to keep it going with interviews when I can no longer write. We’ll have to see.

If you want to follow from the beginning, here’s a link to the start of the blog. Brave man.

LucasFilm pushes the boundaries with real-time rendering

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LucasFilm is working on a real-time rendering system that captures character movements on a soundstage and, in real-time, incorporates those movements in video. This is a remarkable achievement and, in my mind, carries significant implications for film and video game production.

As you watch the video, notice the convergence of technologies. At about :41, the director swaps out one character for another with the push of a button, while the video plays live. At 1:55, you get a real taste of the ability to capture subtle facial movements, transferring them to a live character. There’s so much more. Just watch.

What 64-bit brings to the iPhone 5s

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This review of the iPhone 5s is about what you’d expect. The author loves his new phone, points out things other reviewers have also raved about. But this bit focused on the difference with apps specifically compiled for the iPhone 5s’ 64-bit processor, vs their 32-bit iPhone 5 counterparts:

For instance, Night Sky 2 — it’s among those apps compiled in 64-bit — clearly gains speed during startup. It launches in 2.7 seconds on the iPhone 5S, compared to 4.6 seconds on an iPhone 5. Although 1.9 seconds may not sound like much, it’s still an indicator of the kinds of speed gains we’re likely to see as more apps are updated.

A better test of the new architecture is the new game Infinity Blade 3. For this quick test, I rebooted both devices and launched the game before running any other apps. From the moment I launched the game until the introduction animation ran, I found the iPhone 5S to be surprisingly faster than its predecessor. On first launch, the iPhone 5S needed 47 seconds to clear the loading screen and begin the animation, 14 seconds faster than the iPhone 5. For the second launch, I rebooted the phones again before launching the game. The iPhone 5S reloaded the game in 17.8 seconds compared to 48 seconds for iPhone 5. On the third attempt, the iPhone 5S needed 19.8 seconds, the iPhone 5, 37.9 seconds.

Those are some pretty significant differences.

Chaos Computer Club hackers trick iPhone fingerprint scanner

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Interesting, but required a bit of Mission Impossible trickery to make it work.

The CCC started by photographing a fingerprint with 2400 dpi. Next the image was inverted and laser printed at 1200 dpi. To create the fingerprint mask Starbug finally used, latex milk was poured into the pattern, eventually lifted, breathed on (for moisture), and pushed onto the sensor to unlock the phone. In this sense, it’s hard to definitively state the hackers “broke” the TouchID precautions, because they did not circumvent the security measure without access to the fingerprint.

This does raise a fair question, though. How usable are the fingerprints we regularly leave on our phones? How susceptible is the iPhone 5s to this technique?

How to wipe your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch

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Getting ready to sell or give away your iOS device? Bookmark this page. The instructions are simple enough, but handy to have this page around when the time comes.

The Simpsons secret math

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I’m a math geek, have been all my life. So I was delighted when I saw this one. Had no idea the Simpsons’ writing staff were so mathematically inclined. Here are a few examples.

The episode climaxes with Tabitha appearing on the Jumbo Vision screen at the Springfield stadium, where she publicly proclaims her love for Buck. More important, just before she appears on the screen, it displays a question that asks the baseball fans in the crowd to guess the attendance.

The screen displays three multiple choice options; 8,128, 8,208 and 8,191. These digits might seem arbitrary and innocuous, but in fact they represent a perfect number, a narcissistic number and a Mersenne prime.

The article goes on to give the details on each class of numbers. What amazes me is how much work they put in to create a short chunk of animation that few, if any, in the audience will notice. That’s craft. Or insanity.

Here’s another example (and my personal favorite). Note that the carat (^) symbol stands for “raised to the power of”, as in 2^5 = 32:

Professor Andrew Wiles (now Sir Andrew Wiles) worked in secrecy for seven years to fulfil a childhood dream and build a proof that confirmed that Fermat was right, inasmuch as the following equation has no solution: x^n + y^n = z^n, for n > 2. It is neither necessary to understand the proof nor to examine the equation in detail, except I should stress again that both Wiles and Fermat claimed, indeed proved, that this equation has no solutions, yet Homer’s blackboard proves the opposite!

3987^12 + 4365^12 = 4472^12.

Check it for yourself on your phone calculator and you will find that the equation balances!

I’ll leave it to you to figure out the fly in the ointment. Or just read the article.

575 free movies online

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A fantastic free resource. There’s something for everyone in this list. Some of my all-time favorite films alongside a bunch of unknown works (to me, at least) by great directors such as Quentin Tarantino and David Lynch. Yum.

LinkedIn customers allege company hacked e-mail addresses

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the company appropriated their identities for marketing purposes by hacking into their external e-mail accounts and downloading contacts’ addresses.

That’s a pretty serious charge. Given the process by which LinkedIn grows their user base (an expanding tree of referrals), you might be tempted to see this as true. I’m skeptical. Seems so easy to detect. A foolish move, if the charge is true. I hope this is not the case. We shall see.

Here’s LinkedIn’s public response to the suit.

Samsung films people waiting in line at Apple iPhone rollout

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Samsung sent out a film crew to film the excitement and anticipation of the crowds waiting for their new iPhones. The most telling part of the article was this quote:

“Other companies release new phones, but there’s not as much passion and heat [from buyers],” a Korea-based producer from Samsung Broadcasting Center/Cheil Worldwide, who asked not to be named, told CNET at the iPhone launch. “It’s only Apple. Why? We’re curious.”

Ask us, we’ll tell you.

How an engineer earned 1.25 million air miles buying pudding

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I find this sort of thing fascinating.

Healthy Choice was having a promotion on their frozen entrées section. The offer was as follows: for every 10 bar codes of their product a person sent in, they’d be awarded 500 Air Miles. However, the company had an early bird stipulation that people who redeemed the offer within the first month of the competition would receive double that, meaning a person could potentially receive 1000 Air Miles for buying just 10 of their entrées.

Upon catching wind of the deal, David scoured his local supermarkets to see which, if any products offered the best potential return. After some legwork, he found what he was looking for- a discount grocery chain that was selling individual chocolate pudding cups for 25 cents each. This meant that for a measly $2.50, he could get 1000 Air Miles.

He spent $3,000 on pudding, donated all the pudding, then turned in the bar codes and got more than a million air miles (about $150K in value). Loophole!

How to improve your iPhone battery life under iOS 7

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This article has some excellent suggestions for steps you can take to improve your battery life under iOS 7. I’ve played around with these for a few days and can tell you that these have made a huge difference in my battery usage. The two changes I think made the most difference (your mileage may vary) for me were setting my brightness to 50% (still plenty bright) and reducing the motion of the user interface. With the latter, I do lose the parallax effect, which I do miss, so I’m going to turn that setting off so I get parallax back, see how that affects my battery life. Note that this is the same setting that addressed Shawn’s motion effects post from yesterday.

Hockey fight loophole

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There’s a new rule in hockey that mandates a two minute penalty if a player takes off his own helmet prior to engaging in a fight. And then this happened.

Two players, Krys Barch and Brett Gallant, were about to get into a bit of a scrape-up, when they very purposely took each others helmets off. Really happened. I love hockey.

Grand Theft Auto V generates $1B in three days

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One billion dollars in 3 days. Wow. For comparison, it took Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 16 days to hit $1B, back in January 2012. Then Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 hit $1B in 15 days this past December. 3 days is astonishing.

Grand Theft Auto has been keeping Take-Two afloat during the down times, as the series has an extremely long tail (the volume of sales over time following release). Not only does a new release spike revenues, but it also incentivizes gamers to investigate the back catalog (sometimes spurring purchases of already owned games on new platforms). GTA V will be even more significant should the title see staggered releases on PC and next-generation platforms (as I suspect it will). At this point, Call of Duty is going to have a nearly impossible time beating GTA’s sales this year, ending a four-year streak.

With numbers like these, it is no wonder that Apple has added support for game controllers into iOS 7. Will game controller support be the force that erodes the chasm between iOS devices and traditional consoles like the Xbox and PlayStation? Time will tell.

Tim Cook visits Apple Stores, tweets about it

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I love that Tim Cook did this. What a great surprise for folks queueing up to buy the iPhone 5s. Phil Schiller and Eddie Cue also made the rounds of the Palo Alto area stores. Fantastic.

Apple iBeacons

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Back in June, at WWDC, Apple first announced iOS 7, detailing a host of new technologies. Hidden among them, with the barest of mentions, was the iBeacon.

Think of an iBeacon as a tiny radio you can put almost anywhere. When your iPhone or other iOS device gets within range (a few dozen feet or so), it detects the iBeacon and can estimate how far away it is. Each iBeacon has its own identifier, too, so if your iPhone is within range of more than one iBeacon, it can tell them apart.

One company that is hard at work making their own brand of iBeacon sensor is estimote. From their web site:

Simply stick our tiny sensors in any physical place — such as your retail store — and your app users will benefit from personalized micro-location based notifications and actions when they walk in to your venue or interact with your products.

Roximity is another company that makes iBeacons. From their website:

Manage your beacons and triggers from a simple yet powerful web based dashboard. View detailed analytics about your campaigns, in store foot traffic, busiest times of day, and much much more!

I think this technology has incredible potential.

Liquid nitrogen sorcery

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I just love science. This is all parlor tricks, but so fun to watch. Great payoff at the end.

Jimmy Page on the art of songwriting

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Daniel Rachel just released the book Isle of Noises: Conversations with Great British Songwriters.

Inspired by Paul Zollo’s seminal Songwriters on Songwriting, Rachel has managed to bring together a truly impressive ensemble of British tunesmiths, including Ray Davies, Jarvis Cocker, Mick Jones, Robin Gibb (why the hell not!) and Johnny Marr, among others. The results are hugely enjoyable, and the mind veritably boggles imagining the kind of cajoling and legwork Rachel must have put in to coax this rich and eclectic ensemble out of their country piles—not least the notoriously taciturn, the notoriously notorious Jimmy Page…

I love interviews where musicians talk about their craft (as opposed to their personal lives). Really looking forward to getting my copy. Follow the link above to get to an excerpt of the Jimmy Page interview.

Here’s a tasty bit of Page playing Chopin. The audio is a little out of sync (I think they captured the echo), but yum, nonetheless.