The video below shows a very young Matthew McConaughey auditioning for 1993’s excellent Dazed and Confused.
Amazing to me that, even as young as he is, as unseasoned an actor, his Matthew McConaughey-ness still comes across. You can easily imagine this guy saying “All right, all right, all right.”
Google, like Apple, posts their mobile OS adoption rates. This one was updated on January 5th.
As you can see, Lollipop, Google’s latest rev of Android, is not even on the list. Kit-Kat, the version before Lollipop (Android 4.4) is at 39.1%. Jellybean (Android 4.1.x through 4.3) is, collectively, at about 46%. Lollipop is just not making a big enough dent to make the list.
It’s important to note that the Android data is gathered by monitoring checkins to the Google Play app store. In this case, the latest chart was built using checkins over a 7 day period ending on January 5th. A different approach than Apple’s, but it does give a sense of the numbers.
From the linked ExtremeTech article:
Slow adoption of Android is a fact of life, and things are still better now than they used to be. A slow start to Lollipop’s deployment isn’t the end of the world, and it doesn’t point to user discontent. Lollipop isn’t something people go out and buy, it’s delivered to them whenever an OTA is ready.
The Android distribution model is naturally fragmented (because different vendors ship their own custom version of the OS) and there are competing, forked versions of Android that are competing for adoption with the mothership (Samsung’s Tizen is a prime example).
As reported a few weeks ago, Apple’s numbers (as of January 5th) show iOS 8 at 68%. A world of difference.
Have you ever wanted to share your iPhone or iPad with someone else? If you share your Mac with someone, you can each have your own account. OS X is designed for multiple users. But iOS is not.
iOS does give you restrictions, the ability to limit the type of content accessible from your device. Restrictions lets you limit access to specific apps, like Safari, FaceTime, Camera, the iTunes/iBooks store, Siri, and AirDrop. You can prevent people from installing and deleting apps, from changing privacy setting, and a lot more.
Though restrictions is powerful and needed, it does take time to set up and, once set up, there is no easy way to switch everything back to all access mode for your own personal use.
iOS also offers guided access, an accessibility feature that lets you limit a device to a single app, control which features are available. Guided access is extremely useful if you will be setting up a kiosk or distributing devices to a controlled group, such as a museum tour, or students in a classroom.
There are no doubt technical hurdles to overcome to make iOS a truly multi-user OS on the order of OS X. And some might argue that the iPhone and iPad are personal devices, not designed to be shared. But how many times has someone asked to borrow your phone to look something up or, as a parent, how many times have you wanted to give your phone/iPad to your child, perhaps for entertainment on a long car ride.
As an aside, the latest version of Android, Lollipop, ships with multi-user support built in. I can’t help but imagine that engineers at Apple are working on solving this problem for iOS, as well.
In the meantime, how about this idea? Add in support for a single profile tied in to restrictions. Then tie that profile into Touch ID and Passcode.
The idea would be, let me set up my restrictions profile with all the limitations and privacy I’d like, then tie that to a unique passcode. If I login with my regular passcode or my fingerprint, I get full access. If I login with my guest passcode or fingerprint, I get the restricted access version, ideal if I want to hand my phone or iPad off to someone. No worries about accessing private information or accidentally deleting something of value.
7Online:
A video of a bald and burly Delaware police officer enthusiastically lip-syncing to Taylor Swift’s “Shake it Off” is getting global attention.The video, posted to the Dover Police Department’s Facebook page Friday, shows Master Cpl. Jeff Davis in uniform and driving a patrol car while lip-syncing to the popular pop song – sassy head rolls and finger-pointing included.
What a hilarious video. I especially love the moments like at 1:20 when he sees someone he recognizes and “becomes a cop” again. The rest of the time, he’s just an average father of four who knows “Shake it Off” because of his 10-year-old daughter.
The downside of watching the video is that I’ve now finally listened to my very first Taylor Swift song. Thanks to my friend Lesley for the link.
Academy Award nomination or not, it’s a good, fun movie.
Craig Grannell:
Within the pages of MacUser, you’d not find a great deal of templated fare, and sometimes not even a great deal of content directly about the Mac. What you would find was interesting opinion and analysis about technology, brilliant insight into design and creativity, and in-depth features on all kinds of creative fare. All this was wrapped up in stunning design and layout work that let the content breathe and positively begged you to explore every page.
I never read MacUser on a regular basis but when I did, I always enjoyed its unique sensibility and writing style. A shame it’s shuttering its doors.
I wrote this over two years ago on my personal site, but my opinion hasn’t changed.
Uber said in a statement that the South Carolina Public Service Commission’s order directed at Raiser LLC, an Uber subsidiary, was unexpected and issued despite the company’s close work with state regulators.
I wonder if Uber’s antics in other cities/states/countries weighs in on decisions like this.
Power and Precision. Speed and Aggression. Brutal and Insane. Your metal drum tracks deserve nothing less than what you bring to your music. Your music deserves the real thing – live drum brutality to take your songwriting to the next level. Your music needs Double Bass Mania VIII.
Double Bass Mania is my favorite series of drum loops ever. I’ll be getting this set to go along with all the others I have.
Very interesting wording from Philips in response to Kelly Guimont’s question regarding their support for HomeKit.
Update: Philips updated its statement and said it was a misunderstanding. To be honest, this makes sense to me because HomeKit shouldn’t need a separate launch.
Both systems suffered long outages over Christmas after a major distributed denial of service (DDOS) attack. A hacking group calling itself Lizard Squad, which had attacked the two networks earlier last year, claimed responsibility.
I wonder what they’ll do with him? Will Microsoft and Sony get a say in the matter? This will be interesting.
I’ve always heard great things about NSNorth, so this year, I’m going to attend. I’ll be joining an amazing line-up of speakers for a few days in Canada.
Parity is a free, web-based puzzle game, in the same class as Threes and the like.
In Parity, you are presented with a three-by-three grid of numbers, with one of the numbers highlighted. You move the highlight into a new square using the arrow keys. When you move into a new square, the number in that square is increased by one.
The goal is to get all of the squares to have the same number. Simple to learn, fun to play.
Want to register a domain name? Now you have one more option. Google Domains is now open for business. The site seems reasonably well designed with a one stop shopping approach, offering a dashboard for managing all your domains and settings, a blogger front end, interfaces to website building shops Shopify, Squarespace, Weebly and Wix, website themes, and dynamic DNS.
I particularly like the front and center placement of a WHOIS button to the right of each result. There seems to be a trend to hide the WHOIS interface, use the search for WHOIS data as clickbait.
Curt Clifton from Omni Group gave a talk on developing for Apple Watch. Even if you are not a developer, there’s lots to learn here.
For example, there’s the fact that what runs on the Apple Watch is an extension to your iPhone app, not a freestanding Apple Watch app. If you want to distribute something that runs on the Apple Watch, you’ll be distributing that as an extension of an iPhone app. Got to have both.
Another nugget: All the code that runs on the Apple Watch is Apple’s. Your app extension runs on the phone. What you provide that makes its way over to the Apple Watch are image assets and a compiled storyboard that shows the flow between views.
Fast Company:
The Apple Watch is not like existing interfaces. Its potential lies in its limitations: It is accessible because it’s tiny and convenient because it’s only meant for seconds-long interactions. Features such as native voice control, haptic feedback, and a digital crown that can be used to magnify, scroll or zoom within apps crack open a whole new world of design requirements and opportunities (see more in sidebar). The smartest companies will do more than offer facsimiles of their existing apps; they’ll create custom experiences that exploit the watch’s unique interface.
This is a really well done piece with some thoughtful Apple Watch mockups for Uber, Foursquare, Instagram, and others.
New York Times:
A new website, called Hacker’s List, seeks to match hackers with people looking to gain access to email accounts, take down unflattering photos from a website or gain access to a company’s database. In less than three months of operation, over 500 hacking jobs have been put out to bid on the site, with hackers vying for the right to do the dirty work.
This is tricky, both ethically and from a legal standpoint. Like torrent sites that offer perfectly legal technology that enable you to do something that crosses legal boundaries, Hacker’s List itself is just a classified ads web site. What you do with it is your business.
A few more bits and pieces. Here’s how they make money:
It is done anonymously, with the website’s operator collecting a fee on each completed assignment. The site offers to hold a customer’s payment in escrow until the task is completed.
And here are a few examples:
A man in Sweden says he will pay up to $2,000 to anyone who can break into his landlord’s website. A woman in California says she will pay $500 for someone to hack into her boyfriend’s Facebook and Gmail accounts to see if he is cheating on her.
And:
a bidder who claimed to be living in Australia would be willing to pay up to $2,000 to get a list of clients from a competitor’s database, according to a recent post by the bidder.
“I want the client lists from a competitors database. I want to know who their customers are, and how much they are charging them,” the bidder wrote.
Others posting job offers on the website were looking for hackers to scrub the Internet of embarrassing photos and stories, retrieve a lost password or change a school grade.
A new report studying programming language rankings released yesterday by RedMonk shows that Apple’s new language, Swift, went from 68 place on the list to 22 this quarter—a jump of 46 spots.
Apple first unveiled Swift during its Worldwide Developers Conference in June 2014 and said it “makes it easier than ever for developers to create incredible apps.” Swift promised to reduce common programming errors, and since it can coexist with Object-C, developers could integrate it into their existing apps.
Describing Swift’s growth as “meteoric,” RedMonk said it expects to see Swift to break into the top 20 this year. That seems like a reasonable bet to me.
It’s also interesting to note that Objective-C was ranked No. 10 on the list of programming languages similar to ajax calls. JavaScript, Java, PHP, and Python were the top four languages.
RedMonk had this to say about Swift:
> Last, there is the curious case of Swift. During our last rankings, Swift was listed as the language to watch – an obvious choice given its status as the Apple-anointed successor to the #10 language on our list, Objective-C. Being officially sanctioned as the future standard for iOS applications everywhere was obviously going to lead to growth. As was said during the Q3 rankings which marked its debut, “Swift is a language that is going to be a lot more popular, and very soon.” Even so, the growth that Swift experienced is essentially unprecedented in the history of these rankings. When we see dramatic growth from a language it typically has jumped somewhere between 5 and 10 spots, and the closer the language gets to the Top 20 or within it, the more difficult growth is to come by. And yet Swift has gone from our 68th ranked language during Q3 to number 22 this quarter, a jump of 46 spots. From its position far down on the board, Swift now finds itself one spot behind Coffeescript and just ahead of Lua. As the plot suggests, Swift’s growth is more obvious on StackOverflow than GitHub, where the most active Swift repositories are either educational or infrastructure in nature, but even so the growth has been remarkable.
I usually don’t link to things like this, but this one is very interesting.
Glass is moving from the Google X research lab to be a stand-alone unit led by Ivy Ross. Ms. Ross and her team will report to Tony Fadell, a former Apple executive who heads Nest Labs, the smart-home device company Google acquired for $3.2 billion in February 2014. Mr. Fadell will still run Nest, but he also will oversee Glass and provide strategic guidance to Ms. Ross.
Tony made the iPod and founded Nest after leaving Apple. I have a ton of respect for this man.
The report is “groundless,” Samsung said in an e-mail. In a separate statement, BlackBerry said it “has not engaged in discussions with Samsung with respect to any possible offer to purchase BlackBerry.” The Waterloo, Ontario-based company didn’t specify whether it had received a proposal from Samsung, the world’s largest smartphone maker.
Not even Samsung wants BlackBerry.
Jason Snell really knows his way around a podcast. Just listen to the open for The Incomparable. Go ahead, pick one at random. Though, if I might, consider this one, which features one of the greatest songs ever written (well, I like it).
All that said, follow the link to read Jason’s thoughts on podcasting. It’s the first in a series. And you might learn a thing or two.
If you are pulling together a design, say for an app or a web page, and you are relatively inexperienced at working with color, spend a few minutes reading this post. It’s short, and offers some simple techniques to help you make some relatively safe choices.
Wall Street Journal:
Early this month, mobile ad exchange TapSense announced a product it said will allow marketers to place ads in applications created for the Apple Watch by third-party developers. The technology is still being tested, the company said, but it plans to develop new ad formats specific to the wearable device, and to target those ads based on detailed location information.
“We are working in beta with both app developers and brands but have nothing to publicly announce right now,” said TapSense CEO Ash Kumar, in reference to which companies it’s currently working with. “Reception for this has been incredible and we can’t wait to see how location-based services add value to consumers’ in-app experiences.”
From the TapSense press release:
The TapSense SDK leverages new interactive interfaces supported by Apple WatchKit such as watch faces, glances & full-screen experiences while getting rid of banner ads.
And:
Being worn on the wrist, an Apple Watch is more accessible and can leverage the GPS on an iPhone. This makes it an ideal device to deliver contextual and hyper-local offers such as a retail store coupon.
And:
As Apple Watch has full integration with Apple Pay, the hyper-local coupons delivered through the TapSense platform can be redeemed by the consumer right from the convenience of their wrist. As this reduces friction for the consumer, we believe this will have huge impact on brand lift and engagement. Also, marketers would be able to link their marketing spend accurately with offline purchases, which has been a difficult problem to solve until now.
First things first, this whole concept makes me shudder.
That aside, this all seems incredibly speculative to me. If Apple were to allow advertising on the Apple Watch, why would they give up control to an outside agency?
Augusta Chronicle:
Liam Porter stepped out of the movie theater Saturday afternoon and saw the Imperial Stormtroopers descending on him and his mouth dropped open and then slowly spread into a smile.
“Cool,” was about all the normally chatty 7-year-old could manage.
The troopers led him to the Party Room at Regal 20 Cinemas packed with family and friends and there on a table lay his new left arm and hand, done up like the trooper’s arm, and one of their helmets.
The arm was built as part of e-NABLE, an online community that uses 3D printers to make prosthetics for those who need them.
Nicely done.
The idea here is to remove traffic lights from intersections and embed them on your windshield instead. As your car approaches an intersection, a virtual traffic light appears on your windshield telling you to stop, then turns green when it is your turn to go. If there are no other cars approaching the intersection, you roll on through without having to slow down.
Click the link and watch the video to get a sense of how this might work.
The efficiency here is obvious. With the traditional traffic light system, one direction always has a red light, even if no cars are coming in the other direction. Virtual traffic lights can mirror the existing system, but will eliminate the frustration of waiting at a red light when it is obvious there is no competing traffic in the cross street.
The hazards are also obvious. A system like this depends on all cars on the road using connected vehicle technology (CVT), as it is known in the US. CVT is what makes driverless cars possible, allowing multiple vehicles to negotiate with each other to share the road. Until all cars have CVT, a system like this is impossible. But that said, CVT is coming and it will eventually be mandatory.
From Google’s Project Ara Web site:
The smartphone is one of the most empowering and intimate objects in our lives. Yet most of us have little say in how the device is made, what it does, and how it looks. And 5 billion of us don’t have one. What if you could make thoughtful choices about exactly what your phone does, and use it as a creative canvas to tell your own story?
Introducing Project Ara.
Designed exclusively for 6 billion people.
Jim and Shawn talk about the Mac, the iPhone in the past, the Apple Watch in the future, and how to learn to play guitar!
Sponsored by lynda.com (Start learning something new by visiting lynda.com/amplified and get a FREE 10-day trial where you can access all of their 3,000+ courses).
Riveting. Watch Tommy Caldwell and Kevin Jorgeson make their final push for the summit of El Capitan in one of the hardest free climbs in the world. This is being carried live.
One thing I’ve learned over the last 20 years of writing about Apple is that there’s no shortage of naysayers, ready to declare certain failure of the company’s newest product—whatever that product happens to be. The Apple Watch is the latest in a long list of products, that includes the iPod, iPhone, iPad and Macs, that critics says will fail.
The truth of the matter is, nobody knows if the Apple Watch will be a huge success, a moderate blip on the consumer’s radar or a dismal failure. What we do have, is history of what’s happened with Apple’s major product releases, and a reasonable understanding of how consumers feel about the company. With this information, we can make some logical assumptions about how the Apple Watch will do in the market.
Based on what the naysayers have said about releases of the iPhone and iPad in recent years, and the fact that consumers have purchased them in record numbers, I would say that people, in general, are more educated in their purchasing decisions than ever before.
While we do know what the Apple Watch will look like, it seems like a safe bet that Apple hasn’t given us all of the details on the functionality of the device. For instance, we don’t yet know the full integration of the Apple Watch and the iPhone, although some intriguing details have recently surfaced. We also don’t know which apps will be available on the device.
Apple is positioning the watch at the fashion space as much as they are to consumers. This is evidenced with the Paris unveiling of the watch at Colette, a high-end Paris boutique.
Apple will face a problem convincing people that haven’t worn a watch for years—or have never worn a watch—that they need an Apple Watch. A lot of people, me included, haven’t worn a watch since I started carrying a smartphone. I can be convinced if the watch eases some problem in my life.
The Apple Watch will sell well, probably above Apple’s public expectations. I’m not saying that equals success, just that people will be clamoring for a new Apple device and will give it a try.
There will be a ramp-up to volume sales. While the tech and high-end crowd will go after the watch quickly, many consumers will take a wait and see attitude, but they will start to come around by the end of the year.
Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference will be important for the Apple Watch. The conference is where Apple will lay the roadmap for all of its devices for the coming year. Developers and consumers will get a first-hand look at where this technology is going.
The first iteration of anything Apple has done in the last 15 years has been about releasing a stable, working product. They have, for the most part, met that goal. This is exactly what I expect from the company with the Apple Watch.
Ultimately, success of the Apple Watch depends on developer interest in making apps specific to the watch, functionality of the device, and the future plans Apple has for the watch. There are many things Apple could allow us to control and track with the watch, whether that’s in the home, car, or even our health.
One thing is for sure, the Apple Watch will be one of the most personal devices we have purchased in a long time.
It’s much too early to declare the Apple Watch a failure because it’s a device that we haven’t seen before. Many smart people jumped to conclusions and said the iPod and iPhone would fail too. They couldn’t have been more wrong.