Of all the various Choose Your Own Adventure-type books, the Fighting Fantasy series, created by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone, was by far and away my favorite. I read/played them all, obsessively. They felt more like games than any of the others (and included a simple D&D-esque dice-based combat system), but were also much better written, better typeset, and better illustrated. Rather than going by pages, they went by numbered entries, generally with more than one entry per page. Most of the books had exactly 400 entries, so the gameplay was vastly more complex than any of the regular CYOB-style books. I’d love to see info-graphic diagrams of their decision trees a la the work by Christian Swinehart I linked to yesterday.

I can’t say enough good things about the Fighting Fantasy books and how much they meant to me in my early teens. I loved them.

Update: Unsurprisingly, there is a good Wikipedia entry.

AT&T Files Legal Complaint Against Verizon Over 3G Coverage Map Ads ★

Funny to read a legal filing that references Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer and the Abominable Snow Monster.

Gartner Estimates for Worldwide Smartphone Market Share ★

Apple’s year-over-year share grew from 13 to 17 percent; RIM’s from 16 to 21. HTC grew from 4.5 to 6.5, and Samsung held steady at 3. Nokia dropped from 42 to 39 percent, and the big loser was the “Other” category, which dropped precipitously from 21 to 13 percent.

Now seems like a good time to once again recall the words of Steve Ballmer two years ago:

“There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance.”

ifoAppleStore on the Upper West Side Store ★

Don’t miss the photo gallery.

News From the Opening of the New Upper West Side Apple Store ★

Matt Buchanan reports on Ron Johnson’s remarks:

Sales per store: $26 million, which is just below what Macy’s, Target and Best Buy make per store. But, if you look at the real estate, it’s a slightly different picture. Apple Stores do sales of $4,300 per square foot which is 5× the $872 per square foot Best Buy does.

Wow — over 100,000 applicants on file for jobs at the Apple Store worldwide. 10,000 people submitted applications for the new Upper West Side store. Just over 200 got a job.

Wednesday, 11 November 2009

One Book, Many Readings ★

Detailed analysis and info-graphic visualizations of the old Choose Your Own Adventure books, by Christian Swinehart. Beautiful and fantastically detailed work. Be sure to explore the sections of the site from the menu atop the page. Truly wonderful. (Via Andy Baio.)

Joe Hewitt, Developer of Facebook App, Quits iPhone Development Over App Store Review Policies ★

Joe Hewitt:

My decision to stop iPhone development has had everything to do with Apple’s policies. I respect their right to manage their platform however they want, however I am philosophically opposed to the existence of their review process.

Update: Regardless how you feel about Apple’s App Store stewardship, you have to admit there’s at least some irony here.

Wolfram Alpha Partners With Bing ★

Seems like a good deal for both of them. I don’t see the integration yet when I try their suggested examples, but Microsoft’s announcement claims the features are coming in the “next few days”. I thought this was curious, though:

Microsoft’s initiative and interest in Wolfram|Alpha began earlier this year. In fact, there is an interesting story that circulates within our walls around some of our early discussions with Microsoft.

Highlighting examples of Wolfram|Alpha to the most senior executives at Microsoft, Stephen Wolfram entered the query “2^2^2^2^2”. Upon seeing the result, Bill Gates interrupted to say, “What, is that right?”

A profound silence fell over the entire room. Stephen replied, “We do mathematics!”

Bill Gates still attends meetings like this at Microsoft?

‘We Don’t Lie to Google’ ★

Ben Casnocha on the contrast in Google suggestions for slightly differently-worded queries. (Via Kottke.)

Apple’s Pursuit of Profit Rather Than Market Share ★

And speaking of MG Siegler, he has a good piece about Apple’s pursuit of profit rather than raw market share. This might be the single key factor to understand about Apple as a business. The difference between Apple and its competitors can be striking. Siegler writes:

According to the report, Apple made $1.6 billion in operating profit off of the iPhone in Q3. Nokia, meanwhile, made $1.1 billion. Let’s put this in perspective. Recent numbers suggest Nokia controls roughly 35% of the worldwide handset market. Apple? About 2.5%.

Not 25%. Two point five percent.

Another way to put it is that Apple is concerned with unit share, but only in the most profitable segments of the market.

Birdfeed and Twitter Geo-Location ★

Speaking of Twitter, here’s MG Siegler on the imminent new version of Birdfeed, which has terrific built-in support for Twitter geo-location.

Evan Williams Explains Twitter’s New Retweet Feature ★

Great explanation of the thinking behind a major new feature.

One thing to keep in mind is that Twitter, having reached the size of a pop-culture (rather than mere tech-culture) phenomenon, is going to stir up loud complaints every time they change anything, regardless of the merits of the change itself. Good for them for not being afraid to keep moving the service forward.

Quote of the Day ★

James Cameron, from Dana Goodyear’s profile in The New Yorker:

“If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.”

So true. (Via Jamie Dihiansan.)

Updated Version of Khoi Vinh’s Revenue/Payroll Baseball Table, Taking Into Account Mid-Season Trades and Acquisitions ★

Nice work from Punching Kitty.

Visualizing CNN.com’s Traffic ★

Nicholas Felton:

Ultimately, I think the most fascinating story here is the change in our news habits after September 11, 2001. After this day, a new and higher baseline for visits to the site is established, and the inference is that this event really established CNN.com and the greater Internet as a reliable, timely and indispensable source for news.

Hacker Tool Copies Personal Info From Compromised Jailbroken iPhones ★

Intego:

It is important to note that standard, non-jailbroken iPhones are not at risk; it is extremely dangerous to jailbreak an iPhone because of the vulnerabilities that this process creates. (Estimates suggest that 6-8% of iPhones are jailbroken.)

I am personally wary of jailbreaking, but more from a stability/reliability perspective, not security. I’m skeptical about the above blanket statement. To date, the only security problems that have arisen are not for jailbroken iPhones in general, but jailbroken iPhones running SSH with the default root password. What security holes have been identified that affect jailbroken phones that aren’t running SSH or on which the root password has been changed?

Update: OK, here’s a good security issue created by jailbreaking itself, from Dino Dai Zovi (whom I interviewed back in 2007):

Also, remember that jailbreaking your iPhone disables code signing enforcement. That’s the thing that makes exploits so hard on iPhone.

Google Tutorial Videos for Android 2.0 ★

Google’s tour through the Android 2.0 UI. (Via Dave Winer’s excellent new weblog, Droidie.)

Tuesday, 10 November 2009

The Go Programming Language ★

New systems level programming language from Google (but, judging from the copyright statements, not an official Google project). Go has built-in garbage collection, a simpler syntax than Java or C++, fast compilation times and excellent performance — and it was designed with concurrency in mind. Interesting and ambitious, to say the least.

Among many interesting details, it ships with a utility named gofmt, which formats Go source code according to a standardized style — which standardized style uses tabs, not spaces (hooray). Go uses a Pascal-style “:=” assignment operator for initializing values (hooray). And, regarding my own tiny sliver of expertise, the Regexp library offers only a crude regular expression syntax (boo).

Update: Some amazing names are behind Go, including Ken Thompson and Rob Pike.

Bada — New Mobile Platform From Samsung ★

Samsung bada is a new open platform that enables a richer user experience in applications on Samsung mobile devices.

No idea what it looks like or what the technical details are. Nothing specific at all, really. But one thing is certain: Samsung isn’t comfortable putting their fate in Windows Mobile’s hands. [Insert your own joke about integration with Microsoft’s Bing here.]

Mac OS X 10.6.2 Doesn’t Run on Hackintoshes With Atom CPUs ★

“There is no other logical reason why Apple would do this unless they’re going to enter this space with some sort of tablet-type device,” said Shane Spiess, president of Portland, Ore.-based Apple reseller MacForce.

Um, how about the simple explanation that they don’t want people installing Mac OS X on machines other than Macs?

Even simpler explanation: it could just be a bug that’ll be fixed in 10.6.3. Breaking compatibility with a CPU Apple has never used certainly isn’t a high priority.

Theme Park Maps ★

I just lost an hour here. Fabulous. (Via Nicholas Felton.)

Analyst: Apple Beats Nokia as World’s Most Profitable Handset-Maker in Last Quarter ★

Reuters:

Apple overtook Nokia in the third quarter as the cellphone maker generating the highest total operating profit in the industry, research firm Strategy Analytics said on Tuesday. […]

Apple does not unveil profits per business line, but Strategy Analytics estimated Apple’s operating profit for its iPhone handset unit stood at $1.6 billion in the third quarter, compared with Nokia’s $1.1 billion.

Now seems like a good time to recall the words of former Palm CEO Ed Colligan, a mere three years ago:

Responding to questions from New York Times correspondent John Markoff at a Churchill Club breakfast gathering Thursday morning, Colligan laughed off the idea that any company — including the wildly popular Apple Computer — could easily win customers in the finicky smart-phone sector.

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

CFPropertyList — PHP and Ruby Libraries for Generating Binary Plists ★

Remember this link two weeks ago, where Sam Soffes discovered that for iPhone apps that take data from web services, JSON (parsed with TouchJSON) out-performed XML property lists?

The most common pro-plist retort was that of course XML plists were slow and one should use the binary plist format instead — smaller to transmit, faster to parse. And on iPhone OS, every bit of size reduction and speed counts. The problem with binary plists is how do you generate them from a non-Mac OS X server?

Ends up there’s an open source PHP library by Rodney Rehm and Christian Kruse that does just that, and a Ruby version too.

Editor Takes Constructive Revenge ★

Toronto Star editor edits memo from publisher announcing the layoff of 100 in-house editors. Blood bath of red ink.

Redesigning the Worst NFL Helmet Graphics ★

I particularly love the re-imagined Buccaneers helmet, and I like how the Redskins one stays true to their established brand. Any discussion of great NFL helmet designs ought to mention the Steelers, though.

Le Petit Dummy ★

Crudely funny, exquisitely crafted iPhone gag app by Robert Hodgin and William Lindmeier. It’s the Clutch Cargo trick, with moving lips on a still photo. Interesting business model too — the app is free, but you have to pay (using in-app purchasing) to unlock the ability to use your own pictures or audio.

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar Has Rare Form of Leukemia ★

NPR:

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is being treated for a rare form of leukemia, and the basketball great said his prognosis is encouraging. The NBA’s all-time leading scorer was diagnosed last December with chronic myeloid leukemia, he told The Associated Press on Monday.

Godspeed.

One Finger Discount ★

20 percent discount, this week only, for Mac software from more than 100 indie developers.

Google Providing Free Airport Wi-Fi for the Holidays ★

Google:

Google Inc. today announced that it is working with airports across the country as well as Boingo Wireless, Advanced Wireless Group, Airport Marketing Income and others to provide free Wi-Fi as a holiday gift now through January 15, 2010. The gift currently includes 47 airports, including Las Vegas, San Jose, Boston, Baltimore, Burbank, Houston, Indianapolis, Seattle, Miami, Ft. Lauderdale, Orlando, St. Louis and Charlotte. Additionally, as a result of this project, Burbank and Seattle airports will begin offering airport-wide free Wi-Fi indefinitely.

What’s not to love about that?

Joe Posnanski on the Yankees Payroll ★

Here’s the flip side of the Yankees payroll argument. Needless to say, I disagree.

The Yankees

Monday, 9 November 2009

My friend and fellow Yankees fan Khoi Vinh has written an interesting piece regarding the Yankees and their league-leading payroll:

For almost a decade, the Yankees have consistently maintained the highest payroll in Major League Baseball while failing to bring home a World Series title, and during that time the grousing took the form of ridicule. What Yankees fans heard then was: “See? You Yankees can’t buy championships, even with all of your money.” What we hear today is: “See? You Yankees just buy championships with all of your money.”

This is not a coherent line of argument, but then again it would be naïve to look for any motivation here other than envy, because the logic at work is so suspect. It’s pretty safe to say that a good number of those who hate the Yankees because of their payroll are unabashed capitalists, too; they’d be very unlikely to begrudge the fact that the highest valued, best performing organization in any given market also led that market. That’s not just capitalism, it’s the way capitalism is practiced in America.

This “the Yankees spend too much on payroll” argument reminds me of my quip two years ago about Mark Cuban “loving” his MacBook but not wanting to be mistaken for an “Apple fanboy”. I wrote:

There’s a whole class of recent switchers who define “Apple fanboy” as “anyone who’s been an enthusiastic Mac user since before I switched to the Mac”.

Same with baseball. A team that “spends unfairly on payroll” is any team that spends more than your favorite team.

This line of criticism has always struck me as futile and misguided. What exactly should the Yankees do with the profits the team generates, if not spend it on ballplayer salaries? Keep it in the Steinbrenner family pockets? Yankees fans don’t feel guilty about the Yankees payroll. It’s not like the team is run at a loss. It’s a business, and their business is winning baseball games. Winning leads to profits from ticket sales, TV, and merchandise; profits are used to sign all-star-caliber talent; and the talent leads to winning.

Isn’t that the formula every team tries to follow? Actually, no. Many baseball team owners spend far less of their teams’ revenue on player salaries than teams like the Yankees. Khoi writes:

Anecdotally at least, I knew that their single-minded dedication to winning championships year after year no matter the cost stands in contrast to the perpetual inefficiencies I’ve heard about at other clubs, where owners routinely pocket revenues from the so-called “luxury tax” that they receive from free-spending teams like the Yankees, rather than re-investing the money in talent.

So I dug around a bit online and compiled some figures, dumped them into Excel and found that, relative to the value of their franchise, the Yankees actually invest a fairly high percentage of their revenues directly in their payroll. Of the US$375 million in revenue that the club generated in 2008, in 2009 they dedicated US$201 million of it to talent, making for a 54% investment rate. That ranks them fourth amongst all major league teams.

He includes a table showing the numbers for all 30 MLB teams. The numbers range from the Detroit Tigers, who spent 62 percent of their revenue on payroll, to the San Diego Padres, who spent a pathetic 25 percent.

Keep in mind, too, that when George Steinbrenner bought the Yankees from CBS in 1973 (for just $10 million!), the Yankees were a last-place team, and had been a losing team for nearly a decade. There was and never has been anything automatic about the Yankees’ success. It has been earned season after season, and as the 1980s showed, the path was not smooth.

The goal is not merely to be good, but to be the best, to win the World Series, every year, with no excuses when they fall short. To try to be great, not hope to get lucky. Every team owner says they want to win. What I love about the Yankees and respect about the Steinbrenners is that they mean it, and act accordingly. ★

Monday, 9 November 2009

Lots of Excuses ★

The first comment on Robert Scoble’s Droid piece I linked to earlier today is from Thomas Marban, one of the developers of Twidroid, which is widely (maybe even universally) hailed as the leading Twitter client for Android. Marban writes:

one of the main reasons why UIs are unequally inferior are not only the way you build apps (open vs. closed hw/sw system) and the SDK itself but also marginal to non-existing UI standards, no ready-made drag & drop UI items, variations in carrier- & device firmware, hard- & software input, screen sizes, international customizations, modded phones, rooted phones and last but not least completely different expectations among users and the linux’ish target group itself. in a nutshell: beautiful mess. obviously, all these reasons eat up a huge pile of time that one could better spend with improving UX and polishing the interface. those who started early with android development have learned and are still learning it the hard way, just like they did with win 3.1 back in the days.

That doesn’t sound like someone who plans to ever ship something of the caliber of Tweetie, Birdfeed, or Twitterrific. From what I’ve seen of Twidroid, it’s not even as good as Craig Hockenberry’s original version of Twitterrific for iPhone, which was written as a jailbreak app before the iPhone officially supported third-party software. If Android hardware diversity is already a problem for third-party developers, it’s only going to get worse.

Close Votes Are a Feature, Not a Bug ★

Interesting political observation from Rafe Colburn:

Every vote over the minimum necessary to secure passage represents compromises that the Democrats as a group would prefer not to make. It’s not that Nancy Pelosi was lucky to pass the bill, it’s that the Democrats wrote the strongest bill they could that would get enough votes to pass. That’s good strategy.

Why Google Dropped $750 Million on AdMob ★

$100 million in annual revenue and growing fast.

Droid Limited to 256 MB of Storage for Apps ★

Taylor Wimberly:

The Motorola Droid will be the most powerful Android phone to date when it launches on November 6, 2009. However, the device still features the same shortcomings of all other Android phones. The Droid ships with a 512 MB ROM which contains only 256 MB available for app storage.

Google does not support installing apps to the SD card (and likely never will), so developers are limited in what they can create.

This is another one of those things where I simply don’t understand why Motorola doesn’t follow Apple’s lead and provide ample built-in storage rather than relying on removable SD cards. I just checked, and I have about 1.8 gigabytes of apps installed on my iPhone. Many of the top iPhone games weigh in at 50 or even 100 MB each. My two biggest games alone (Texas Hold’em and Need for Speed Undercover) weigh in at just over 256 MB combined. Just two games.

Did Motorola even look at the size of popular apps in the App Store before releasing this?

(HED) Folo My Lede (UNHED) ★

William Safire, back in 1990, on “lede” as a variant spelling of “lead”.

Mac OS X 10.6.2 Update ★

Lots of fixes.

Marshall Clow Reviews Yojimbo 2.0 for MacNN ★

Marshall Clow:

The Tag Explorer, a welcome new feature in Yojimbo 2, lets you see which items are marked with particular tags. Unlike a search mechanism, which is top-down, the Explorer lets you see how your data is organized or, if you are like me, disorganized.

Agreed, great feature.

Google Acquires AdMob for $750 Million ★

AdMob provides in-app advertising to a slew of iPhone apps.

Support for Same-Sex Marriage by Age and State ★

Striking differences in support by different age groups. There are only 12 states where same-sex marriage doesn’t have majority support from 18-29 year-olds.

Upcoming Ricoh GXR Interchangeable Lens/Sensor Camera System ★

Interesting new camera system from Ricoh — rather than just interchangeable lenses, each lens comes with its own image sensor. Ricoh cameras aren’t cheap, but you get what you pay for. My love for my Ricoh GR-D is unholy. (Via Wouter Brandsma.)

Update: Here’s a thread on DPReview.com with some info.

Pinching and the Droid

Monday, 2 November 2009

Joshua Topolsky, writing for Engadget, gives the Droid a very positive review overall. But regarding something I’d been wondering about, here’s what he writes about multi-touch:

As you have probably heard (or guessed), there’s no multitouch on this device. That’s clearly an issue with Android 2.0 and choices that Google is making about user interface — we’re fairly certain there’s nothing technically holding back the DROID from utilizing multitouch input, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see some tweaked ROMs hit the information superhighway with the functionality onboard. […]

Note: Android 2.0 does support multitouch events, but the functionality isn’t implemented here.

I, alas, don’t have a Droid in hand, but my understanding of the multi-touch situation is as follows. First, “multi-touch” is too general a term. What Topolsky means in his italicized note is that the Android 2.0 OS does have APIs to track multiple simultaneous touch events. Game developers, for example, should be able to write “multi-touch” games equivalent to those on the iPhone. This was not possible with early versions of Android.

So from an API perspective, Android 2.0 allows developers to “see” multiple touch events, but, from a UI perspective, Android 2.0 does not use pinching as a standard gesture.

The big multi-touch gesture that Apple uses in the iPhone is pinching — in particular, pinch-to-zoom. You pinch to zoom in MobileSafari. You pinch to zoom photos. You pinch to zoom maps.

There is no pinching on a Droid running Android 2.0. As for why, my somewhat-informed best guess is that it is related to Apple’s patent applications for the pinch-to-zoom gesture. If so, this stinks.

It’s not like no one else has implemented pinch-to-zoom, though: Palm uses it in WebOS, pretty much just like in the iPhone OS. It’s such an unbelievably useful, convenient, obvious, natural gesture, it’s hard for me to imagine using a handheld device without it.

And then adding to the intrigue, today came this demo video from Eldar Murtazin of Mobile Review, showing the Motorola Milestone, the GSM version of the Droid which will purportedly go on sale in Europe later this month.¹ As noted by Chris Davies at Slash Gear, the demo clearly shows support for pinch-to-zoom in both the Photos app (around the 3:00 mark) and web browser (around the 5:45 mark). In both cases, pinch-zooming on the Milestone seems very jerky — the zooming seems to happen all at once after the pinch gesture stops, very much unlike on the iPhone, where zooming smoothly animates live, as you pinch. My sources suggest that this is a Motorola customization, not code from Google. (Likewise for multi-touch gestures supported by HTC Android phones.)

So it would appear that Palm is willing to risk a lawsuit with Apple over this, and Google is not. The situation certainly brings to mind a gesture of some sort. ★

A key advantage Apple has over many of its competitors is simple, consistent, worldwide branding. For three years, Apple has released one new phone in either June or July: iPhone, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS. Everyone, everywhere, just calls them all “iPhones”, or “the iPhone”. Even in the case of the just-released Chinese iPhone, which lacks Wi-Fi hardware, the name is unchanged. iPhone, iPhone. iPhone.

Palm gets it — they’re using the “Pre” name worldwide, as they begin adding carriers outside the U.S. HTC, on the other hand, seems to use different names for the same hardware in different countries. And “Droid” is a Verizon brand, not a Motorola brand, so that phone will need a different name on other carriers around the world. (Update: But, Palm also has the new Pixi, which has a completely different name than the Pre but runs the same OS, which is called WebOS, so perhaps they haven’t really learned anything from Apple.) ↩

Regarding Apple TV

Friday, 30 October 2009

Dan Frommer is pretty down on the Apple TV 3.0 update:

Apple needs to make major changes to the Apple TV’s software and platform. That could include some or all of these options:

Opening Apple TV up to all Web video content, whether Apple controls it or not. (Rival Roku is heading in this direction with its $99 box.)

Apple isn’t going to do that. Love it or leave it, Apple TV is a front-end to the iTunes Store and a player for open video and audio content (i.e. non-DRM-protected MP4 video and MP3 and AAC audio, synced from a Mac or PC on your home network). If you want access to everything, use a Mac Mini — more powerful, open to just about anything, but also a lot more fiddly. Apple TV is not a Mac, it’s a top-to-bottom Apple experience device.

Adding a Blu-ray player to Apple TV so it could replace an existing port on peoples’ TVs, not take up a new one.

That would be nice. (I bought a PS3 just for use as a Blu-ray player; I would have bought a new Blu-ray equipped Apple TV instead if there were one.) But: Apple seems to have made a decision to ignore Blu-ray across the board, at least for now. Apple’s answer for HD movies is the iTunes Store.

Establishing an App Store for Apple TV, so that companies could offer video services, games, other apps, hardware accessories, etc., the way they do on the iPhone.

This sort of did happen with the 3.0 software — Apple TV can now play iTunes Extras and iTunes LPs, which are bundles of WebKit content.

More importantly, Frommer’s last two points would require new hardware. When you talk about “apps” for a computer hooked up to your TV, you’re going to want games. And there’s no way you’re going to have games where the input is a little five-button Apple Remote, or anything else connected by IR. As Jason Snell pointed out in his Apple TV 3.0 review, the current hardware doesn’t do 1080p or 720p at 30 fps, and occasionally struggles even with 720p at 24 fps.

You can argue that Apple should have released major new Apple TV hardware in time for this holiday season, but it’s not fair to complain that a software update doesn’t include features that would require new hardware. Surely they have to update the hardware eventually, but if not now, when?

That said, my biggest Apple TV complaint has nothing to do with its hardware or software, but instead remains the paltry number of movies available through iTunes — especially the number of rentable movies. ★