Readable

post from Daring Fireball on 18 November 2011 10:04:29 PM. © Daring Fireball

My thanks to Readable for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Readable has everything you’d expect in a great reading app for the iPhone and iPad: clean, crisp typography, article layouts that eliminate all the distracting junk, caching for offline reading, and integration with services like Read It Later, Google Reader, Delicious, and more.

And it has a gimmick: face detection. Turn it on and it scrolls the current article automatically, pausing when you are no longer looking at the device. I was skeptical, but in practice it’s damn clever. “Look, don’t touch” is the slogan they used in their sponsorship ad earlier in the week. It’s worth 99 cents just to play with this feature alone.

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Read The Full Article:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/readable/id440105585?mt=8&ls=1

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Speaking of Malcolm Gladwell Losing His Touch

post from Daring Fireball on 18 November 2011 08:03:25 PM. © Daring Fireball

He’s now working for Bank of America.

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Read The Full Article:
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2011/11/16/bank-of-america-hires-malcolm-gladwell-to-a
ttract-small-business-clients/?utm_source=twitterfeed

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Bigasoft Audio Converter Updated to Support
iTunes Match and iCloud

post from prMac on 18 November 2011 07:51:00 PM. © prMac

Bigasoft announces Bigasoft Audio Converter for Mac is updated to support the new iCloud and iTunes Match. It can easily convert CAF, FLAC, OGG, WMA, APE, WAV, MP2, VQF, and AUD to iTunes/ iTunes Match for iCloud to iPod/iPhone/iPad. Though iCloud and iTunes Match provides a new way for us to store and enjoy music on all our Apple devices, they can only store or transfer iTunes supported audio format. Then it is just easy to import the converted audio files to iTunes for syncing to iOS devices.

Read The Full Article:
http://prmac.com/release-id-33951.htm

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Boris Continuum Complete 8 AVX Now Available

post from prMac on 18 November 2011 06:51:00 PM. © prMac

Boris FX, the leading developer of integrated VFX and workflow technology for video and film, today announced that Boris Continuum Complete 8 AVX (BCC 8 AVX) is now available. BCC 8 AVX delivers 200+ comprehensive VFX and compositing filters to Avid Media Composer, NewsCutter, and Symphony. Flicker Remover and Videoscope tools, integrated Beat Reactor technology for audio-driven effect animation, a new Film Glow filter, and support for 64-bit operating systems headline the Version 8 release.

Read The Full Article:
http://prmac.com/release-id-33950.htm

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About Todays DF Outage

post from Daring Fireball on 18 November 2011 04:03:57 PM. © Daring Fireball

A rare bit of downtime for DF today. The site was unavailable for a little over an hour, but seems to be back to normal now. According to Joyent, it was a router problem at their east coast co-location facility.

Sorry about that. My goal is nothing short of 100 percent uptime.

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Read The Full Article:
https://twitter.com/joyent/status/137616859183853568

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Baked Ham Games announces text adventure games in
development for iPhone

post from prMac on 18 November 2011 03:10:00 PM. © prMac

Baked Ham Games is currently running a reward-based crowd-funding campaign for Narratavius, an engine that will allow independent authors to create text-based adventure stories (also known as interactive fiction) from many different genres. Users will be able to interact with all of these stories and control their destinies, right from their iOS device.

Read The Full Article:
http://prmac.com/release-id-34079.htm

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Getting Steve Jobs Wrong

post from Daring Fireball on 18 November 2011 03:04:30 PM. © Daring Fireball

Exhibit A in the case against Walter Isaacson’s flawed Jobs biography: Malcolm Gladwell in last week’s New Yorker, arguing that Jobs was “a tweaker”:

In 1779, Samuel Crompton, a retiring genius from Lancashire,invented the spinning mule, which made possible the mechanizationof cotton manufacture. Yet England?s real advantage was that ithad Henry Stones, of Horwich, who added metal rollers to the mule;and James Hargreaves, of Tottington, who figured out how to smooththe acceleration and deceleration of the spinning wheel; andWilliam Kelly, of Glasgow, who worked out how to add water powerto the draw stroke; and John Kennedy, of Manchester, who adaptedthe wheel to turn out fine counts; and, finally, Richard Roberts,also of Manchester, a master of precision machine tooling — andthe tweaker?s tweaker. He created the ?automatic? spinningmule: an exacting, high-speed, reliable rethinking of Crompton?soriginal creation. Such men, the economists argue, provided the?micro inventions necessary to make macro inventions highlyproductive and remunerative.?
Was Steve Jobs a Samuel Crompton or was he a Richard Roberts?

Jobs was neither. These men make for a poor comparison to Jobs because Jobs didn’t really “invent” anything — not in the sense that Industrial Revolution inventors did. Jobs understood technology but was not an engineer. He had profoundly exquisite taste but was not a designer. What it was that Jobs actually did is much of the mystery of his life and his work, and Isaacson, frustratingly, had seemingly little interest in that, or any recognition that there even was any sort of mystery as to just what Jobs’s gifts really were. Gladwell, alas, takes Isaacson’s portrait of Jobs at face value:

In the eulogies that followed Jobs?s death, last month, he wasrepeatedly referred to as a large-scale visionary and inventor.But Isaacson?s biography suggests that he was much more of atweaker. He borrowed the characteristic features of the Macintosh— the mouse and the icons on the screen — from the engineers atXerox PARC, after his famous visit there, in 1979. The firstportable digital music players came out in 1996. Apple introducedthe iPod, in 2001, because Jobs looked at the existing musicplayers on the market and concluded that they ?truly sucked.?Smart phones started coming out in the nineteen-nineties. Jobsintroduced the iPhone in 2007, more than a decade later, because,Isaacson writes, ?he had noticed something odd about the cellphones on the market: They all stank, just like portable musicplayers used to.?

If this is the standard for innovation, then what product, from any company, has truly been innovative? Some people — most people? — can’t get their heads around the idea that “innovation” doesn’t mean “creating something 100 percent new using never before seen technology, ideas, and concepts”. Yes, there were digital music players before the iPod. There were “smartphones” before the iPhone. But, I say, the differences between those products and Apple’s iPod and iPhone weren’t “tweaks”.

Here’s an image from the January 2007 Macworld Expo keynote, where Jobs unveiled the original iPhone.

Those really were the leading smartphones of the day. Four years later and no company is making phones that look like those, save for RIM, and RIM is circling the toilet.

Here’s a video showing the Xerox Star in 1982, which Jobs and Apple, Gladwell would have you believe, “tweaked” to create the Macintosh. You can judge for yourself how much the interface resembles that of a Macintosh. Xerox certainly blazed the trail for many fundamental concepts the Mac built upon, but anyone familiar with the Mac would be utterly lost trying to use the Star without significant instruction. But the key difference between the Star and the Macintosh wasn’t design, but democratization. According to Wikipedia, a typical Star installation circa 1981 cost about $75,000 — it required a network and dedicated file server — and each additional workstation had a starting price of $16,000. The 1984 Macintosh cost $2,495 (and Jobs wanted it cheaper).

Bringing the concepts of a $100,000 networked workstation to a $2500 standalone mass market personal computer is, I say, radically innovative. The Macintosh was no “tweak”. Pixar was no “tweak”. The iPod is maybe the closest thing among Jobs’s career highlights that one could call a “tweak” of that which preceded it — but it’s hard to separate the iPod, the device, from the entire iTunes ecosystem in terms of measuring its effect on our culture and the way everyone today listens to music. Does anyone really think Apple’s entry into the music industry was a “tweak”? A “large-scale visionary” is precisely what Steve Jobs was.

Gladwell continues:

The idea for the iPad came from an engineer at Microsoft, who wasmarried to a friend of the Jobs family, and who invited Jobs tohis fiftieth-birthday party. As Jobs tells Isaacson:

This guy badgered me about how Microsoft was going to completelychange the world with this tablet PC software and eliminate allnotebook computers, and Apple ought to license his Microsoftsoftware. But he was doing the device all wrong. It had a stylus.As soon as you have a stylus, you?re dead. This dinner was likethe tenth time he talked to me about it, and I was so sick of itthat I came home and said, ?Fuck this, let?s show him what atablet can really be.?

How is that “the idea for the iPad”? The motivation to make the iPad, perhaps. The extra nudge to pluck the idea of “a tablet” from the idea pile and move it to the let’s get to work on it pile, more likely. But how can anyone read the above paragraph and come away with “The idea for the iPad came from an engineer at Microsoft”? (And even with regard to motivation, if you really think the iPad would not exist if not for that one blowhard tablet PC engineer from Microsoft, you’re nuts.)

What if some seemingly obvious bit of conventional wisdom is not only completely wrong, but, in fact, it turns out that the opposite is true? That’s the Malcolm Gladwell formula. It does not fit here.

If anyone is the “tweaker” in the PC industry, a la Gladwell’s 18th century steam engine inventors, clearly it’s Bill Gates, not Steve Jobs. There was BASIC before Microsoft’s BASIC. Microsoft didn’t invent DOS. Windows followed the Mac. Word followed WordPerfect, Excel followed 1-2-3 (which followed VisiCalc), the Xbox followed the PlayStation.

I don’t even think it’s fair to call Gates merely a “tweaker”, though. Gates was (and remains) a large-scale visionary in his own right. He was simply never a product visionary. But the whole idea that software in general could be more valuable than hardware — or even just valuable, period? Gates. The man pioneered the concept of selling software. The idea that a software platform could be created that ran everywhere, on almost all hardware? Gates. And he built a company worth hundreds of billions of dollars from those ideas. So please don’t get me wrong and think I’m trying to belittle or diminish Bill Gates’s accomplishments. Gladwell’s entire premise here is fundamentally flawed; I’m just saying that given that faulty premise, Steve Jobs isn’t the one who fits the description.

Part of what makes Gladwell’s premise so wrong is that Jobs, clearly, was a tweaker too. Iteration — steady incremental improvements, prototype after prototype, design after design, year after year, release after release — that process is ingrained in Apple’s (and I think Pixar’s) culture. But Gladwell writes:

The visionary starts with a clean sheet of paper, and re-imaginesthe world. The tweaker inherits things as they are, and has topush and pull them toward some more nearly perfect solution.

Steve Jobs really did re-imagine the world. The thing is, he actually made it happen, too.

Read The Full Article:
http://daringfireball.net/2011/11/getting_steve_jobs_wrong

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Mirics brings live DVB-T broadcast television to
iOS devices

Mirics, developer of FlexiTV, the world's first commercial software-based global TV receiver, announces availability of their FlexiStream client software for Apple iOS devices. The Mirics FlexiStream player has been released to Apple for approval and will be in the store shortly. Mirics FlexiStream works in conjunction with Mirics FlexiTV's software and built-in TV-tuner to re-stream over IP a received live digital broadcast TV signal from a user's FlexiTV-powered computer.

Read The Full Article:
http://prmac.com/release-id-33949.htm

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