Real
Real:
The emphasis on text is also striking. More than just content, text has replaced iconography in many cases. Look at Camera: the modes — VIDEO, PHOTO, SQUARE, PANO — are represented by text for the first time ever on iOS. This to me is proof that “clarity” has taken top priority. iOS is available in a number of countries and languages, which means every piece of text has to be localized (translated) many times over. This isn’t only time consuming, it’s disruptive to UI design: a short word in English is not necessarily short in German, and suddenly things don’t fit on screen anymore. I attended many meetings at Apple where people cringed at changing a word shortly before release, because it meant a whole new round of localize-then-build-then-test.
[Yes to cringing over text changes are easy.]
Source: Apple Outsider
Scripting News: The quiet war in tech.
Scripting News: The quiet war in tech.:
I said a while back that if you want to understand politics you have to become deeply immersed in tech. The political reporters and bloggers have been totally too casual about that, even the smart relatively open-minded ones, and that even includes Glenn Greenwald. Is he really prepared to listen to Snowden, or can he just report an approximation of what Snowden tells him? It’s the latter, because as smart as Greenwald is, he hasn’t been spending the last N years schooling himself in the technology that we’ve built our existence around.So think about it, how are we going to boot up the intelligence we need to make sense of this situation in time to make a difference?
Serious question, and heavy times.
[Go read. Thoughts?]
Source: Scripting News
iOS 7′s design language
I wouldn’t claim that iOS 7’s design language is bolder than WP8’s, but it’s certainly a radical break from the past. Which is why Mike Rundle is completely wrong to say it’s anti-Apple. A radical break from the past is just about the most goddamn Apple thing that Apple could do.
[Heh. On point.]
Source: Coyote Tracks
Frank Chimero × Blog × Generosity of Perspective
Frank Chimero × Blog × Generosity of Perspective:
Designers are usually the most aware of the problems in their work, and I can imagine a bunch of them in Cupertino reading Twitter during the keynote saying, “I told you we had to fix that before we shipped!” Every time I assume a talented person isn’t painfully aware of the flaws in their work, I am wrong.
[Frank's post is named Generosity of Perspective, and while he claims some remorse for his knee jerk tweeted reaction, even in this post I think he's missing his own point. This software has not shipped! This is a developer oriented preview shipping months and months from now. I suspect iOS7 is not the sort of thing you'd want to install on your every day iPhone. Again, it's not supposed to be. It's shipping months from now!! So if we are to be generous in our perspective, and while so many of us in the design and development community can get all riled up for good or bad with what Apple does, could we at least give the designers and engineers a chance to ship? Seems like that is the last amount of generous we could be. BTW, Frank, love your book!]
President Obama’s Dragnet – NYTimes.com
President Obama’s Dragnet – NYTimes.com:
Those reassurances have never been persuasive — whether on secret warrants to scoop up a news agency’s phone records or secret orders to kill an American suspected of terrorism — especially coming from a president who once promised transparency and accountability.The administration has now lost all credibility on this issue. Mr. Obama is proving the truism that the executive branch will use any power it is given and very likely abuse it. That is one reason we have long argued that the Patriot Act, enacted in the heat of fear after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by members of Congress who mostly had not even read it, was reckless in its assignment of unnecessary and overbroad surveillance powers.
Based on an article in The Guardian published Wednesday night, we now know that the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency used the Patriot Act to obtain a secret warrant to compel Verizon’s business services division to turn over data on every single call that went through its system. We know that this particular order was a routine extension of surveillance that has been going on for years, and it seems very likely that it extends beyond Verizon’s business division. There is every reason to believe the federal government has been collecting every bit of information about every American’s phone calls except the words actually exchanged in those calls.
[Those of you who swore to me (and at me) that this President would be different, and that things were going to change… I'm now collecting all the rewards, drinks, etc. you promised.]
Why Privacy Matters Even if You Have ‘Nothing to Hide’
One such harm, for example, which I call aggregation, emerges from the fusion of small bits of seemingly innocuous data. When combined, the information becomes much more telling. By joining pieces of information we might not take pains to guard, the government can glean information about us that we might indeed wish to conceal. For example, suppose you bought a book about cancer. This purchase isn’t very revealing on its own, for it indicates just an interest in the disease. Suppose you bought a wig. The purchase of a wig, by itself, could be for a number of reasons. But combine those two pieces of information, and now the inference can be made that you have cancer and are undergoing chemotherapy. That might be a fact you wouldn’t mind sharing, but you’d certainly want to have the choice.
[A great read an why we're about to make a huge mistake in the US. Reductionism fails again on this issue. Looked at as a whole, it is frightening.]
Verizon and the N.S.A.: The Problem with Metadata : The New Yorker
with 3 comments
Verizon and the N.S.A.: The Problem with Metadata : The New Yorker:
[And hasn't the attitude in Washington about this been entirely clear? I always worry when someone tells me something is "for my own good."]
Written by Daniel
June 9, 2013 at 6:51 pm
Posted in advocacy, commentary, news, security