David Barnard:
Ultimately, the users become the product, not the app. Selling users to advertisers and pushing in-app upgrades/consumables is a completely different game than carefully crafting apps to maximize user value/entertainment. It’d be a shame if the mobile software industry devolved into some horrific hybrid of Zynga and Facebook.
[Oh my that would be awful.]
Source: Daring Fireball
Doing bold things (a start) (part trois):
Timing is critical for ideas and products to grab hold. Whether at the individual level or the broader market. You can always learn something from the folks who are saying no, about why, when, and what is working for them etc. that will probably improve your situation down the road.
[Useful advice from a brilliant source. :)]
Jazz is harder to understand now than it was back in the 40s and 50s because the repertoire is based around songs that were popular then but are esoteric now. Miles’ repertoire in the fifties and early sixties would have mostly been as familiar to his audience as “Prince.” Listeners would have been able to mentally sing along to just about everything, making all of Miles’ intellectual abstractions easier to parse. Jazz was still commercial music then, and when jazz musicians wrote their own tunes, they had a tendency to be as melodic and catchy as showtunes and standards — Miles’ own compositions of the period, like “So What” and “All Blues,” are about as catchy and hooky as music gets.
If you want to listen to jazz now, you’re at a big disadvantage. Without knowing all those pop standards and showtunes, the improvisation based on them will just sound like random strings of notes. I had a much easier time getting into jazz through tunes like “So What” than through adaptations of standards. Contemporary musicians are playing abstractions of references to abstractions to references to tunes that were popular seventy years ago. It’s left to the listener to supply a ton of historical context. The best way to approach the music is to start on familiar territory with a tune you know and like, and check out how different artists approach it. Miles and Coltrane are great people to investigate, because they liked playing corny pop songs that are still in wide circulation, and because nearly everything they did was so awesome.
[This was an interesting explanation, and not a bad one either. It seems to miss the essence for me though. It’s about the technique of playing standards which is not all of jazz, and barely mentions in passing the communication, composition, and discussion that is jazz. I’m not sure if an explanation like this does a disservice when it fails to scope the discussion. Where does “free jazz” or harmolodics or “Sheets of Sound” Coltrane fit? Sticking to Miles for a second, where does Bitches Brew fit into this explanation? Never mind that an example like Miles’ recording of Time after Time might have provided a somewhat more contemporary example.]
Wind Power Without the Blades:
Noise from wind turbine blades, inadvertent bat and bird kills and even the way wind turbines look have made installing them anything but a breeze. New York design firm Atelier DNA has an alternative concept that ditches blades in favor of stalks. Resembling thin cattails, the Windstalks generate electricity when the wind sets them waving. The designers came up with the idea for the planned city Masdar, a 2.3-square-mile, automobile-free area being built outside of Abu Dhabi.
[Nice. And maybe these can avoid some of the NIMBY issues that the turbine based farms have suffered with… aesthetics matter more than many believe. You could even make this into a skate, pump track park.]
Why the video pros are moving away from Apple:
Everyone we spoke to agreed that Apple would have a much better standing among professional users if the company would just acknowledge them a little more and act like their concerns are being listened to. “Apple needs to be a little more open with third parties about how they plan to improve FCP over time. They need to enable those third parties to feel that when FCP improves, they can make more money selling their products,” Alper said.
[It’s easy to understand the argument being made. “We were loyal to Apple, now Apple should be loyal to us.” But it’s clear to me that this isn’t true. When the product worked for them, they used it. If it is not going to work for them, they’re going to switch. That’s not loyalty, but it makes business sense. I wonder if Apple didn’t decide to “skip” a generation here. Current folks with big suites of hardware and software are, despite their desire for new gear, are probably fine for a while longer. We’ll wait out this generation in order to push this in a direction we think is right, and see what makes sense from a hardware point of view down the road.]
Design Sets Tone at Square, a Mobile Payments Start-Up:
…we sat at a square table, in a square glass conference room — all of which are named after a famous town squares from around the world. Mr. Dorsey was eating nuts out of a square bowl. (Don’t worry, the nuts were still round, I checked.) Employees are even referred to as Squares.
“We believe strongly that the company is going to be reflected in the product and vice-versa,” Mr. Dorsey said. “The internal matches the external and the external matches the internal, and if we can’t provide a clean, simple, well-designed experience in here, it’s not going to be reflected in our identity. It’s in our DNA.”
[I’m not sure about the employees being called “Squares” thing. But the rest is thoughtful, if only potentially meaningful.]
Scarcity Is A Shitty Business Model:
I am sure there was a time when scarcity was a good business model for the film industry. And I am sure that many of the leaders of the film industry came of age during that time. I understand their muscle memory in terms of the scarcity business model. But restricting access to content is a bad business model in the age of a global network that costs practically nothing to distribute on.
I’ve argued this point many times with film executives. They insist that they need their windows. They argue they need to manage access to their films to extract every last dollar from the market. That just doesn’t make sense to me. If they went direct to their customers, offered their films at a reasonable price (say $5/view net to them), and if they made their films available day one everywhere in the world, I can’t see how they wouldn’t make more money.
[For some things it is, but for others it simply the nature of how things are produced. The decisions come when demand exceeds current production. Can you maintain the essence of your product if you remove yourself from each step of production? If so, do you wish to? If your item becomes less scarce does it lose something? But I agree about the film business. It’s nuts.]
Source: A VC
★ On the Behavior of the iPhone Mute Switch:
Daniel J. Wakin, reporting for the NYT:
The unmistakably jarring sound of an iPhone marimba ring
interrupted the soft and spiritual final measures of Mahler’s
Symphony No. 9 at the New York Philharmonic on Tuesday night. The
conductor, Alan Gilbert, did something almost unheard-of in a
concert hall: He stopped the performance. But the ringing kept on
going, prompting increasingly angry shouts in the audience
directed at the malefactor.[Snippage -Ed]
I think the current behavior of the iPhone mute switch is correct. You can’t design around every single edge case, and a new iPhone user who makes the reasonable but mistaken assumption that the mute switch silences everything, with an alarm set that he wasn’t aware of, and who is sitting in the front row of the New York Philharmonic when the accidental alarm goes off, is a pretty good example of an edge case.
Whereas if the mute switch silenced everything, there’d be thousands of people oversleeping every single day because they went to bed the night before unaware that the phone was still in silent mode.
[Part of the problem here was that the marimba sound was apparently the culprit which would cause a lot of performers and conductors to pull up short. But also, while I agree that the phone does the right thing (tricky though that is) it makes me wonder how many people know that the alarms are not silenced when you mute the phone? I’d bet a lot.
If this is not possible, you’ll want to set the ringer to mute, set the system audio to zero, launch Siri and lower the volume to zero, disable all alarms, and review the Settings > Notifications items in the Notification Center to switch off audio. There’s probably some items Auntie is missing here, but she trusts her nieces and nephews will refine this list in the comments.
[snippage -Ed.]
For those rare occasions where you really need to bypass these design choices, powering the iPhone down will keep it from embarrassing faux pas.
A suggestion I can get behind.]
Source: Daring Fireball
Well designed code is easy to test. As a rule of thumb, anytime I get over about two or three lines of setup code for testing a method, I normally take a step back and ask myself if this method is doing too much.
Test speed
The other advantage of running tests purely in isolation is that they’re fast. Very fast. When I’m coding Rails apps these days, thanks to advice from Corey Haines I’m running a spec_no_rails folder which runs independently from the rest of my Rails app. Rails apps by default epitomise this problem: default model tests exercise the whole system from the database up. By running your tests independently you’re not having to clean the database or start Rails each time you run your tests, which means that much of your interesting code can be tested in under a second. Gary Bernhardt has more information on how to set this up in his excellent Destroy All Software screencast series.
[One thing not mentioned here is a pet peeve of mine. I see a lot of tests where the dev is testing implementation rather than input and outputs. To me, checking how something was implemented is not relevant. That the method returns the expected results for a given input is. “Implementation tests” also causes a great deal of test rewrite when refactoring.]
New York City gets a Software Engineering High School:
This fall New York City will open The Academy for Software Engineering, the city’s first public high school that will actually train kids to develop software. The project has been a long time dream of Mike Zamansky, the highly-regarded CS teacher at New York’s elite Stuyvesant public high school. It was jump started when Fred Wilson, a VC at Union Square Ventures, promised to get the tech community to help with knowledge, advice, and money.
[Cool!]
Source: Joel on Software
turnings :: daniel berlinger 