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Everyone cries, nay, weeps at the thought of it all.

The Cycle Wherein Apple Creates A Product And People Copy It And Then “Improve” Upon The Design And Then People Ask Apple To Do The Same “Improvements” And Apple Doesn’t And Then People Get Mad At Apple And Apple Keeps Making More Money Than Everyone Else:

Of course, technology pundits don’t pay attention to these kinds of things. They see a competitor to Apple, and how they have made an improvement, and they now want Apple to do the same. Apple then doesn’t. Everyone cries, nay, weeps at the thought of it all. In fact, when gadgets reviewers (supposedly unbiased) review a new Apple gadget, they take points off if the screen isn’t larger. Who says a larger screen is better? Doesn’t matter. Android has it, and so Apple needs to do it to stay competitive.

[All developers have to put up with this. Be true to *your* vision.]

via Daring Fireball

Father Of C And UNIX, Dennis Ritchie, Passes Away At Age 70

Father Of C And UNIX, Dennis Ritchie, Passes Away At Age 70: After a long illness, Dennis Ritchie, father of Unix and an esteemed computer scientist, died last weekend at the age of 70.

[I stared for years at his “C” book on my brother’s shelf wondering what that was all about… and I’m part of chain of knowledge, passed on from developer to developer. The most fun I have with computing is teaching. RIP, condolences to his family.]
Source: TechCrunch

Screen size

Size:

Marco Arment:

Android phones have been one-upping each other with screen size a lot recently. It’s an interesting tactic that seems to be working, at least relative to other Android phones. When comparing phones side-by-side in a store, the larger screens really do look more appealing, and I bet a lot of people don’t consider the practical downsides.

Apple generally tries to make it instantly obvious which of its products are better — what the trade-offs are. 16/32/64 GB: pay more, get more storage. iPhone 4S vs. 4: faster, better camera, Siri.

Bigger-screen iPhone proponents are telling me via email that they don’t necessarily want Apple to replace the 3.5-inch models with a 4-point-something inch one — just want a bigger screen model added to the lineup. But then which is “better”? I think it’s likely that many customers’ intuition would tell them that bigger must be better, and they’d make a choice they’d come to regret. What appeals to you in-store, side-by-side, isn’t necessarily what will appeal to you in long-term actual use.

 ★ 
[All true. But the point is subtle one. Many people may not care. It’s the same problem being complained about in other threads that the “4S” is not “5”. That somehow all new internals wasn’t exciting enough for the tech press. But here, tech guys are arguing over whether a 4 inch screen is better compromise than a 3.5 inch screen and whether an individual’s hand (specifically the person looking at this issue) can reach the entire screen as get it larger and is that a problem or not. For some, a larger phone with a bigger screen will be a better solution. For others, and I count myself among them, it wouldn’t be. At some point, a device stops being a “phone” a starts being something else. And with that you’ve now entered a very complex space of tradeoffs and design decisions. Size, weight, thinness, pocket sizes, cost, capability, battery life, experience all weigh in on what a device is… and worse yet, you have to live with the decision for a while before you’ll know whether it works or not and why. That is always an expensive proposition for users. It’s why reviewers who review a lot of “stuff” often seem more picayune than the rest of us… it’s not that they’re more opinionated and more demanding although many of them cultivate that belief. It’s that they’re forced to use many more designs. When you do that, you feel the failure in your hand. (“Man. That’s annoying!”). Yes, in the store a larger screen will have a positive impact, but carrying it in your pocket, not necessarily being able to reach across its surface and other issues may not be noticeable at first. It may feel like a cool drink of water in hell, or it may be one of those things that annoys you many times a day.. Hard to say from here. But that sucks.]
Source: Daring Fireball

via Frank : For Steve

via Frank : For Steve: We all have that same opportunity. Take a moment to consider your job. Boil it down to its essence: you make things for other people. The most important concept to learn from Jobs is embedded in how we feel after using one of his products. That very same thing is happening now in his wake. Look closely and you will see it: wonderful experiences have an afterglow to them. The delight we find in what we do is in some way lost in the moment, but captured in our memories.

[There’s been a lot of lessons to remember lately. Trying to embed them more deeply in my life right now.]

The Friends We Never Meet

The Friends We Never Meet: I’ve watched people — friends — die from cancer. It’s horrible. And I saw in his face that he knew, just like they knew.

There’s so much more I’d like to say. Comparisons with exceptional people I respect from history and how rarely and brightly their lights shine, so rarely that we can name many of them even hundreds or thousands of years later. Or the fleeting nature of life, and how important it is that we do our best with what time and resources we have.

But mostly, since I learned in a text message from Corinne that “Steve Jobs died”, I’ve been thinking about friends we never meet. People we interact with every day but in a very one-sided way, and how they can be important to us without them ever knowing it.

And how it hurts to lose them, even if they were never really there.

[Brilliantly said.]
Source: Truer Words – A Journal

The message of Occupy

The message of Occupy:

A picture named manInBlack.gifIt’s really simple. The United States has been run for the benefit of a very small group of people. That was never the idea of this country. This must change.

Occupy Wall Street is not part of any party. It’s not left or right, although many of the people that are part of it look left. But if you look at the groups that are forming around the country, you’ll see that it looks more like America than it does any single political discipline. If it works, it should be equally comfortable for a Republican who yearns for real representative government in the United States as it is for a labor union member, student or retiree. It should be the thing that we all agree on. The principle that Lincoln spoke of in the Gettysburg Address. A government of the people, by the people and for the people. Whether it perishes from the earth is the question. Imho.

The 99 percent message is brilliant, but it’s problematic. What if I were a member of the 1 percent (I might be). Would my participation be welcome?

[Dave points out some of the problems. Unsaid is that the message of these people is muddled and unclear. But he also clarifies quite a bit.]
Source: Scripting News

The journey was the reward

The journey was the reward:

I was in the midst of late edits on The Intention Economy this afternoon, wondering if I should refer to Steve Jobs in the past tense. I didn’t want to, but I knew he’d be gone by the time the book comes out next April, if he wasn’t gone already. So I decided to make the changes, and stopped cold before the first one. I just couldn’t go there.

Then the bad news came a few minutes ago, through an AP notification on my iPhone. Tonight we all have to go there.

[(I found out the same way…)]

Turns out Steve’s muse was the best in the history of business. No one-hit wonders. We’re talking about world-changing stuff. Again and again and again.

[Sigh. Go read the rest of Doc’s piece and his email from so long ago. Amazing.]
Source: Doc Searls Weblog

Occupy Silicon Valley?

Occupy Silicon Valley?: Instead of bundling parcels of mortgages and turning them into derivatives, they bundle up parcels of people and turn them into masses of users, who generate content. Then they sell access to those users for a price, to other businesses. The problem is that as growth levels off, and it’s sure to do that (how many more groups of 800 million can Facebook find, and where will they have to go to find them, and who will they have to sell out to to get there) — they’re going to have to take more from those users. Zuck calls it “sharing.” The rest of us call it “privacy.” [I find it interesting that the vast majority of friends and family have barely any network/social presence at all.]
Source: Scripting News

A new iPhone prediction

A new iPhone prediction:

Out of all the pundits who will explain over the next 24 hours why the iPhone 4S is a huge disappointment, less than 1 in 20 will even attempt a coherent defense of that position.

“All right, the camera meets or exceeds anything else on the market in a phone, as does the CPU. Yes, iMessage beats BBM, and has nothing directly comparable on any other platform. Sure, it’s actually a ‘world’ phone now, and it has HSDPA data speeds. Yeah, iOS 5 addresses complaints with notifications and a lot more. Okay, iCloud isn’t quite like any other syncing solution and it could be a really big deal, and the cloud-based iTunes is—no matter what you may think of iTunes—a killer media manager. And sure, we’ll have to see how Siri works in practice, but up until now voice control has meant sitting in your car repeating ‘Dial Martha’ over and over in slow, mounting frustration—if Siri does what it’s supposed to, it’s operating on a level we haven’t seen before outside of sci-fi movies.

“So all in all, we have to conclude this was quite a disappointment.”

[Heh. I agree. Siri could be, ahem, well siriously amazing. I’ve lived a number of “voice activation” features in my car and phones, and I’ve found them utterly useless. I haven’t participated in the betas for iOS5 for lack of time, but I’m excited to give this a go. It could be great. Even insanely so.]
Source: Coyote Tracks