IONIZED: A Journal of Witty Commentary

Current skewers the Twitterverse, while summoning the Fail Whale in the process. Hilarious.

[ Ed. Note: Sorry for the major lack of posting today. My family is going to California tomorrow, and I've been preparing. Thanks for the understanding.]

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Scientific America:

This research has important practical implications. It suggests that there are several simple steps we can all take to increase creativity, such as traveling to faraway places (or even just thinking about such places), thinking about the distant future, communicating with people who are dissimilar to us, and considering unlikely alternatives to reality. Perhaps the modern environment, with its increased access to people, sights, music, and food from faraway places, helps us become more creative not only by exposing us to a variety of styles and ideas, but also by allowing us to think more abstractly. So the next time you’re stuck on a problem that seems impossible don’t give up. Instead, try to gain a little psychological distance, and pretend the problem came from somewhere very far away.

(Via Shawn Blanc)

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The fiasco gets worse and worse:

As if having to worry whether or not your apps could start disappearing isn’t enough, there is another layer of complexity to deal with if a paid app is removed: the users. Sure, if a live app is removed, users will likely be upset no matter what happens… but if they’ve paid for it, and they can’t get future upgrades or bug fixes, some of them are going to be wanting their money back. As some developers have already discovered, refunds can get expensive if there are enough of them, because Apple retains its 30% commission, while the developer has to reimburse the full cost of the application to cover the refund — meaning each refund on an app that is priced $9.99 ends up costing the developer the full $9.99, rather than the $7 in revenue that they actually made from the purchase.

Apple needs to handle this soon. The discussion is getting heated, and the backlash is already starting. This deserves a Steve Jobs open letter; it’s gotten that bad.

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Carsonified goes in depth regarding Typekit’s setup. Seems simple and intuitive, according to the screenshots provided. I’m sticking to my opinion—Typekit will be the solution for real web typography, and this latest overview just bolsters my argument.

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Polar Bear Farms:

Any developer who has experienced the business side of the App Store, iTunes Connect, the app submission process, is well aware that there is virtually zero care and attention to detail taken, it barely works for it’s intended purpose, and that lack of care and attention even creeps into the customer facing App Store. Put simply, the whole thing is entirely unprofessional, bordering on incompetent, and Apple should be highly embarrassed by it. The astounding thing is that this is so at odds with what most people expect from Apple: it’s certainly a far cry from the usual obsessive attention to detail in most of it’s consumer facing products.

Sad, yet so very true. There’s a developer and consumer uprising—one that Apple can’t possibly ignore— coming soon.

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Slow motion beauty at its finest. Interesting.

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The Onion:

Retailing for $599, the iPhone 3GI offers only the most special Apple consumers—the ones who believe in the company more than anything else in the world, and who would never, ever dream of questioning it—the ability to open dozens of powerful applications at once. In addition, the new multimedia device will provide true Apple fans with a high-definition video camera, one-tap editing with Final Cut Pro, and cut and paste.

All Hail Steve. Dissenters will be shot.

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Signal vs. Noise:

It’s easy to fall into this trap. You know the scenario… you’re knee-deep in a design and engaged in the back and forth of feedback and revisions. You are carefully revising your design, following the directions to the letter. Somewhere along the way, you’ve turned off your brain and stopped designing.

When you’re getting direction from a client, manager, art director, etc., it is easy to fall into the mode of just following instructions. You get so caught up in getting it right that you forget to keeping thinking about the problem. In an effort to please, you take feedback as solutions instead of suggestions.

If you’re a designer, you’ve got to be strong enough to make you own decisions. Don’t be stiff armed by your client, but don’t disregard what they’re saying either. Do what’s right for the problem at hand.

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Eoghan McCabe:

This success is enviable by anyone’s standards; its forecast turnover for 2008 was £36m. But its dilemma with respect to its growth targets is not. A niche by definition is restricted. It’s a slice of a market and you grow by getting deeper into that slice. And just like the returns from a slice of pie diminish if you eat it from the edge inwards, the end of a niche market is hard to capitalise on: some people in the sushi market are price sensitive, some don’t like the music YO! Sushi play, some live in hard-to-reach rural areas, and so on.

So what are you to do when you’ve got your eyes on the 100 restaurant prize? Faced with the plateau that is the shape of growth in an exhausted niche market, the temptation is to go where many good brands have gone before and diversify. And ruin your brand. Sure, offering “more than sushi” potentially opens the door to less-ambitious diners like me, but what of the sushi fans? What a sushi fan wants is a sushi joint, not “sushi plus other”. And what someone like me really wants is a steak joint, a Thai restaurant, a tapas bar, not “sushi plus other”.

Keep focused, find a niche, and take care of the dedicated customers. Do this—rather than pander to a larger but less interested group—and you’ll have success.

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Harry McCracken:

Jobs said that Apple wouldn’t distribute porn or malicious apps or privacy-invading apps, and said that Apple’s interests and those of third-party developers were the same. The slide also mentioned “Bandwidth hogs,” which apparently meant stuff like SlingPlayer, and “Unforseen,” which I assumed at the time referred to other applications that put iPhone owners at risk in one way or another. What he didn’t do is say that Apple would reject software that competed with Apple or AT&T offerings.

I imagine that if Steve had his way with what apps do or don’t get approved for the App Store, it would be even more selective and inane that it already is.

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Fake Steve Jobs:

Anyway, just like Orpheus stole fire from the gods and gave it to the world, my gift to the world is iTablet — a device that incorporates not just chips and software, but magic. Special secret powers from Mount Olympus, stuff that turns you into a kind of man-god, a semi-divine being with a magic tablet so light that you can’t even feel it in your backpack or briefcase but with the ability to connect you to the Internet and enable you to buy anything you want as long as it comes from Apple. In other words, you’re a superhero. With super powers. All this for only $899!

It’s official: the tablet cometh!

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Music-listening, on-demand goodness:

This is going to be Spotify’s killer feature – as it is on the desktop – the ability to play any track in their catalogue with no latency. Is the Spotify app the first P2P app on the iPhone? It looks like it might well be. LastFm’s iPhone app is pretty good but their latency – since the data has to stream in with no P2P software to help it – is much greater and discernible to the ear. Plus of course Last.FM is really a radio station not the proverbial celestial jukebox.

Despite my doubts that this will actually get past the Gates of Apple into the App Store, it’s becoming more enticing as the details leak out.

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John Gruber:

And, to play devil’s advocate for a moment, I’m not sure the decision is entirely unreasonable. Don’t think about it in terms of Apple’s relationship with its carrier partners, but instead think about it in terms of Apple’s competition with Google. Google Voice is a mobile phone service provided by the maker of one of the biggest competitors to the iPhone OS. What if Google Voice were instead Microsoft Voice? And what if Windows Mobile were as modern and competitive as Android? Would you be as surprised then that Apple is discouraging iPhone owners from using the service? Just saying.

I see why everyone is piling on AT&T—they’re a mediocre carrier with a lot of problems—but, really, how much worse is it than others? Even Verizon has difficulties. Putting all the blame on AT&T for the iPhone’s troubles, something that Techcrunch has been howling about for the last few weeks, is blind to Apple’s other concerns: all their cellular partners,  not just AT&T, rely on a business model that is threatened by products like Google Voice.

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You can’t make this stuff up:

Is Sarah Palin secretly a beat poet? Do her words make little to no sense because she is so immersed in language and lyrics that she operates on a plane we cannot grasp? We sincerely doubt it, but that was the implication last night as William Shatner appeared on the “Tonight Show” and read Sarah’s resignation speech in his typical Shatner way, with all the lilting and soft drum beats we’ve come to expect. It was quite magical.

Sarah Palin: a treasure trove of laughs.

(Via Daring Fireball)

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Mozilla has been brainstorming about the next major version of Firefox after version 3.7, which is set to be released sometime early next year. One particular change is really nice:

Instead of separate buttons for each of these functions, they’re all integrated into one button on the right hand side of the address bar. It also changes colors based on your actions. So if you’re typing, it will be a green “Go” button, but if the page is currently loading, a red “Stop” button will take its place. Not a bad way to save space, if we do say so ourselves.

Also, the internal discussion they’re having about the implementation of “Chrome-Like Tabs” is encouraging—instead of just follwing the current trend in browsers, they’re actually getting down to what works better. I agree with Ben Parr at Mashable; the preference for the tabs should be user-configurable. Overall, the designs look really good. If only they could get that kind of quality from their Mac team.

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A great look at Dan Benjamin’s great site and the different iterations of it’s design. I love this one.

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Beautiful mockups of Apple’s mythical tablet, rendered by the great Yanko Design. If Apple does come out with something similar to this, which I doubt (more iPhone, less MacBook), it’ll be a hit.

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Classy, fresh, and so much more clean than the current design. It’s been the same for a little too long.

Apple, get this man a job, will ya?

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Come with me if you want to live.

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Bill Simmons:

One of the biggest differences between sports and real life is that when athletes retire, they still have half a lifetime ahead of them. They feel sad because their careers are over, but also because they have no idea what to do next. This is why they come back — in Favre’s case, over and over.

When real people retire, ideally, they have accomplished everything they wanted to. My father was lucky in this respect. Like Billy Beane, he put up Moneyball numbers in a middle-class town, essentially winning 95 games a year with a small-market club. He lasted 16 years in a job in which people rarely last five.

Of course, we never read tributes about someone like my father for obvious reasons. We pay homage to athletes, entertainers and politicians. Real people don’t get victory laps. So here’s one for Dr. Bill Simmons. Congratulations, Pops. You made it.

A very personal, heartfelt goodbye by Bill Simmons from his Page 2 column in ESPN the Magazine. Godspeed.

(Via Kottke)

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Mike Butcher:

Streaming music service Spotify – born in Sweden but currently taking the UK and the rest of Europe by storm – has released a video of the iPhone app which they’ve just submitted to Apple, which means it could be out in a few weeks. They’ve also revealed more of their business model – mobile access on any device will require a premium subscription.

Interestingly, you’ll be able to use the app when there is no wireless connection. The application has an offline mode that allows users to temporarily cache playlists to their phone for use when there is no connection.

The idea of a cacheable playlists would be great, especially since the selection of music is precise like a jukebox, as Butcher says. Currently with Last.FM, Pandora, and most other iPhone music apps, they are merely streaming players that can’t operate at all without a connection. Lets hope this one gets through the impenetrable Gate of Apple™.

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A bunch of reproductions from famous artists, but very little original work. Digging the beautiful photos of some actual Snow Leopards, however.

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The Edge is posting U2’s latest tour on Twitpic. One of my favorite bands reaching out to their fans like this is very cool.

(Via Joshua Blankenship)

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For any IKEA fans out there (particularly in the Boonies, like me) here’s a nice shirt with our favorite friend, the IKEA instructions guy.

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Sounds like a fan’s dream, but it’s becoming more dubious to my ears as the summer starts to end:

While it has been known for a while that LTE will be rolling out in select markets at some point next year. The most recent roadmap has 20-30 markets as a target for the second half of 2010. But our source says that Verizon is putting just about everything it has in to moving many of these markets up to Q1 2010 — which is the same timeframe for this supposed new Apple device. While the source had no information to specifically tie Apple to this move by Verizon, they did note that there was talk of at least one non-dongle (wireless card) product that this LTE launch was being specifically geared towards.

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Max Records:

Maurice told me, ‘I really like this movie, and I hope people like it. Because if not, they can all go straight to hell.’”

My respect for him, which is already high, just shot out from the roof. I have a great feeling about this film—it’s bound to be one of my favorite movies out this year.

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I like transparency and all, but finding out that the government is paying close to $10 million dollars for a website is insane:

One of the most renowned Web development firms in the country is 37Signals in Chicago. Their Web applications consistently receive accolades for usability and design. With only 14 employees, they manage to put out amazing state-of-the-art sites that outclass anything the federal government has ever produced.

To them, a contract of this size would mean an annual salary of $1.3 million for each employee. Believe me, that’s not the market rate.

(Via Joshua Blankenship)

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Maybe it’s because I’m not a casual user in any sense of the word, but installing applications on the Mac for me just seems so simple. Lukas Mathis at Ignore the Code disagrees:

Going with a ZIP file instead of a disk image avoids the issues created by people dragging an application from its mounted disk image directly to their Dock. A ZIP file also avoids the confusion caused by applications disappearing after a restart because their disk images aren’t mounted anymore.

This shouldn’t be a problem—browsers should be configured to open disk images by default—and well designed disk images that indicate to drag the app to the Applications folder should prevent all of the confusion. The thing that’s really broken in regards to applications on the Mac is the uninstallation of apps, something that many developers have tried to fix.

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Palm’s last move to fix iTunes and Pre compatibility was ballsy, but definitely not a good move when Steve Jobs is the opponent:

So they hacked into iTunes. We broke their hack. Now they’ve hacked us again.

Translation: It’s war.

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The batteries are still screwing up our progress of innovation.

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