ARTS & FARCES internet

Business

Hank Williams has a compelling perspective on Apple’s rules for iOS developers. Which are, in essence, no rules. Developers serve, Williams writes, at the pleasure of the queen. But that’s not the point of his “Apple fears the killer app.” Apple, Williams opines, doesn’t enforce its rules to keep out bad apps, as the company asserts, but rather wants multitudes of crappy apps because “numeric superiority is a huge marketing tool.” Apple is scared to death of a third party actually developing a ground-breaking, killer, app because “as platforms mature, killer apps from third party companies pose more risk. ... “Because if some third party invents something that fundamentally changes what it means to own a mobile device, and that software is available on other devices, overnight Apple is in the position of being the supplicant.” Again. Apple learned this lesson in the 1990s with Adobe and will not let it happen again. For proof of his thesis, Williams points to the fact that while there have been small successes on the iOS platform, there have not been any successes on the order of VisiCalc, Lotus 1-2-3, PageMaker, or Microsoft Office. Highly recommended.

Internet

Maybe it’s my age or maybe my control-freakery, but I’m not enamored of cloud computing even though I trust Dropbox to keep my working documents synched between three different MacBook Pro laptops and an iPod Touch. Now comes news of Hylke Bons’ SparkleShare: An open source alternative to Dropbox. Built on Mono, GTK+, and Git, the first version will be for Gnome, followed by OS X and Windows. What’s especially interesting about this project is that Bons is a designer, not a programmer, and the project grew out of this year’s Usability Hackfest.

Law

When medical professionals involved in the US Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) torture sessions during the George W. Bush administration collected data to fine-tune the level of pain experienced, they engaged in illegal and unethical human research and experimentation. That’s what a report, “The Torture Papers,” published by Physicians for Human Rights alleges. James Risen, writing for the New York Times, refers to the report—which bases its findings on information already discovered—“the first analysis of the CIA’s interrogation program to argue that one of the unintended consequences of the Bush administration’s efforts to provide legal cover for officials involved in the program was to place medical professionals in legal and ethical jeopardy.” Both the Nuremberg Code and the US Common Rule ban human experimentation without informed consent.

Media

Good math, bad math strikes again as the Iglu Cruise company cobbled together a terribly misrepresentative infographic to explain the current BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico to other spills. Iglu Cruise used the appropriate ratio, but for the diameter not the correct area. The result? A misleading image that’s 196 times larger when it should be only 14 times larger. Remember, designers, the area of a circle is proportional to the square of its radius.

Publishing

AOL hired a new president of its media and studios division, David Eun. Eun spent his first three months on the job studying the economics and traffic data across AOL’s content properties. His conclusion, according to Michael Learmonth writing for Advertising Age: “Produce more content, faster.” Sigh. Quality apparently doesn’t enter the equation. Well maybe. “Our mission at this company is to be the world’s largest producer of high-quality content, period,” Eun told Learmonth. “The content driving our traffic is home-grown, and 80% of it is now produced by folks on the AOL payroll.” With about 500 full-time editorial employees and 40,000 freelancers, it should. Eun told Learmonth AOL will be “the largest net hirer of journalists in the world next year” and continues to work on a system that values content based on clicks, how long a user looks at it, and the amount of advertising revenue it generates.

Sustainability

Tim Dickinson, writing for Rolling Stone, has the best analysis of how President Obama totally failed to address corruption in the US Minerals Management Service (MMS). Yet another failure from the president who refuses to govern like he campaigned. When things are as bad in an agency as they are in MMS, it’s no great loss if you just shit-can everything and start from scratch. It’s not like MMS was actually regulating anything anyway. Instead, Obama kept the entire outfit and, worse, “calibrated his response to the Gulf spill based on flawed and misleading estimates from BP.” His aides set the flow rate at a ridiculous 5,000 barrels a day while the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) worst-case estimated 64,000-100,000 barrels a day. Dickinson reports that Obama, while making big noise about a “moratorium” on off-shore drilling, has done nothing to prevent the same thing from happening again. 5,106 wells in the Gulf of Mexico—including 591 deep-water wells—continue drilling operations. Dickinson goes on to fully review how BP has been “implicated in each of the worst oil disasters in American history, dating back to the Exxon Valdez in 1989.” BP’s assets should be seized and it’s corporate charter revoked, to be sure. But Barack Obama’s failure to clean up the US Department of the Interior and MMS, taking 40 days to announce a criminal investigation, and properly respond to the Gulf spill—it took a full week for him to initiate a government response and even then his administration looked like the Keystone Cops, leaving BP in charge of the cleanup—is just as inexcusable. As Dickinson reports, the National Oil and Hazardous Substances Pollution Contingency Plan “plainly states that the government must ‘direct all federal, state, or private actions’ to clean up a spill ‘where a discharge or threat of discharge poses a substantial threat to the public health or welfare of the United States.”

Technology

Apple introduced the fourth-generation iPhone: second camera (front-facing), 800:1 contrast, 960x440 326ppi, A4 chip, larger battery (40% more talk time, six hours 3G browsing, 10 hours wi-fi browsing, 10 hours video, 40 hours music), three-axis gyroscope, better camera (five-megapixel and 720p HD video), iBooks, (finally) multitasking, iAds (developer’s take is 60%), and FaceTime (picture-in-picture video calling; wi-fi only). Snore. Funniest part had to be when Steve Jobs told attendees—five or six times—to turn off their wi-fi. But the problem wasn’t wi-fi; it was mi-fi: 500+ mobile hotspots—with 500+ associated service set identifiers (SSIDs) and 500+ associated networks—and connected laptops resulted in a perfect tragedy of the commons. Later reports indicate that a faulty pre-release iPhone 4 iOS also contributed to Jobs’ problems. I’ll be perfectly happy if Apple’s iOS 4 update conjures a way to reliably and predictably move photos from my MacBook Pro to my iPod Touch. A quick same-day perusal of analysis yielded only Dan Gillmor writing for Salon nailing the two major problems with Apple’s new iPhone: The walled garden ecosystem Apple is building around the iPhone and iPad and the abysmal digital networks that just can’t keep up with demand.

Oh noes, here comes the singularity. Ashlee Vance, writing for the New York Times, has a very level-headed, non woo-woo, survey of the singularity—the point in the not-to-distant-future where intelligence becomes increasingly nonbiological and orders of magnitude more powerful, so as to be incomprehensible, enabling humans to transcend biological limitations and amplify creativity. The first half of Vance’s article focuses on Ray Kurzweil who wrote The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, and co-directed The Singularity Is Near: A True Story About the Future. Kurzweil is an inveterate inventor, responsible for the first text-to-speech converters for the blind, electronic keyboards, voice-recognition software among others. Vance quotes Kurzweil on the predictable, exponential improvement in computer technology: ““With 30 linear steps, you get to 30. With 30 steps exponentially, you get to one billion. The price-performance of computers has improved one billion times since I was a student. In 25 years, a computer as powerful as today’s smartphones will be the size of a blood cell. ... Within 30 years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence. Shortly after, the human era will be ended.” The second half of Vance’s article focuses on Singularity University, Kurzweil’s current scheme with Peter Diamandis, housed at the NASA Ames Research Center, intended to inch us closer to the singularity by developing projects that will “change the lives of one billion people.”

User experience

Apple’s HTML5 showcase is a breathtaking collection of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript demos. I haven’t had this much fun viewing source in years.

Get two or more user experience professionals together and talk will eventually turn to whining about the lack of empowerment and influence within large organizations. Will Evans got tired of listening to this and proposes taking the methods and processes we’ve developed in user experience and applying it to business processes and leadership. Evans presented his ideas at the Boston chapter of the Usability Professionals’ Association mini conference on 9 June 2010. Leah Buley expanded on Evans’ model for user experience career growth, emphasizing the necessity of having appropriate user experience staffing not only at the tactical layer but on the process, dynamics, and strategy layers as well. Highly recommended.