Dieter Bohn at the Verge on the Surface 3:

Even with these design improvements, the Surface’s core design is simply physically more complicated than a laptop’s single hinge. You will find yourself mucking about with setting the kickstand in the right place on your knees and dealing with that cover flapping about. Microsoft may have needed two years of design iterations before it could honestly make the case that the Surface can be used on your lap like a, well, a laptop, but it’s finally gotten close enough to make it. It’s just strange to think of so much design effort going into what other companies solve with a hinge. The simplicity of a clamshell is easier, but it’s also not the end-all-be-all of “getting stuff done” computing. If you buy into the benefits of a tablet computer — and there are many — the tradeoff could well be worth it.
Let’s borrow Steve Jobs’ analogy of PCs (including laptops) being “trucks.” In this world this makes tablets small coupes and/or motorcycles. The motorcycle Apple built is the iPad: more fun to use and easier to carry around. It can solve most problems, most of the time.
Microsoft tried to build a motorcycle with sidecar and a roof and small trunk to keep a spare tire. To top it off, they’ve decided they’re not going to race against other motorcycles like the iPad and the Nexus 7, but other cars like Macbook Airs and Lenovo Thinkpads and the more I read about the Surface 3 the more I’m convinced it’s not equipped to race against anyone now.
Microsoft has painted themselves into a flat, Windows 8 tile.
Microsoft wants badly to take down the iPad and they went after laptops. To be clear, this is not a pivot. This can be more accurately described as a retreat.

Will Oremus at Slate asks us if Microsoft’s new tablet could replace your laptop?
Luckily, he answers it:

It’s hard to know how much of this is my unfamiliarity and how much is Microsoft’s poor design, but this article took me significantly longer to write on the Surface than it would on either my Macbook or my old Windows XP desktop machine. That’s partly because Word crashed and had to restart for no apparent reason, and partly because simple tasks like copying a URL from Internet Explorer and pasting it as a hyperlink in Word took multiple rounds of trial and error.
Sounds pretty awesome.

Microsoft, you’re killing me. You’ve just announced what looks like a killer new tablet that you’re hyping as “the tablet that can replace your laptop.” It looks like a big improvement over the Surface 2 in just about every possible way, from the display quality to the super-thin build. But for some reason, you are still insisting on selling the keyboard cover separately for $130 a pop. To use an old science fiction cliché, this does not compute.

This bothers me for no other reason than because it seems like an assault on basic logic. You are selling a tablet that is, by your own admission, meant to be a laptop replacement. You compared it to the MacBook Air repeatedly during your presentation. And yet you’re still telling customers that having a keyboard is optional for something that’s supposed to be a laptop replacement… why?
—Brad Reed, BGR
If Microsoft opened a car dealership, they’d be selling the cars without wheels.
If Microsoft were a clothing retailer, they’d be selling shirts without buttons, and pants without zippers.
I have more, should I go on?
Seriously, Microsoft, what the fuck is wrong with you?

Is that not the caption to this photo? My bad.

Give it up, Microsoft. You have derailed.

From The Verge: The inventor of iMessage leaves Apple for a messaging startup
I hate that term, “inventor”. I hate it because it’s not accurate. I’ve talked about this before in regards to the “father(s)” of the iPod—Tony Fadell, Jony Ive, Steve Jobs or Jon Rubinstein. Take your pick.
If we dig into the article a bit (ok, if we read the first 2 sentences) we get more details:

Andrew Vyrros, the man who led development on iMessage and FaceTime while at Apple, has left the company for messaging startup Layer. The company announced the news yesterday, but Vyrros left Apple several months ago, sources tell The Verge, where he was also responsible for Apple’s push notification services, iTunes Genius, Game Center, and Back To My Mac.
So he’s a lead developer, or likely a director of development. This helps.
Now if we had been reading about the designer “in charge of” the design of iMessage leaving Apple, we would have likely seen a very similar headline as this one.
Design is almost always a collaborative process, so awarding a single person as an inventor of a product is inaccurate.

Joel Johnson from NBC New on the licensing around digital purchases from Amazon:

The core issue might actually be a simple matter of semantics: when we click a digital button that is labelled “Buy,” we expect that we’re actually buying something. But we’re not buying anything, we’re licensing it. Just last year, the Supreme Court ruled that the first-sale doctrine does not apply to software — or e-books. Or apps. Nor pretty much everything you “Buy” online that doesn’t get shipped to your home in a cardboard box.
The perpetual tug-of-war between content wanting to be free and companies trying to lock it down continues.

Nice job, LG:

Seriously, why fucking bother coming out with a ‘smart’ watch when it looks that bad?

Interesting thesis by Avram Miller on what’s going to happen in September of 2015 (via Robert Cringely):

Jobs began to realize that Google could become the next Microsoft which would have the same effect that the old Microsoft had on the pre-iPhone Apple, it would cut the company off at the knees. Jobs realized that the only way to prevent that, was to put a dagger into the very heart of Google – Search. So he started up the most secret project ever undertaken at Apple. The name of the project was “Found.” Less than four people knew about Found and not one of them was a board member. Jobs understood that Search was a very vulnerable area that had no stickiness other than possibly the brand behind it. That when users did a search, they just wanted the best results.
Google is quickly catching up to Apple in the quality of their software and product design, I’d love to see Apple catch up to Google in search (Siri is part of that).
Hey, I can dream, can’t I?

Kindle for iOS, version 4.2 was released the other day. New features include easier access to the table of contents of books, and something called X-Ray Smart Look-Up. It’s a welcome addition, actually. But, has continuous scrolling, one feature that has been missing for years, been added yet?
No, it has not.

Yesterday I sent out a link to my Kickstarter backers to the digitial version of the book I published. The book is in PDF format. It’s “open”, no DRM protection, nothing.
I used bitly to track clicks and I watched them trickle in slowly (as expected) until around 2pm when—in a 15-minute time span—this happened:

Of the 192 total backers to my project, 106 received this link to the book. It’s possible there was a flurry of genuine activity for 15 minutes, but it looks shady. There’s no proof of referral traffic (the link wasn’t posted on another website), but it’s intriguing.
I’m not getting bent out of shape about this. If people are sharing the link, they’re sharing the link. There’s nothing I can do about it.
I myself have torrented movies, music and books from time to time, so I have to put my money where my mouth is and let it happen, if it’s going to happen.

Reeder 2 for Mac Beta 1 is out.
Bye, bye, Feedly web app.
via 512 Pixels

DropBox introduces the Carousel 50 years after Don Draper did.

TechCrunch: Facebook Is Forcing All Users To Download Messenger By Ripping Chat Out Of Its Main Apps
Except for old 36-year-olds like me who sometimes uses the Facebook iPhone app and have never used Facebook Messenger (although I’m a fan of the UI in Facebook’s new Paper app).
No one is forcing me to do shit.

John Gruber on mobile apps versus mobile browsers:

Lamenting the falling share of time spent by people in web browsers at the expense of mobile apps is no different from those who lamented the falling share of time spent reading paper newspapers and magazines at the expense of websites.
I agree with Gruber. Who fucking cares what you use to access your favorite services?
What you should be asking yourself is, “am I using the right tool for the job?”