CNN Money: Meet Cortana, Microsoft’s Siri
NYTimes: Cortana, Microsoft’s Answer to Siri
The Verge: The story of Cortana, Microsoft’s Siri killer
Engadget: Microsoft unveils Cortana, its answer to Siri and Google Now
Gizmodo: Windows Phone 8.1’s Cortana Is Google Now Plus Siri
The tech press, understandably, has been comparing Microsoft’s voice assistant, Cortana, with Apple’s Siri.
I love how they call Cortana, “Microsoft’s Siri”.
Sort of how the Zune was Microsoft’s iPod. And Surface is Microsoft’s iPad. And Bing is Microsoft’s Google.
Best of luck in the mobile wars, Microsoft.

Microsoft just announced their entry into the automotive world this morning with their new voice-assisted car, the Cortina.
I’m confused.

Google is now in the wearable OS game with Android Wear.
The Google voice assist is a great feature, but the same weather, time and text messages on your wrist just isn’t compelling.
When you compare what Google and Samsung are doing with wearable tech to what Apple is working on with detailed health-tracking, it puts things into perspective.
Am I missing something?

Christopher Mims for Quartz:

Apple’s Mac desktops and laptops may still count for a fraction of the global market for PCs, but when you tally up all the computers (iPhones, iPads, etc.) on which people actually get things done, the number of computers sold by Apple exceeds the number of Windows-based PCs shipped worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2013.
When you realize that an iPhone 5s in 2014 has approximately the same specs (hard drive space, memory, speed) as an iMac from 2004, I don’t think it’s cheating at all to count iPhones and iPads as “PCs”. Hell, even people from Microsoft have said the tablet is a PC.

[Update: I should have know I was Onion-rolled. This New Yorker piece is fake. Still funny.]
Andy Borowitz, for The New Yorker:

A Microsoft spokesman said only that Mr. Gates’s first day in his new job had been “a learning experience” and that, for the immediate future, he would go back to running Windows 7.
Is this not a perfect metaphor for Microsoft?
via parislemon

A 12-Year-Old Explains the Information Age’s Facts of Life to Her Mother:

Mom, it’s gonna be a long ride to Grandma’s, and while we have some time alone together, I think it’d be good for us to talk about some things. I’m getting older, and I’m not always gonna be around the house to explain stuff to you. I know you have a lot of questions, and I want us to be open with each other. So, I think it’s time you learned where blogs and tweets come from.
A bit dated in parts, but still funny.

I wish I could say I was on the original Mac thirty years ago, but I wasn’t. I was on the original IBM computer, the 5150. My father actually bought it in 1981 and it wouldn’t be until around 1990 that I remember using Windows 3.x.
Back in the pre-Windows days of the 5150, everything was done at the DOS prompt. It’s where I traversed file directories, launched programs, set up my SoundBlaster card and most importantly, installed and played video games (I remember always looking for INSTALL.EXE and SETUP.EXE).

The first time I used a Mac was at Pratt Institute during the summer of my junior year in high school in 1994.
When I started college at Rutgers in 1995, I majored in graphic design and exclusively used Macs in our computer labs.
I wouldn’t be a Macintosh owner until I was gifted a G4 tower by my parents upon graduating from my design program in 1999. My dad was computer nerd and PC guy, but understood it was important I have a Mac to work on, versus a Windows box.
After that, I never returned to the PC again.

Cory Doctorow on the future of the Web as we know it:

Try as I might, I can’t shake the feeling that 2014 is the year we lose the Web. The W3C push for DRM in all browsers is going to ensure that all interfaces built in HTML5 (which will be pretty much everything) will be opaque to users, and it will be illegal to report on security flaws in them (because reporting a security flaw in DRM exposes you to risk of prosecution for making a circumvention device), so they will be riddled with holes that creeps, RATters, spooks, authoritarians and crooks will be able to use to take over your computer and fuck you in every possible way.
Scary shit.

…of Common UI Symbols

Accenture is the new company tasked with unfucking Healthcare.org.
I’m not holding my breath.

When Apple reached parity with Windows

via YIMMY’S YAYO

Sorry, Jim, I couldn’t resist.

[Update, 6 Jan 2014: This entry has been picked up on Reddit and some other sites, so I feel I should elaborate more on some of my quips with Android. Additions have been noted below.]

I started familiarizing myself with Android design guidelines last month (for an update to a mobile app at my work). Prior to that I only had experience designing for iOS.

Overall I’m not impressed with anything about Android. The iconography lacks sophistication, the typography is derivative and there’s an overall lack of cohesion to the experience of the operating system. Android clearly feels like a system built and designed by engineers, not designers.

My perspective comes from using the Samsung Galaxy S3 and reading Google’s own Design Guidelines website.

It comes as somewhat of a relief that some of my favorite apps look/feel/work almost as good on Android as they do on iOS (Instapaper and Dropbox come to mind). The problem is, even when apps are great, the OS they live in feels clunky and poorly designed. It’s like driving a Porsche on horrible road in a rundown town.

Then we come to designing for Android.

For Apple’s iOS, this is the state of fragmentation across the various device types (via iDownload):

And here is Android’s clusterfuck fragmentation:

Update: When you have as many screen resolutions and dimensions as Android has, it becomes impractical to design for every one of them. What you end up doing then is picking a subset of resolutions and dimensions and designing for those. To use another car analogy, instead of designing perfectly tuned wheels for a few cars, you design a few that perform decently on a lot of cars. Better yet—it’s like designing 4 shirt sizes for people ranging from people who are 5′ 6″, 145 lbs to people who are 6′ 5″, 220 lbs. When use averages in design, you’re watering things down for common denominators. What we have with Android is an operating system that wants to have it’s cake (or whatever pastry is current) and eat it too. They want “open” with beautiful, strict design guidelines. The problem is, you can’t have both (maybe you can? I’d love to be proven wrong). Design still doesn’t seem to be as high a priority as it could be, even on Kit Kat (which is the best designed version of Android thus far, in my opinion).

To drive home how Google lacks taste and sophistication, you need to look no further that Google’s page for Kit Kit, featuring a cheesy cross-promotion with the Kit Kat candy bar. I appreciate the sense of humor they’ve woven into the nomenclature of the OS versions, but where’s the showcase for the actual operating system?

Whether you step back and look at the entire ecosystem of Android or closely examine to the user interface, iconography and typography, it’s just not fun to use, beautiful to look at or enjoyable to design for.