With Instagram and Vine, is Windows Phone ‘turning a corner’?
Magic 8-Ball says, says ASK AGAIN LATER.

BGR: iCloud was Jobs’ best shot at killing Dropbox… and it missed badly
When Steve Jobs met with the DropBox founders before Apple announced iCloud, he famously told them they had a “feature, not a product.”
As of today, DropBox is very much a product to me and integral to my everyday workflow both in the office and out.
I use iCloud too, but I have to say not just iCloud, but file syncing in general has a long way to go before it’s easy for non-nerds to comprehend and use. I’m surprised how many non-nerds still don’t understand the difference and relationship between their Photostream and their iCloud account.
There’s a lot of smartphone users who carry around thousands of photos with them, and usually have few to none of them backed up.
It’s a very real problem.

What’s the non-iPhone smartphone world baking up these days?
Curved displays and 41-megapixel cameras:

I guess you can argue that some consumers need the 41-megapixel camera that Nokia introduced a few months ago. But the number of people who care about that is a sliver of the overall market. Things get even murkier with the Samsung Galaxy Round and its curved display. Technically, this feature does have marginal utility. When you rock the phone as it lies on its convex side, you can glimpse messages on the display if you happen to be looking at it sideways. This is pretty much the definition of “grasping at straws” when it comes to feature innovation.
It’s seems like companies are just spinning their wheels while they wait for whatever Apple might announce in 2014.

The 23-year-olds at Snapchat rejected a 4 billion dollar buyout offer.
In other news, Kanye West gives a lecture on design (?!?!?!) at Harvard Business School.
Can someone tell me what the fuck is going on in the world?

I installed the latest iTunes update the other day. Later on, I watched a movie in fullscreen. I hit the ‘esc’ key, and, instead of closing the video, as the app had been doing, it windowed the video. Oh, happy days.
All over the internet, and in VLC or Quick Time player, when a video is in fullscreen and a user hits ‘esc’, the vid backs out of fullscreen. But not in iTunes. It used to, but since at least Lion was released, hitting ‘esc’ closes a video. Man, I hated that.
But, in their infinite wisdom, Apple has decided, with this latest release, to restore what has become an expected function to a common action. Well done, sirs.
It’s too bad the Safari update is so buggy, though.

Looks like Samsung is drinking Google’s milkshake:

To give an idea of what Samsung is doing, just look at the new Mobile SDK: It supports Samsung’s pen, gestures, multiwindow and motion features with 800 APIs available to developers. If that number doesn’t grab you consider what Samsung said about opportunities for developers. Simply by adding the digital pen to a phone in the first and subsequent Galaxy Note handsets, more 1,800 pen-enabled apps were created. And the company sells two televisions every second. Clearly, Samsung is trying to entice developer attention for its platform.

Wait, isn’t Samsung’s platform Android? Absolutely! Samsung has effectively built an individual, closed environment of apps and features on top of the open Android. Amazon has done much the same with its Fire OS on Kindle Fire tablets but the approach was a little different.
Wait, open always wins, right?

MIT Technology Review: Data Shows Google’s Robot Cars Are Smoother, Safer Drivers Than You or I

Data gathered from Google’s self-driving Prius and Lexus cars shows that they are safer and smoother when steering themselves than when a human takes the wheel, according to the leader of Google’s autonomous-car project.

A robot can probably wipe my ass better than I can, but that doesn’t mean I want it to. I’m a human being, I can do it my damn self, thank you. Perfection is overrated.

Update: Actually, a robot can totally wipe my ass, just stay away from my car keys.

Look at that mess. This website is so broken they can’t even be bothered with loading CSS while they’re trying to fix the backend. Two weeks into the Affordable Care Act rollout and this is what New Yorkers are dealing with.
And it’s not just New Yorkers. The national website, healthcare.gov, is so broken that people are having trouble even logging in. As bad as New York’s site is, at least I was able to progress to the eligibility portion of the process before it finally shit itself completely.
Republicans in Congress and conservative pundits have been working up some effective framing about the health care rollout this past week. On this morning’s talk shows, it went something like this:
“This isn’t a glitch. The system is breaking down…repeal Obamacare.”
To be sure, the technology failures plaguing the rollout are serious and inexcusable, especially considering the government had three years to develop this program, and spent more than 400 million dollars, just for the national website. Many millions more have, of course, been spent on the twenty or so state-run sites. The technical requirements for running these exchanges is enormous, but doable. As Paul Krugman tried to point out on This Week, before he was shouted down by a wave of talking points, the exchange in the nation’s largest state, California, has been working well, auguring the fact that given time, the technical challenges will be overcome.
What is disheartening is that, even though these pundits and politicians are reading from a script, they do seem to believe that the technical problems mean the health care program is fundamentally untenable, and they couldn’t be more wrong. These are people who make their livings in the world of partisan proclamations and ideological utterances. They tend to be middle-aged, and probably began their careers hammering away on IBM Selectrics. They wouldn’t know how a webapp works from a hole in the ground. When I see Secretary of Health and Human Services Kathleen Sebelius stumble through an interview on The Daily Show, or Peggy Noonan spout her rhetoric at Krugman, I wonder why I have yet to see any of these shows bring on someone with experience building websites.
I want to see someone on these shows who has had experience with phased rollouts (something the government unwisely decided not to do). I want to see someone who has spent weeks or months whittling down a bug list. Most importantly, I want to hear from the people who saw this train wreck coming from months away. No web project this fucked up could have possibly been a surprise to the people involved. Having been on some doomed projects here and there, I can imagine the waves of feature creep and endless conference calls throughout this past spring and summer as, all of a sudden, the deadline for rollout approached.
And the reason I want to hear from these people, is because they, and only they, can give the public an accurate representation of what is happening regarding these websites. That is, they can point out that the problems are not indicative of an unworkable law. Rather, they are indicative of complex challengess that are technical in nature. And technical problems are eminently solvable. The fact that some states do have working exchanges shows that time and effort will resolve the issues plaguing the systems.
So, I have confidence that the insurance exchanges will be up and running. Critically for me, and millions of other Americans, is that the sites be fixed before the technological illiterates that run the government pull the plug. This is it. This is the only way I, and so many others, will be able to find affordable coverage. We need this more than most people can imagine. We’re not going to see the Medicare rolls expanded into universal coverage. We’re in a health care limbo whose costs in both lives and dollars is too high. The Affordable Care Act is probably the only step we’re going to see in our lifetimes towards righting an unconscionable wrong in this country. I, for one, am willing to give the law more than thirteen days before I throw up my hands in despair and declare it time to scrap the whole thing. But the people responsible for this royal fuckup aren’t making my position any easier.

Dear New York,
Your health care website is garbage. Fix it.

From Webdesigner Depot:

Just weeks after the successful launches of the first Firefox OS smartphones to Spain, Colombia, Venezuela and Poland, Mozilla has announced that new launches of Firefox OS smartphones will begin soon with more devices and in more markets around the world.

App designers may already know this is not “yet another platform” to factor for projects. Rather than building apps for Firefox OS — developers are able to build HTML5 apps for the Web. Part of the Firefox OS genius is that it enables developers to access the hardware of the phone by means of Web APIs.
How very 2007 of you, Firefox.
I’m sure this makes developers SUPER excited.

First, Microsoft shows up a few years late to the tablet party with a half-baked product, Surface.
Then they sell about 9 Surfaces total in the year it’s been on the market.
…wait, I mixed that up, that should be $900,000,000 that Microsoft had to write off for all the unsold Surfaces.
Then they announce the Surface 2, who’s updates include a new docking station, a new kickstand and better battery. People are going to be all over that shit for sure. Are you kidding me? My parents love kickstands and docking stations. Doesn’t everybody?
Now Dell announces their own Windows 8.1 tablet priced to undercut Microsoft’s Surface 2. Yeah, that’s right. A licensed, Microsoft partner is trying to undercut Microsoft because, well, Microsoft wants to have it’s cake and eat it.
Doesn’t this whole thing seem like a bad dream?

BGR: Samsung exec reportedly admits Galaxy Gear smartwatch ‘lacks something special’

The last thing you want to do when entering a new product category for the first time is launch something that isn’t your best effort. According to a report from The Korea Times, however, a Samsung executive may have admitted that the company is doing just that with the Galaxy Gear smartwatch. “We’ve acknowledged that our Gear lacks something special,” an unnamed Samsung official is quoted as having told the site. “With more investment for user interface and user experience, Samsung devices will be better in terms of customer satisfaction.”
Give ’em some time.
As soon as they see what Apple has planned for the motion-tracking capabilities in their M7 chip Samsung will have a clear picture where they need to take their smart watch.
The expression, “lead, follow or get out of the way” comes to mind.
In the realm of mobile computing innovation we have Apple leading, Samsung following and Blackberry, well, getting out of the way.

Bill Gates on the legendary Control-Alt-Delete:

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has finally admitted that forcing users to press the Control-Alt-Delete key combination to log into a PC was a mistake. In an interview at a Harvard fundraising campaign, Gates discusses his early days building Microsoft and the all-important Control-Alt-Delete decision. If you’ve used an old version of the software or use Windows at work then you will have experienced the odd requirement. Gates expains the key combination is designed to prevent other apps from faking the login prompt and stealing a password.
Before Control-Alt-Delete was used to log into Windows machines it was how you restarted the whole computer. My father taught me this back in the pre-Windows days of the early 80s.
In middle school I taught this trick to my friend Dave. When we went to the mall we would reboot all the computers on display in Sears and then run out. The sales people on the floor were usually computer illiterate and had no idea what we had done.
It didn’t take much to keep us amused back then.

I hate iOS Safari. It has nothing to do with me being a web developer. I just find the performance of the browser to be substandard compared to a desktop browser. That’s to be expected considering the machine sitting atop my desk has somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 times the processing power of my iPad, but every time iOS Safari struggles to play an animated gif or fails to load a simple js slideshow, I get a little frustrated. It would be one thing if iOS Safari couldn’t handle heavy lifting, but it regularly balks at tasks that browsers on desktops mastered a decade ago.
Trying another browser is no guarantee of better performance, either. The same performance issues hinder Chrome for iOS, as well. Once again, it’s all about the hardware.
Anyway, the point is, I’m not happy with browsing in iOS, and so am open to new browser apps that purport to offer an improved experience. That’s why I was excited to try out Coast, the new browser for iOS developed by Opera. There’s been a lot of fanfare in the tech press since its release a couple days back, and it’s well deserved.
Coast, being still subject to the hardware limitations of iOS devices, doesn’t offer much in the way of performance improvements, at least from what I’ve seen in the past couple days I’ve had to play around with it. But that’s not what makes Coast an improvement over every browser I’ve used on a mobile device, regardless of the operating system.
Coast’s strength is in its interface. It’s, well, minimalist. That word is easily overused in technology, but minimalism is a worthy goal for app development, especially in environments such as mobile where real estate is limited. Opera achieved this goal in part by doing away with the URL bar, a feature that has been ubiquitous in browsers. Imagine that, a browser with no URL bar.
What a user gets instead is a home screen, not unlike the home screens of phones and tablets anywhere. Instead of apps, the home screen in Coast has websites. A user can add and remove icons for any web page they see fit. For pages not represented by an icon, there’s an integrated URL/search bar prominently placed on the home screen to aid the user. While in a website, a small nav bar at the bottom allows the user to return to the homes screen or swipe through history. There are no tabs, just many, many past pages waiting for the user in the history.
So, the URL bar hasn’t completely disappeared, it’s just moved. One clunky feature of this interface is that, in the current build, you have to jump out of a website to the home screen in order to enter a new address. I can’t speak for the developers, but they left a lot of real estate in that bottom nav bar, and an icon that pops up a field would be nice. Yep, it’s a neat idea to get rid of the URL bar, but the reality seems to be more challenging.
The interface isn’t completely intuitive (it took me a good five minutes to figure out how to close a web page), but once a user gets the hang of it, it becomes natural. Once I got used to it, I began to like Coast enough that it’s now my default browser.
The point of Coast seems to be to introduce the smoothness of apps into a browser. In that, it’s hindered only by the fact that websites are not apps, and websites are what Coast is presenting to the user. However, Coast is a wonderful start at shaking up the way a browser is supposed to work. Once those rules can be shown to be arbitrary and unnecessarily restrictive, the web can only get better.