Microsoft can’t help themselves. They keep gravitating back to their original Surface.
You don’t remember the big-ass table?

What can programmers do?
They can make computer simulations of moshpits.
Fucking classic.
via Hacker News

Google has a new website for Glass, their heads-up display computer glasses they demoed during Google I/O in 2012.
First off, I’m not wearing this shit.
This is not just because I already wear glasses and I’m particular about what I put on my face. They just look goofy. And I’m fairly certain my father, mother, sister and brother won’t be racing out to get Google Glass either. I’m also pretty sure none of my friends will be getting Google Glass.
This isn’t Google responding to the iPhone and iPad like they did with Android. Glass is is clearly something the guys at Google are excited about. And they don’t care what anyone else thinks. They really seem passionate about Glass. I can respect that.
Google Glass strikes me as a very cool toy for engineers, developers and die-hard science fiction fans. I would definitely try it out in the privacy of my own home, but hat’s where I would draw the line.

The Back of the Internet
via The Dish

My father got an iPhone 5 this past Christmas. I know he’ll enjoy using it.

How do I know this?

This is usually what happens when my wife and I go back to Jersey to visit my parents:

Me: [lays iPhone on kitchen counter]

Dad: [picks up my iPhone, starts messing with it]

Me: Dad, what are you doing?

Dad: Ha, I figured out your passcode, 1111.

Me: Congratulations, Dad.

Dad: [Continues to swipe and tap around, eventually puts it down]

Dad: Ha, neat stuff.

My dad’s an engineer so by his nature he’s a tinkerer. I know what you’re thinking and no, he hasn’t tried to take his iPhone apart to understand how it works. He knows a lot about computers and technology and he took the time a few weeks ago while I was on the phone with him to “enlighten” me on a “trick” he learned on his iPhone. I was intrigued.

Dad: So Mikey, you got your iPhone handy? Do this: Go to your Home screen. Okay? Now double-click the Home button. Ok, you see all those apps? Now tap and hold on one until they all start shaking. Now you can kill apps that are running in the background and draining your battery.

Mike: Dad, who the hell told you to do this?

Dad: The guys in my IT department recommended I install a task killer app on the Galaxy S3 they gave me. They said these task killer apps let you quit apps running in the background that are draining your battery. Once I discovered this [App Switcher] on my iPhone I figured it worked like the task killer app on my Galaxy.

Mike: No, no, no, Dad. No, you don’t need to do this on iOS. The operating system handles on this for you. And so began the re-education of my father on how background processes work on iOS. I explained to him the App Switcher tray can be thought of as a history of apps you’ve used. It’s not showing you everything running in the background. I explained to him, sure, he might only have 5 items total in his App Switcher, but I have over a dozen in mine. This does not mean over a dozen apps are running in the background on my iPhone.

He understood things after our conversation, but it makes me wonder how many other people are misinformed about how iOS handles resource management?

A few weeks after our conversation, he sent me this scan of a magazine my mother bought him called iPhone Life:

It’s a bit hard to read, but #2 says:

Shut down background apps. Double-tap the home button to bring up the multitasking bar with the recently used apps. Tap and hold any app icon until it starts wiggling, then close it by tapping the little red button on the top left of the app icon. Sometimes these apps consume power even if they are not being used (especially Location Services).

Now this battery saving advice isn’t 100% false. Apps using Location Services can be a drain on your battery even if they’re not being used. For instance, I love the app Dark Sky. Its key feature is it can tell you, almost down to the minute, when it will start raining where you are. In order to be so accurate, it has to track your location via GPS, regardless of whether you’ve launched the app or not. This eats up some some system resources. Dark Sky is the exception though, not the norm.

Reading through Apple’s Developer site can shed some much-needed light on this whole background process issue. On the page titled, App States and Multitasking, Table 3-1 lists the five states an app can be in: Not Running, Inactive, Active, Background and Suspended.

Let’s look at what “Suspended” is:

The app is in the background but is not executing code. The system moves apps to this state automatically and does not notify them before doing so. While suspended, an app remains in memory but does not execute any code.

When a low-memory condition occurs, the system may purge suspended apps without notice to make more space for the foreground app.

Farther down the page, under the heading, Moving to the Background:

When the user presses the Home button, presses the Sleep/Wake button, or the system launches another app, the foreground app transitions to the inactive state and then to the background state. These transitions result in calls to the app delegate’s applicationWillResignActive: and applicationDidEnterBackground: methods, as shown in Figure 3-5. After returning from the applicationDidEnterBackground: method, most apps move to the suspended state shortly afterward. Apps that request specific background tasks (such as playing music) or that request a little extra execution time from the system may continue to run for a while longer.

To be clear: all apps immediately transition to the inactive state once a user presses the Home button, presses the Sleep/Wake button, or the system launches another app and then they move right to the suspended state unless they request specific background tasks.

This highlights one of the most important differences between “open” platforms like Android and curated ones like iOS. In addition to controlling background processes on iOS, Apple also requires every developer put their app through an approval process where Apple checks for things like unnecessary background processes or malicious, [back doors](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backdoor_(computing).

On Android, there are no approval processes if you decide to publish your app outside Google Play. If you want to make an Android app, you just do it. This sounds great, but it requires things like task killers to quit resource-hogging apps.

To me, this defeats the purpose of a smartphone.

What can Apple do to dispel the misconception that all the apps in your Task Switcher are running and draining your battery?

Many of my friends think of me as the early-adopter-Apple-fanboy guy. I do love Apple products, but I’m far from an early adopter when it comes to Apple products (Web services like Twitter are different, they don’t mess up hard drives or require backup up and reconfiguring things, so I sign up for new ones all the time to test drive.)
Case in point: The latest issue with iOS 6.1 affecting battery performance on 4S owners and Apple’s subsequent 6.1.1 patch.
I’ve been around and seen enough operating system releases to know it’s usually best to wait a few months before upgrading.

I apologize if you’ve been inundated with old posts on the site and in your RSS feeds.
Last week a third-party plug-in was causing my Movable Type administration area to crash. In turn, I tried to fix the problem and I made more work for myself than I needed to (It had to do with Twitter Tools and and what I think was a conflict with a Perl module upgrade by my hosting provider). I learned some things. Good news is, the site is running better than ever.
Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, Daily Exhaust is back online.
The main lesson I learned is Movable Type is not getting better with age—at least in my experience with it on a shared-server environment (I’m not the only one). Part of what took me so long to get this site back up was installing and testing multiple dot-releases of Movable Type 5. As of this writing, the latest release is 5.2.2 and it ran exponentially slower than the version I had previously installed, 5.02. Luckily MT includes the install version number in the HTML Head section.
I’m not interested in exporting everything over to WordPress because WordPress doesn’t have static publishing like Movable Type does. Despite the broken links and embedded video objects from the last 7 years, static publishing gives me a complete archive that isn’t contingent on backend server to work.
At the end of the day, Daily Exhaust is about publishing words and images and Movable Type does that well. No it’s not as advanced as platforms like Squarespace (which I use over at The Combustion Chamber), but it doesn’t need to be.

BGR: Teen survey says Apple is done, Surface is cool

“Teens are telling us Apple is done,” Buzz Marketing Group’s Tina Wells told Forbes. “Apple has done a great job of embracing Gen X and older [Millennials], but I don’t think they are connecting with Millennial kids. [They’re] all about Surface tablets/laptops and Galaxy.”

Really?

On my flights across the country this past year my “research” says otherwise, but I’m not a teen anymore, so what do I know?

Techcrunch: Microsoft Launches “Next App Star” Competition For Windows Phone Developers

You know a mobile app store is still young and needs more content when the company behind it still writes its own blog posts when interesting new apps appear in it. With 150,000 apps, the Windows Phone store isn’t actually quite as empty as the Windows 8 store, but Microsoft could sure use some marquee apps for its mobile platform. To get developers and consumers a bit more excited about it, the company is launching its “Windows Phone Next App Star” contest today.

It wasn’t to long after Apple launched their App Store that they were able to brag about having both the best and the most apps. Now in 2013, Microsoft has no such advantage. While 150,000 apps is nothing to scoff at, it means nothing to people already conditioned to seeing over one million apps in Apple’s App Store. “Hey, Windows Phone now has Angry Birds!!!” …who cares?

Parity in apps will help Microsoft, but parity won’t win the war for them.

I’m just curious when the Charade of the Zune Phone will end. Will Microsoft piss away all their cash reserves before they gain a foothold in the smartphone space?

Dr. Paul Jocobs of Qualcomm kicked off CES 2013, along with his Cirque du Lameness. Seriously watch the first 10-15 minutes and try not feel embarrassed for everyone on stage.

Qualcomm is a company that makes products, and they revealed their newest one, the Snapdragon processor:

Doesn’t command the same level of attention of a new iPad, does it?

The whole keynote felt like a bizarro dream. There were actors on stage dressed like raggedy hipsters, then they showed a Disney-esque animated short and then during the middle of the CEO talking about Microsoft, Steve Ballmer bum-rushes the stage and starts babbling about Windows 8 and their keyboards, then Guillermo del Toro comes on stage to talk about how he loves the Snapdragon chip. Then Big Bird comes on stage….

All these things actually happened.

The Verge does a lot of great things. Their site design is awesome (done by Code and Theory), they have some great reporting and tech scoops, but man, their product reviews can be real shit.

Take their latest review for the new Surface Pro by Microsoft. midway through:

It’s a great notebook computer that beats out the competition in a number of ways, but it’s also still all about compromise.

And then the very next sentence, at the beginning of the next paragraph:

Like the Surface RT before it, the Surface Pro isn’t the perfect notebook or the perfect tablet. It’s still difficult to use this device on your lap and the screen angle isn’t adjustable. It’s also a 16:9 tablet so using this device in portrait is comical. You could say these are obvious flaws in the product, but if you’re willing to forgive both of them for a portable power house with beautifully engineered hardware then the Surface Pro isn’t going to disappoint.

[Or said in another context: If you’re willing to forgive this car for its horrible proportions, awkward steering and bad weight balance for a beautiful paint job and solid chassis, then this hot rod won’t disappoint.]

Man up and take a stand on the gadgets you review.

Otherwise, you’re wasting everyone’s time.

So Steve Ballmer made a surprise appearance at Qualcomm’s demonstration at CES.

Is it me, or is he looking more and more like Lex Luther?

He’s definitely a destructive force to his own company.

Update: Here’s a video of Luther in action. He definitely still has the original cheesy Ballmer in him.

The NDP Group says, “Despite the hype, and hope, around the launch of Windows 8, the new operating system did little to boost holiday sales or improve the year-long Windows notebook sales decline.”

Was Steve Jobs not clear when he said we were entering the Post-PC era back in 2010 (jump to 45 minutes 20 seconds)?

Windows 8 isn’t going to change that. Deal with it.

Link via The Verge

MacRumors is reporting some troubling news for 2013:

Some iOS 6 users who use Apple’s scheduled “Do Not Disturb” feature may find that their iPhone, iPad or iPod touch hasn’t automatically disabled the feature on New Year’s morning.

First world problems.