Adrian Short: What makes Twitter Twitter?

June 30, 2012
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

Adrian Short’s article — What makes Twitter Twitter? — is what I was about to comment on the same matter, but written so much better than I could possibly have. Any part of it is quotable, and I urge you to read all of it. (If Twitter matters to you as it matters to me and Adrian, of course.)

I’ll choose this bit:

The upshot of Twitter’s announcement is that it will be “introducing stricter guidelines around how the Twitter API is used”. I read this as saying that while independent developers have recently been discouraged from producing basic timeline apps, now they’ll be actively obstructed.

Why? In the name of “consistency”.

Now I might be in a small minority but I’ve sent over 15,000 tweets and I’ve never heard anyone raise even the mildest concern that their Twitter experience isn’t consistent. Consistent with what? Consistent with the new “interactive experiences” that Twitter is building into the platform which will presumably only be effectively supported by its own client apps.

What a racket. Move the goalposts and send everyone home for missing the target.

I’ve been on the web since the mid-1990s and Twitter for me has been by far the most interesting, fun and sociable experience I’ve found online. As a freelancer I do most of my business through it too.

It’s hard to put a value on that. Twitter made the best social website ever. That’s something very special. Something worth understanding. Something worth preserving.

The ‘Twitter announcement’ we’re talking about is this: Delivering a consistent Twitter experience.

By the way, as I recently tweeted (heh) I would gladly stick to Twitter’s official clients for Mac and iOS (the platforms I use), if they weren’t such lacking applications. I’ve used and tried many third-party clients, and they’re simply better. More feature-rich, better designed, better built. Just as an example, the official Twitter client for Mac OS X hasn’t received a worthy update since the opening of the Mac App Store (January 2011, a year and a half ago). They didn’t even update it recently to display Twitter’s redesigned logo. And speaking of lacking features, it is probably the only Twitter client that doesn’t let you choose to see real people’s names instead of their Twitter usernames. Even Tweetie — the original client it’s built upon — is better.

Dove va il portatile pro

June 28, 2012
by Riccardo Mori
Mele e appunti

Il MacBook Pro con schermo Retina è il primo Mac presentato negli ultimi 15 anni a lasciarmi un sapore amaro in bocca. Ne ho già parlato qui, in un articolo in inglese, e ne parlo nella mia rubrica Appunti di iCreate di luglio/agosto, ma voglio cercare di tornare sul discorso da un altro punto prospettico.

Due sono le principali attrattive del nuovo MacBook Pro: lo schermo e l’ulteriore assottigliamento e alleggerimento della macchina. Qualche entusiasta aggiungerà anche la scelta di utilizzare tecnologie di connettività veloci, come Thunderbolt e USB 3, e magari anche la scelta di abbandonare i dischi rigidi tradizionali. Ma le due attrattive nominate poco sopra sono, al momento, esclusive del nuovo MacBook Pro.

A lasciarmi l’amaro in bocca è però tutto quel che sta dietro a quelle novità, in altre parole il prezzo che bisogna pagare per abbracciare la filosofia di questo nuovo portatile ‘pro’. E non mi riferisco soltanto al prezzo letterale, ovviamente. Come ho già avuto modo di dire altrove, sono la ridotta espandibilità e le scelte obbligate a cui l’utente (che decide di imbarcarsi in questa direzione) si trova di fronte.

Non mi piace la RAM saldata sulla scheda madre. Non mi piace il fatto che si debba decidere al momento dell’acquisto se lasciare la memoria di base o espanderla al massimo possibile pagando altri 200 Euro. Non mi piace il fatto che, se si decide di non espanderla, non sarà possibile farlo in un secondo momento. Non è tanto una questione di prezzo puro e semplice, è il costringere l’utente a prendere una decisione irrevocabile subito. Idem per il disco flash. Se uno è orientato al modello base del MacBook Pro con schermo retina, dovrà accontentarsi di 256 GB interni. Si vuole di più? O ci si porta appresso un altro disco esterno, o ci si orienta sul modello di MacBook Pro più caro, che offre la scelta di 512 o 768 GB. (Notare che la scelta di un disco interno più capiente costa 500 Euro in più. Inoltre, se si vuole anche il massimo della Ram e il processore più veloce occorrerà aggiungere altri 449,99 Euro, per un totale di 949,99 Euro su un computer che di suo già costa 2.899 Euro).

Questo genere di espandibilità, molto poco elastico e decisamente a salti forzati rappresenta il lato oscuro di quando è il design a dettare legge. Al di là dei meriti del nuovo MacBook Pro — che ci sono, perché quello schermo è favoloso e il design esterno e l’ingegnerizzazione interna sono dei veri capisaldi del disegno industriale moderno in ambito informatico — al di là di questi meriti, tutti gli aspetti più sottilmente irritanti sono legati a precise scelte di design. Le scarse opzioni di aggiornamento di RAM e disco interno hanno a che vedere con la mancanza di spazio per inserire strutture che rendano RAM e disco ‘mobili’ e facilmente sostituibili. L’esclusione di connessioni come FireWire 800 ed Ethernet sono dovute alla sottigliezza nella nuova scocca. Idem la scomparsa di unità ottica e la necessità di ridisegnare il connettore MagSafe. Notate come il tutto esemplifichi perfettamente quel che io chiamo l’effetto valanga di una scelta di design. Notate come il desiderio di risparmiare qualche millimetro di spessore (e 500 grammi di peso) si ripercuota su ogni altro aspetto della macchina, fino alla sua stessa longevità. 

Non dubito che a molti utenti vada benissimo così. Del resto questa progressiva chiusura dei portatili Apple non è una novità: il MacBook Air insegna, e visto il grosso successo della linea Air era prevedibile che Apple avrebbe seguito l’esempio nella linea Pro. Questo, fra l’altro, mi porta a domandarmi per quanto tempo le due linee rimarranno separate. Una volta una macchina ‘pro’ si distingueva da una macchina ‘consumer’ per l’espandibilità e le tecnologie che incorporava. Si pensi alla differenza fra un iBook G3 e un PowerBook G3: il modello base dell’iBook ‘conchiglione’ aveva una porta USB, una porta Ethernet, una porta modem e una presa per cuffie. Un PowerBook G3 ‘Lombard’ aveva due uscite video, uscita e ingresso audio separati, due porte USB, una porta SCSI, Ethernet, modem, uno slot PCMCIA (la serie anteriore ne aveva addirittura due). Il modello seguente, ‘Pismo’, aveva persino due porte FireWire 400. Queste differenze tra macchina pro e macchina consumer sono andate progressivamente diminuendo, al punto in cui oggi la principale differenza fra un MacBook Air e il MacBook Pro con schermo Retina è praticamente lo schermo e ben poco altro. Per questo ho l’impressione che presto le due linee confluiranno in un’unica famiglia di portatili, dagli 11 ai 15 pollici, punto e basta. In fin dei conti, alla Apple degli ultimi dieci anni è sempre piaciuto semplificare al massimo l’offerta dei prodotti.

Ultimamente però mi sto chiedendo se per caso Apple non stia semplificando un po’ troppo. Non guardiamo la linea di portatili adesso, perché è ovvio che si tratta di una situazione transitoria: immaginiamola tra un anno, un anno e mezzo, quando potrebbe benissimo essere composta da MacBook (Air) da 11″, MacBook (Air) da 13″ e MacBook (Pro Retina) da 15″ e nient’altro. Ho l’impressione che quei professionisti che necessitano espandibilità e versatilità dai loro Mac dovranno orientarsi sempre più verso i Mac da scrivania, sperando ovviamente che il grosso aggiornamento previsto per il Mac Pro l’anno prossimo sia un aggiornamento che lo mantenga espandibile e ‘aperto’ come oggi. I portatili stanno ormai diventando macchine di zona media, ‘prosumer’. Macchine di tutto rispetto da un punto di vista prestazionale, ci mancherebbe, ma che — e qui ritorno sul MacBook Pro Retina — possono dare il meglio di sé più l’utente si avvicina al tipo di utilizzo professionale che intende Apple. Con certe applicazioni, con certe periferiche. (Una nota di passaggio, sempre sull’espandibilità del nuovo MacBook Pro: al momento, la sola idea di collegarlo a un monitor esterno è ridicola se lo si è acquistato per la risoluzione Retina. Non essendovi ancora un monitor Retina esterno, tanto vale usare quello del MacBook Pro. Che è ottimo, è denso, è nitido, però le dimensioni fisiche dello schermo possono essere scomode per alcuni).

L’altra sottile contraddizione: ci si ritrova con portatili sempre più sottili, sempre più potenti, che dovrebbero quindi durare di più, specie considerando caratteristiche di grande attrattiva come lo schermo Retina, ma al tempo stesso più chiusi, più difficilmente espandibili, che spingono a investimenti più dispendiosi[1], e che alla fine hanno un ciclo di vita di poco superiore ai due anni. Evidentemente, il Mac declassato a ‘dispositivo’ (ricordate quel che disse Jobs all’evento Back To The Mac nel tardo 2010?), e quindi al livello di iPhone e iPad, nel medio-lungo termine finisce con l’ereditarne la brevità di ciclo di vita e la frequenza di rinnovo. A ritmi che per un iPhone o iPad mi stanno benissimo, per stazioni di lavoro portatili un po’ meno. Sono molto curioso di vedere cosa succederà da qui al 2014, e confido che Apple sappia quando, come e quanto tirare la corda. Ma non nascondo qualche sensazione contrastante a riguardo. 

 

 

  • 1. Infatti, se prendiamo l’utente che vuole il MacBook Pro Retina più potente, con RAM al massimo, disco flash al massimo, ecc., ovviamente a tutta la spesa (che già arriva ai 4.000 Euro) vorrà aggiungere anche l’Apple Care per stare più tranquillo. Idea intelligente e condivisibile, ma sempre e comunque un ulteriore esborso. ↩

 

10 days with the Palm Pre 2: considerations

June 25, 2012
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life

Preword

My interest in webOS is not new, it dates back to 2009, when the Palm Pre was announced at CES. At that time, I have to say, I wasn’t really interested in Palm or its products. As a Newton user, Palm and the success of its PDAs, along of course with Jobs’s decision to discontinue the Newton platform, didn’t leave me too happy, so who cares about Palm, I thought. In 2009 I was enjoying my iPhone 3G, bought the year before, still thanking Apple for taking me away from the atrocious mobile phones of the pre-iPhone era. But I was also thinking that the iPhone could use a little competition, and Android to me was a joke, its UI and user experience a sort of less horrible nightmare than Windows Mobile 6, and so on and so forth.

The Pre and webOS struck me as something fresh, more pleasant, more elegant. I was even willing to forgive the physical keyboard. I thought: this is interesting. The idea, the implementation, looked coherent enough to me. Since I moved to Spain, I’ve maintained two mobile numbers, one tied to a Spanish SIM, and the other to an Italian SIM. When the Pre was introduced, I was willing to purchase one as my second phone, a project that never materialised because when it finally was available in Spain (early 2010, if I remember well), apparently you could only have one locked with a Spanish carrier, and I needed one unlocked. Concurrently, at that time I was rather low on budget, and such a ‘research purchase’ (as I love to call it) wasn’t possibile. So I waited, following webOS’s development from the sidelines, downloading the SDK and running the Palm Emulator under Mac OS X just to analyse the interface and interaction.

Fast forward to February 2011: when the Pre3, the Veer and, most importantly, the TouchPad were unveiled at the HP webOS Think Beyond event, I really believed webOS could be a valid competitor along with iOS, Android, Windows Phone. And I really liked that TouchPad. It was the first non-Apple tablet I would consider buying, despite the not exactly stellar reviews that started to appear later. When HP executives managed to butcher the platform completely, making what I still consider the hugest mistake in mobile operating system history, I was quite saddened by webOS’s misfortune. (If you haven’t yet read Chris Ziegler Pre to postmortem: the inside story of the death of Palm and webOS at The Verge, I suggest you do. It’s a long, but worthwhile read.)

A Pre 2 falls from the sky…

In recent months I’ve been keen on obtaining an HP TouchPad as a ‘research purchase’, my interest still strong especially after reading Please steal these webOS features by Lukas Mathis. I wanted to get one from somebody who maybe made an impulse purchase when the 16GB model was fire-sold by HP at $99 and now wanted to get rid of it, but I still haven’t found such a deal. (I’m still open to it, and willing to pay €99 for your TouchPad). When I vented my frustration on Twitter some weeks ago, I was contacted by one of my followers and offered an unlocked Palm Pre 2. Not a tablet, but definitely a first-hand, non-emulated, webOS experience.

Miscellaneous impressions

After using this Pre 2 as a second phone for ten days, my general impression is definitely positive overall, and every time I pick it up and interact with webOS I can’t help thinking of what it could have been and wasn’t. I’ve been an iPhone user since 2008, and as regards to responsiveness and user-friendliness of the UI, I’m undoubtedly spoiled. Every other smartphone I’ve tried and tinkered with has always disappointed me on this front, compared with the iPhone. Only the most recent Android and WP7 phones have started to really catch up on responsiveness. Well, I was positively surprised by webOS and the Pre 2 touchscreen. Moving through screens of apps is smooth, as is scrolling pages of content (like emails, Web pages, Twitter feeds, PDF documents etc.). The Pre 2 also seems powerful enough to handle true app multitasking without getting sluggish. Of course, I haven’t tried opening 20 different things because it seems just a stupid test to do. In real-world everyday use one can probably keep three or four tasks open, and that is handled very well by the Pre 2.

There are things of webOS I really like and even prefer over iOS. Most of them have been already pointed out by Lukas Mathis in the aforementioned article, especially (I’m using Mathis’ section titles for convenience and reference) Notifications, Quick access to regularly changed settings, Switching apps, and the Just Type system-wide search feature.

Hardware

Hardware-wise, the Pre 2 feels great in my hand, and beautifully proportioned. It has a removable battery, so the plastic back comes off entirely to let the user install/remove the battery and the SIM card. Unlike many other phones, whose back panels feel cheap and start wobbling a bit after a while, the Pre’s back snaps solidly in place (at least in my unit) and remains in place rather firmly.

I was really amazed by the screen’s brightness. Due to my eyesight, I tend to keep both my phones and laptops on high brightness settings, but the Pre 2’s screen is bright and pleasant even at 35% of total brightness. When I cranked it up to 100% the white areas in the UI were simply too bright to stare at.

The gesture area is a smart idea: on the Pre 2 there is no physical Home button, but the whole area beneath the screen acts as a Back/Home button. It’s very handy and quick to get accustomed to (and yesterday I even tried to swipe on my iPhone 4 in the same manner…) and definitely the kind of implementation that wouldn’t be out of place on a future iteration of Apple’s own iOS devices.

Coming from four years of typing on a virtual keyboard, the physical keyboard of the Pre 2 took a while to get used to. After a few days, I can type without making too many mistakes, but I still type more slowly than on the iPhone. The keys are tiny, even for my long thin fingers. The only advantage of having a physical keyboard on the Pre, in my opinion, is in combination with the Just Type search feature. You flip the keyboard out and start typing, and you’re instantly inside the search interface. With all apps closed, you begin to type anything, a search term you want to look up in Google, or a contact name, or a word you want to search in past emails, or the first letters of an app you want to launch, and the search interface reacts promptly, offering you all the related options. It’s not that much different from Spotlight on iOS or even on the Mac, but during use I found it slightly faster to access and more elegant in giving results. And there’s one thing that does more than Spotlight: you don’t ‘just type’ to search, but also to initiate ‘Quick Actions’ such as writing a new text message, or email message, or calendar event, memo, etc. And this is really handy and well thought-out.

Another thing I’ve been liking about the Pre 2 is the file exchange procedure. I wanted to put some music, videos and documents in it, to test the relevant apps, and the Apple user in me automatically looked for some syncing software, only to discover that the quick and dirty (but equally effective) method was simply to connect the Pre 2 to my MacBook Pro via USB, choosing the ‘USB drive’ option (the other being ‘Just charge’), creating ‘Music’ and ‘Video’ folders at the root level of the Pre 2 main folder, and copying the files there. Ten minutes after I was listening to music on the Pre 2. When you connect the Pre 2 to the computer this way, you can also download all the photos you took with the Pre 2’s five megapixel camera just as seamlessly. Sure, the iPhone is more elegant and cable-free, but it’s been somewhat liberating to be able to manage music without relying on that beast of iTunes for a change.

And speaking of the camera: it takes decent photos overall, but nothing compared to the iPhone 4. Its features are the bare minimum (flash controls) and that’s it. No tap-to-focus, no exposure controls, nothing of the sort. Probably due to its simplicity, it has less shutter lag than the iPhone 4’s.

Software

Application-wise, the Pre 2 comes with the usual basic system applications you’d expect in a modern smartphone: a browser, an email client, a calendar, a clock/alarm, a calculator, a Music app, a Video app, Camera app (the Pre also shoots video), Photos, Maps, Contacts, Memos, the App Catalog (i.e. the equivalent of iOS’s App Store), and so on. Everything is pretty standard, but my favourite apps are the browser, the email client and the Photos app. The browser is capable and minimal; I found the email client to be more pleasant to use than Mail on the iPhone (and it has a quick, handy “Mark All Read” feature which is quicker than having to select all the emails you then want to mark read, as you still have to do on iOS); what I like of the Photos app is one simple thing: photos are automatically arranged in different folders according to their source. So you have a “Photo roll” for all the snaps you took with the Pre 2’s camera, a “Wallpaper” folder with the stock webOS wallpapers (and if you want to add yours, you just place them there when you connect the phone to the Mac), a “Downloads” folder with all the images you’ve downloaded from the Web, etc. On iOS everything basically goes into the Film roll cauldron. 

The third-party app scene is a mixed bag. I’ve been browsing the webOS app catalogue and any savvy iOS user exploring webOS will be underwhelmed by the general quality of third-party webOS apps. I found a surprisingly lacking choice of photo apps, for example. And I mean both apps to use the phone’s camera creatively (such as Instagram, Camera+, CameraBag, Halftone, ShakeItPhoto, Snapseed on iOS) and apps with photo editing tools. But there are good apps, especially those sticking to webOS system UI. And I found some nice surprises, like a couple of good Twitter clients (Spaz and phnx), an Evernote app, a Spotify app, a good ebook reader (pReader), an app for watching TED talks, a webOS version of Remote (to control iTunes from the phone) and Picsel Smart Office, to handle the odd Word/Excel/PowerPoint document. 

An interesting aspect of webOS and third party apps is that you can benefit from a lot of applications outside the official App Catalog without having to ‘jailbreak’ or ‘root’ your Pre. You just need an application (webOS Quick Install or ‘wosQI’) on your computer and to enter Developer mode on the Pre (which is done simply by inserting a special string in the Just Type fied), then you connect the phone via USB and you’re basically set. It’s still not recommended for the non-tech-savvy guy, but it’s not too complicated or terribly dangerous either.

Battery life is a serious drawback, as any Pre user would tell you. To get at least one day out of a full charge, I had to disable automatic email check in Email, to put my GoogleTalk account offline in Messages, to deactivate the GPS and some other thing I now forget. At that point, the battery could hold one full day of moderate to normal use.

All in all, these ten days with the Palm Pre 2 as a second phone have been surprisingly pleasant, and my initial good impressions of webOS have been confirmed when using the software in person (emulation is enough when you want to explore the UI, but you need a physical device in your hands to actually test the software and hardware’s responsiveness). Considering the current, uncertain situation of webOS, it’s really a pity that something with this kind of potential has failed to be more prominent in the mobile world. Let’s see where the open sourcing of webOS will go.

On a really final note: these are just first impressions and this doesn’t want to be a comprehensive review of webOS or the Palm Pre 2. There are certainly omissions. If you feel I’ve missed something obvious or if there are factual mistakes, please write to me and let me know.

TypeCon 2012

June 20, 2012
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

TypeCon2012

What is TypeCon? Its About page sums it up more clearly than I ever could:

TypeCon is an annual conference presented by the non-profit Society of Typographic Aficionados (SOTA), an international organization dedicated to the promotion, study, and support of typography and related arts.

Since the inaugural conference in 1998, TypeCon has explored type for the screen, printing history, Dutch design, type in motion, Arabic calligraphy, the American Arts and Crafts movement, experimental typography, webfonts, and much more. Special events include the Type & Design Education Forum, and an exhibition of international type and design. 

I first heard about TypeCon in 2005… through my friend Grant Hutchinson’s photography (here’s his TypeCon 2005 flickr set). From then on, despite not being able to attend, I’ve followed each annual conference from afar, being there ‘in spirit’, and checking more of Grant’s photos (he also documented TypeCon’s 2006, 2008 and 2009 editions).

This year’s TypeCon conference will be held in Milwaukee, WI, from July 31st to August 5th. Again, I won’t be able to attend, but this time I wanted to help spread the voice a bit, so I’m proud to inaugurate the advertising spot on my website’s footer with a little reminder of this great event. 

By the way, they are looking for volunteers, so if you want to help, read this post at TypeCon’s website.

The need of talking about technology in a different way

June 20, 2012
by Riccardo Mori
Tech Life
The best way to stick out from the crowd...

Illustration by Stanley Chow

In truth, not only am I dissatisfied with the way I talk about technology, but also with the way others talk about it. How is this post going to continue now? Will it be a bit of a rant, uttered by the frustrated tech writer from the relative obscurity of this eternal ‘junior league’, despite his experience and the fact that he’s been doing this for many years now, certainly more than other ‘celebrity’ bloggers? Not really. In passing, though, I will say: don’t be fooled by the purported ‘democracy of the Web’. Sure, you can write and publish at your heart’s content. But when you want your voice to be heard, you’ll face the same mechanisms of the offline dimension: circles, and ‘knowing the right people’. If what you write is liked by ‘the right people’, then quality isn’t the main concern anymore. You’re in the loop, you can afford a link blog, you can afford the quip, the one-liner, even the one-worder. Does this make me angry because I’m not part of the ‘circle’? No. It does make me angry because I sense something wrong in the whole system. In the world of tech debate there shouldn’t be aristocracy, but meritocracy. It shouldn’t be a community resembling court life at Versailles during the reign of Louis XIV. Or, if you want another image, a caste system where the highest caste basically links and talks to itself.

But this brief piece is not about that. That is what I feel to be the background, the general atmosphere. This is about my dissatisfaction with the way I’ve been talking about technology so far. I still hold some values dear: that a long, quality article is better than a series of quick links posted just to keep the RSS feed alive and increase pageviews; that it’s not mandatory to talk about what everyone else is talking about at the moment; that it’s important to know what you’re talking about and to check your facts (stating the obvious here, you say? — Don’t get me started); that one should write only when he/she has really something to say, that it’s not mandatory to have an opinion on all things tech.

Still, despite having these values always clear before me, despite always striving for quality and originality, I feel I haven’t been writing at my best. I’ve been feeling that my ‘voice’ could be stronger and even more unique. I’ve been feeling I could do more here. This realisation has recently come to me by taking a look at my more creative writing (the Minigrooves project, and other things I haven’t published online). I think my tech writing has been dull in comparison. Stylistically, it’s understandable: writing a short fictional story is quite different from writing about a tech product or analysing a trend or particular phenomenon. But if one’s not careful enough, the risk is talking about technology like everyone else. Following other people’s patterns and examples can help at first, but if you keep doing it indefinitely, you’ll literally disappear in other people’s shadow. And I don’t want this. I’m inaugurating a new experimental phase of my writing here which I hope it’ll lead to a better place. Thank you in advance to everyone who keeps following. I really appreciate the audience I’ve gained so far.