» Purple haze
Matthew Panzarino is a big meanie and kills “CameraFlawGate” before anyone gets to use their awesome Jimmy Hendrix-themed headlines.
Except for me, of course.
Seriously, people, “The iPhone 5 has a sapphire lens so it must be tinting your pictures purple” is a thing you just type up? What am I supposed to do with you? I’m just glad your father isn’t alive to see this.
» Sour grapes or rush job?
Bloomberg (via Mary Jo Foley):
Chief Executive Officer Paul Otellini told employees in Taiwan that Microsoft Corp.’s Windows 8 operating system is being released before it’s fully ready, a person who attended the company event said.
Improvements still need to be made to the software, Otellini told employees at a company meeting in Taipei today, said the person, who asked not to be identified because the meeting was private.
As Foley points out, this could be sour grapes on Otellini’s part since ARM-based systems will ship first.
Whatever the case, I hope it ships soon. I’m not sure how much more popcorn I can eat.
Feelin’ really… bloated.
» Sponsor: Scratch for iPhone
Hey, speaking of scratches on the iPhone, my thanks to Karbon, makers of Scratch for iPhone, for sponsoring the Very Nice Web Site RSS feed this week.
Unlike physical blemishes that we all know Steve Jobs would never have allowed on an iPhone, Scratch for iPhone is an app that captures your great ideas immediately before they slip away.
Scratch for iPhone cuts through the barriers of note taking and gives you a clean slate to get your idea down fast. You don’t have to come up with a title or navigate a long list of notes. Just open Scratch, type, and worry about it later. Scratch remembers everything so you don’t have to.
Once you’re ready to work with the note, Scratch gives you the options you need to move the text where it belongs: Dropbox, email, your favorite text editor or just about anywhere else.
» Darby Lines’ iPhone 5 review
Phew. Someone saved me all the trouble of writing a review.
Steve Jobs never would have shipped a phone that scuffs
You know someone’s going to say it eventually.
» Arrogance
Wired’s Marcus Wohlsen:
Among the many lessons of RIM’s collapse, Apple would do well to note the fungibility of mobile brand loyalty. In other words, if someone builds a better phone, people will buy it. That doesn’t sound like a difficult concept. But the iOS 6 map disaster displays an arrogance that suggests Apple doesn’t get it.
Right. Apple doesn’t get that its phones need to be better than its competitors phones.
When you think about it, what is a smartphone but a portable electronic map? Do they even do anything else?
» BOR-ING
Matthew Panzarino:
Market research company Comscore has released some interesting data today around iPhone 5 pre-orders. According to its info, the iPhone 5 has been pre-ordered 96% as many times in three days as there were iPhone 4S purchases in its first month.
Steve Jobs never would have sold more iPhones in…
Wait.
» One does not simply use iOS 6 to walk into Mordor
(Via David Chartier.)
Frankly, I could never figure out why they just didn’t do that in the first place.
» Copy clock
Electronista:
The look of the clocks in the app is said to resemble a design originally used in Swiss railway stations and currently licensed by Mondaine. A spokesman for SBB, Reto Kormann, says that the railway has already contacted Apple, while Mondaine CEO André Bernheim has confirmed an intent to go after Apple.
It’s “said to resemble” the design by people who have working eyes.
The intersection of Niceness and Utility
“Niceness” is the term John Gruber uses to describe what has previously been called “build quality”. It could also just be called “quality” if that word hadn’t been misappropriated by a bunch of MBAs for years to describe their vain attempts to make people care about the crap they were churning out.
The bored-by-the-iPhone tech press/industry experts surely value niceness, but they do not hold it in the same top-tier regard that Apple does.
If they do value niceness — which some of them certainly do — most of them don’t seem to express that in their writing.
Matt Drance meanwhile gets at the other thing your average technology reviewer doesn’t get.
It’s not the technology that matters — it’s the utility that the technology provides.
I kind of feel like we in the Apple-preferring world have been ranting about this checkbox mentality for several years now but people in the general tech press still don’t get what makes Apple products exciting. Like the promise of NFC, their understanding is always six months to a year away.
The iPhone has always been the intersection of niceness and utility. Each iteration more acutely defines that crossing.