YouTube v. the sword channels

YouTube deleted a channel without warning due to a video that had been up for years. So lots of viewers (including myself) and other YouTubers have rallied to have the channel reinstated.

But I can't help but think that reinstating the channel is a bad idea. It isn't a solution. I can't help but think that Thrand and the other YouTubers supporting him should treat YouTube the same way YouTube is treating them. Just take their content elsewhere. Unlike what happened to Thrand, this is far from YouTube's "first strike", and it is something they're doing right now rather than years ago.

There are many good reasons why YouTube is in the position it is. There would be many downsides to leaving YouTube. But as long as content creators stay, YouTube has no motivation to change. (They may never have any, since they'll bend over backwards to keep the big content providers while continuing to treat the smaller ones this way.) Does anyone really think things are going to get better rather than worse?

While it seems everyone is setting up accounts with vid.me or other services as an "insurance", I can't help but think that it is too late for insurance.

The petition: Reinstate the ThegnThrand channel

The problem with Google search

Google and blogs

Google changed everything by creating a search engine that was resistant to gaming the system. The problem is, of course, that users don’t pay to use it. And Google is a for-profit business. It was only a matter of time before it stopped serving the interests of its users. Users are no longer the customers; they are the product.

Convergence

This is Android TV

Android TV may sound like a semantic difference — after all, Google TV was based on Android — but it’s something very different. Android TV is no longer a crazy attempt to turn your TV into a bigger, more powerful smartphone. "Android TV is an entertainment interface, not a computing platform," writes Google. "It’s all about finding and enjoying content with the least amount of friction." It will be "cinematic, fun, fluid, and fast."

The thing about convergence was that people wanted the technologies in the background to converge, but they never wanted the experiences to converge. Watching video is ideally done on a TV; web surfing is ideally done on a tablet, and writing a novel is ideally done on a PC. That’s not to say that we shouldn't be able to do all three tasks on all three platforms, but we don’t want, e.g., the full PC experience on our TVs.

Nest

Every Google product I’ve used has at some point started getting worse rather than better, if not simply canceled. From search to docs to notebooks to reader to YouTube to gmail, etc. My problem with all the G+ integration with other products not for any privacy concerns but because the result is worse than what it was before.

So, the reason I won’t be buying a Nest or Protect now is not because I’m afraid of Google spying on me. It is because my expectation is that being part of Google will make these products worse.

Customer versus user

I really appreciate Reeder and Feedbin because I know I can leave them at any time and, when I come back, they’ll still be in the same state. They’ll still know what I’ve read and what I haven’t. They’ll show me things in order instead of via some “top stories” silliness.

The thing is, I shouldn’t appreciate those things. That should be expected. These things were mastered decades ago. Yet they are beyond Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google+.

Of course, the biggest difference is that I am a Reeder customer and a Feedbin customer. I pay them. While I use Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google+; I don’t pay them. They won’t even let me.

Apple and Google maps at NTRPGC

No, the Old San Antonio Road wasn’t involved in me getting to or from NTRPGC, but its sign seem appropriate to the topic.

My experience with the map apps while attending the North Texas RPG Con this year...

Apple maps did it great job of getting us near the hotel. It thought the hotel was a couple blocks from where it really was, but at least I could see it. (And, yes, I submitted the mistake to Apple.)

For nearby points-of-interest (i.e. restaurants), it failed. It didn’t show them all and was mistaken about the locations of those it did have. On the POI side, the Google maps app proved flawless. It appeared to show all the nearby restaurants, and it had their locations spot-on.

So, when we left and headed out to pick up my daughter from her grandmothers’, it was Google maps’ turn to fail. First off, the app just gave me a text list of the route choices, which didn’t give me a good way to judge between them. It told me to get off a highway only to get back on to it a few miles later, which added a lot of unnecessary extra time. To exacerbate things, construction meant I couldn’t get back on that highway. After adding about a 20 minute extra delay to a 30 minute trip, I switched back to Apple maps to help find an alternate route.

The road construction in the D/FW area seems out-of-control. It’s a real mess. Apple maps tripped up on it once as well, but it luckily recovered quickly. So, the delay was perhaps not completely Google maps’ fault, but it picked a screwy route even if there hadn’t been construction to exacerbate things.

Of course, this is just one anecdote that I wouldn’t want to generalize too much from. The lessons I’m taking away from this are:

• It’s a good idea to check both Apple and Google maps when possible.
• Start with Apple maps for guided turn-by-turn directions.
• Start with Google maps for POIs or finding the exact location of the destination at the end of an Apple maps route.

Corporate hobbies

I’ve signed up for feedbin as my Google Reader replacement. Firstly because it is the choice of Reeder, but also because I think such a service is worth paying for. Hopefully paying for it means that it will not only stick around but actually see improvements.

Also of note is Feed Wrangler. I enjoy David Smith’s podcast, Developing Perspectives and his Check the Weather app. I suspect Feed Wrangler will be a great alternative too.

I don’t really lament the end of Google Reader as I did Google Notebooks or when Google Docs became significantly less useful to me. I think we’re going to end up with more and better options.

But on to the topic of this post, which is inspired by Google Reader but isn’t really about Google Reader specifically: Some people say that Google Reader never made sense for Google. I don’t agree.

Consider musicians. Most musicians have a “day job”. Their day job is how they make money. They may make some money off music but not enough that they can quit their day job. (Sometimes their day job is music related, but that’s neither really here nor there.) Yet nobody would say that making music never made sense for these people.

The same way that it makes sense for people do spend time, energy, and money on activities other than a profitable job; it makes sense for businesses to spend time, energy, and money on activities that aren’t profitable. Because businesses are made up of people.

Google Glass

Wearable computing has come a long way

I think you can break down most of the aversion to Google Glass into these concerns:

1. Privacy concerns about its camera and the way it might surreptitiously take pictures
2. A safety concern such as it being a distraction while driving
3. A social concern about how its users interact with other people
4. How it looks

Concern number 4: We live in a world where people walk around with Bluetooth headsets in their ears at all times and where having your pants pulled down to show your underwear is a fashion. I honestly don’t have a problem with either of those things. Though, it does make me wonder why—if others are doing those things—I don’t wear my very comfortable renfaire garb everyday. I’m not convinced this will be a significant hurdle.

The second and third concerns: I think for most people, these concerns are more about behavior than technology. If people don’t use the technology in a way we consider rude or dangerous, then we don’t mind them using the technology. We’re not banning mobile phones, though we are banning and discouraging their use in certain contexts.

I suspect number 1 is the biggest issue. (Arguably it’s a subset of concern number 3, but it is a very significant subset.) On the one hand, you can argue that, even without Glass, we’re already living in a world where we may be unknowingly photographed or filmed† by surreptitious cameras. On the other hand, you can argue that, in practice, Glass exacerbates the situation.

(Of course, most of the arguments against the camera also apply to the microphone. It’s even easier to surreptitiously record audio today without Google Glass than video, though.)

Whether it is a valid concern or not, I suspect merely eliminating the camera might be the best thing to do to make Glass more acceptable. While that does also eliminate a whole host of features, we can still have those features on our phones.

†It might seem strange to use “to film” here, since film is not involved. Then again, “to film” itself strikes me as a fairly strange verbification of a noun. Yet, its use here feels very natural for me. Language is weird like that. Read it as “video’d” if you prefer.

Image attribution: By Glogger at en.wikipedia Later version(s) were uploaded by Dgies at en.wikipedia. (Transferred from en.wikipedia) [GFDL (www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html) or CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)], from Wikimedia Commons from Wikimedia Commons

The trouble with online conversations

Twitter, Facebook, G+, blog comments, web forums, &c. None of them seem able to handle one very important thing that NNTP clients did since the 1980s: Keep track of what I’ve read & what I haven’t.

The Twitter iOS client does a decent job of remembering my position in its time stream. That position doesn’t sync between my iPhone, my iPad, & the web site, though. Twitter is also not a great medium for conversation in many other ways, though.

Some web forums make an attempt at it, but I haven’t seen one that does it well. Although it has been a while since I was keeping up with forums.

Browser/OS stats for this blog

I was looking through the blog’s stats, and the browser and OS stats seemed kind of interesting.

• 63% Firefox
• 15% Chrome
• 10% Safari
• 8% Internet Explorer

• 40% Macintosh
• 37% Windows
• 16% Linux
• 2% iPad
• 2% iPhone
• < 1% Android
• < 1% Other Unix

Based on what I’ve been seeing from more generic reports, that seems atypical. I’m surprised that Chrome isn’t closer to or a bigger percentage than Firefox. I’d expect Safari and IE to be reversed, but they are pretty close. It seems that fewer of my visitors who use Macs use Safari than I would’ve thought.

For this blog, that’s pretty much just trivia. If you are someone who has to make decisions based off this kind of data, though, I can’t emphasize enough how important it is to collect your own data rather than relying on what others report. e.g. When I was in the shrink-wrapped software business, Macs made up a lot more of my company’s market than the general marketshare they held at the time.

Touch won’t hold the kids back

Coding Horror: Do You Wanna Touch:

Although I love my touch devices, one thing I've noticed is that they are a major disincentive to writing actual paragraphs. On screen keyboards get the job done, but if I have to scrawl more than a Twitter length reply to someone on a tablet or phone, it's so much effort that I just avoid doing it altogether, postponing indefinitely until I can be in front of a keyboard. By the time that happens I've probably forgotten what I wanted to say in the first place, or that I even needed to reply at all. Multiply that by millions or billions, and you have a whole generation technologically locked into a backwater of minimal communication.

That “whole generation”? They’re not as attached to keyboards as we are. They’re going to take what they have and make those touch keyboards sing.

Maps in iOS 6

There hasn’t been a single complaint about Apple’s maps in iOS 6 that isn’t something I’ve seen from the previous, Google-powered maps app. In my experience, the iOS 6 maps app works as well as the iOS 5 maps app ever did. Maybe better. Plus, I get the turn-by-turn, voice-prompted navigation which, again, has been flawless for me so far.

In some countries, things are bad. If you’re in China, though, iOS 6 maps is a huge improvement.

People like me get shouted down, though. We are told we’re the outliers. They say you only have to google to see how widespread the problem is.

Apple’s data is different than Google’s. So, people who were happy with Google’s are likely to be less happy with Apple’s. It’s no surprise those people are going to be vocal about their disappointment. I’m not convinced, however, that the number of complaints found online is an especially good metric for measuring the quality of the app. Your anecdotal evidence isn’t better than mine.

One test suggests that the iOS 5 and iOS 6 data may be comparable. Maybe it isn’t the best test, but it is orders of magnitude better than the “Don’t you see all the complaints?” test.

Yes, Tim Cook apologized. Which is standard customer service operating procedure. You apologize before you even know whether the customer’s complaint is valid. (Jobs might not have done it, but the regular customer service in Apple does.) It is reasonable to assume Apple’s data isn’t up to par with Google’s. Apple is new to this game. It will take actual research rather than anecdotes, however, to know how it really compares.

Hyperlinks

So, I’m sitting here polishing up some blog posts. I’m grabbing URLs to create hyperlinks. And it strikes me...

It’s taking me longer to create these hyperlinks than it will take you to select some text, search Google, and get to the same page. Not only that, the hyperlinks might grow stale, but a Google search won’t. Heck, Google might turn up more relevant results than what I choose to link to the moment I post. Even after Google, some other even better search engine will be available. For all I know, what you’ll really be interested in following up on won’t even be anything I create a hyperlink for.

Google is making hyperlinks obsolete. But Google is built on hyperlinks. It’s only by analyzing hyperlinks that Google can come up with such good results.

Weird.

I think you missed the point of “less is more”

Domo Arigato, Mr Roboto - Boing Boing

Google supplied me with the full family (so far) of 16 faces to examine: a regular and oblique (the sans serif name for a slanted type that's not drawn differently, as with italics) of Light, Thin, Condensed, Bold Condensed, Regular, Medium, Bold, and Black. This warms the cockles of my typographer's heart, because with many different weights of a typeface, you can use differentiation to signify importance or meaning without having to rely solely on placement, size, or other faces. (The sign of a bad design is typically the use of many different sizes and faces. Find a great design, and you'll find remarkable restraint. The exceptions, which are legion, break that rule and prove it at the same time.)

I’m not convinced that using eight different weights of a single typeface in one document is superior to using eight different typefaces. The advantage of eight different weights is that you can pick a subset best suited to the use, not so that you can use them all.

Sony’s Google TV controller

Sony’s Google TV controller outed on ABC’s Nightline

Gruber says: “Seems like a lot of buttons.”

Most of them, however, are a QWERTY keyboard. That’s a configuration of buttons that is familiar. It’s not intimidating. In fact, I think this remote is a lot less intimidating that a U-verse or DirecTV remote.

The Apple Remote, on the other hand, has always had too few buttons.

That said, I’m not convinced this Google TV remote is a win, but I’m not convinced it’s a fail either.

Android and the carriers

Android Is As Open As The Clenched Fist I’d Like To Punch The Carriers With

In theory, I’m right there with you. The thought of a truly open mobile operating system is very appealing. The problem is that in practice, that’s just simply not the reality of the situation. Maybe if Google had their way, the system would be truly open. But they don’t. Sadly, they have to deal with a very big roadblock: the carriers.

Is Google even making an effort to have their way?

An iPhone isn’t a phone. It’s a palmtop computer. The cellular provider for such a device should be much less involved that they have been with cell phones. One of the key pieces of the iPhone is that Apple has pushed AT&T more towards their rightful role for such a device. They haven’t been entirely successful, but they have been very successful.

Flatland, 10/GUI, and SEO

A trio of interesting things found today. (All thanks to Daring Fireball, I believe.)

In “Flatland”, Lukas Mathis presents a very good rebuttal to some of Tog’s viewpoint. I think I may agree with everything Lukas says there.

Lukas’s blog then pointed me to 10/GUI. I think they hit the nail on the head with the idea that the next step in GUIs is not from two-dimensions to three but to fewer dimensions. I don’t know if they have the answer, but I know that the answer involves the user spending less time managing windows.

In “Spammers, Evildoers, and Opportunists”, Derek Powazek says that “search engine optimization” is a racket, which has been my gut feeling about it. Although, I suspect that the things he calls “obvious” are—sadly enough—not obvious to a lot of people. Those things, however, aren’t really about SEO. They’re just about making a good web site.

Mac/PC apps = trouble; iPhone apps = fun

Bruce Tognazzini—Apple employee #66—developed the first version of the Apple User Interface Guidelines. In “Restoring Spring to iPhone Springboard” he writes:

Unlike the Finder or Desktop, rather than giving access to as many apps as you could possibly want, the current Springboard limits you to 180 apps. Paradoxically, this would not be a bad upper limit on a Mac or PC, as apps tend to equal trouble and the more you have, the more trouble you’ll encounter. On the iPhone/iPod Touch, however, 180 apps is terribly limiting as iPhone/iPod Touch apps translate to fun, not trouble, and the more apps you have, the more fun you can have.

It’s funny because it’s true!

Ever since I bought a Pilot (the first name of the Palm PDAs), I have thought that it presented a pretty good model for how the “next Mac” should work. Besides a lot of legacy stuff that the Mac has naturally accumulated, even it has always forced the user to deal with some concepts users shouldn’t even have to know about. For me, while the iPhone has made some advances, it has also made some steps backwards from the Palm OS.

That’s another post, however, that is sitting around amongst my blog drafts.

You can argue that the user-interface for a PDA or phone is too simplistic for a general-purpose computer, but I’m not convinced. Both my Palm devices and my iPhone come awfully close to being general-purpose computers, and I think that for a great many people, their user-interfaces would be more than adequate on a desktop or laptop machine. (We already have plenty of options for geeks like me.)

Back to Tog’s article: He proposes some changes to the iPhone “home screen” app—internally called Springboard. While I like Tog’s proposal, I think he’s too quick to dismiss search. While I’m not a fan of ditching “browsing” interfaces, I’m seeing search becoming more and more primary.

With maybe a dozen exceptions, I’m more likely to google for a web page rather than go looking for it in my bookmarks. Even back c. 1995, I was more likely to use the Finder’s search to locate files than by browsing. Now, it’s Spotlight. Amongst all the brouhaha around Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) no longer supporting creator codes, I’m thinking more than ever that something like Quicksilver is the future.

Of course, I’ll be the first to admit that I’m not the average user, but I think Google’s success shows that average users—when given a really good search capability—will use it.

Time spent improving the app search on the iPhone would give more bang-for-the-buck than Tog’s proposal. So, that’s what I’d do first if I were Apple.

And one mistake Tog made: Using dots to indicate vertical scroll position. This should use the standard iPhone scroll “thumb”.

Apple App Store rejections

I’m embarrassed to be an Apple customer right now.

I don’t use Google Voice, so the current brouhaha with Google Voice apps doesn’t affect me. It’s another point in the trend, though. Apple insists that iPhone app developers partner with them through the App Store, but they aren’t being a good partner. They should be open and honest about the criteria used to reject apps. They should be clear about the reasons an app is rejected and how the app can be modified to pass. If they yank an app after approving it, they should pay the refunds to the customer.

Furthermore, they should not be rejecting apps for many of the reasons that they are giving. Off the top of my head, I can only think of these reasons that seem legitimate to me:

• The app compromises the stability of the device (an unstable app is fine as long as it doesn’t compromise the device as a whole)
• Resource abuse (and I have uneasy feelings about that one)
• Security issues
• Privacy issues

No doubt there are others, but the point is that they should be few and used as little as possible.

I have a hard time not seeing some of the reasons that have been given as bogus.

I will say that, looking at some of the lists being compiled, I think many of the rejections have been defensible. Even with those, however, the problem is that developers are left to discover the rules of the game by experiment. Expensive experiments.

This honestly has delayed my plans to upgrade my iPhone. As much as I like their products—which do work besides just looking good—I don’t like doing business with dishonorable companies, and there is a threshold at which bad behavior matters enough for me to choose to do business elsewhere.

Besides, I want a selection of good apps for my iPhone. I don’t want Apple driving developers out of the iPhone app business. I don’t want Apple rejecting apps before I get to decide whether they’re worth my money.

(I’d also like to see Apple allow people—as an option—to install any app from any source with the appropriate caveat utens†. The truth is, though, that I wouldn’t do that with my iPhone.)

† I’m not sure if this is right. Participles of deponent verbs always confuse me. ^_^

HTML 5 <video>

There’s some brouhaha over the decision that the HTML 5 standard (a work in progress) will not require browsers to support any specific codec(s) for the <video> tag. So...my 2¢...

Submarine patents: Really? You’re paying the licensing fees to implement the heavily patent encumbered H.264 codec, but you absolutely refuse to implement (or just take advantage of the open source code for) Ogg Theora because you’re afraid it may be discovered to infringe a patent? Despite the known patents covering H.264, isn’t it just as likely to be a victim of an as-yet-unknown submarine patent? It doesn’t look like the licensing future of H.264 is all that clear either. It’s hard for me to believe that Ogg Theora is any bigger a risk than anyone who has implemented H.264 has already assumed. I think Apple can weather any submarine patents better than Mozilla.

Quality: What does it matter whether Ogg Theora isn’t as good as H.264? Implementing Ogg Theora doesn’t prevent you from also providing H.264 as well. This is not an argument for opposing Ogg Theora being required by the standard or for refusing to implement it. Does iTunes refuse to play mp3 files because AAC are higher quality? Does Safari refuse to play mp3 files?

I don’t buy that HTML 5 should only codify what the browsers do. (Would there even be a <video> element to be debated if that were really the case?) A standard—backed by pressure from actual customers and implemented by competitors always looking for another bullet point—can and has convinced implementors to do things they wouldn’t otherwise.

That being said, I fully respect Ian Hickman’s decision as editor. It was a good decision, whether I might nitpick it or not.

And really, I haven’t been following HTML 5 as closely as I probably should be. Not to mention that, as interested (although that word seems entirely inappropriate) as I am in intellectual property law, I’m far from an expert on it. And my knowledge of video codecs is only having implemented some old codecs. (^_^)