Arguments Against Using Facebook Connect as Your Primary Log in Mechanism
Buzz Anderson, commenting on Bijan Sabet’s post:
For the (I suspect rapidly growing) portion of us who only grudgingly maintain any sort of Facebook presence, it’s like asking us to reaffirm our commitment to a religion before being allowed to eat in your restaurant.
I wholeheartedly agree with this, but it’s not the thing that bothers me the most about Facebook-based authentication (or Twitter-based authentication for that matter.) The benefits of using other platforms to lower the sign-up barrier don’t outweigh the drawbacks of being tied to the another property for something as pivotal as logging in to your own service. If you think Facebook is too big to fail, think again. Nothing lasts forever. No matter how long the timeline is, there will come a point on it where you’ll have to move away from 3rd party tokens for authentication. Whether it’s the downfall of Facebook/Twitter as a popular platform, their cessation of the authentication program or simply a political disagreement.
And then you’ll be stuck with the task of messaging, inconveniencing and supporting your user base through the log in process, which is, ironically, exactly what you were trying to avoid doing in the first place.
Redemption!
For a little background, Shazam Encore pushed an ad to my iPhone using Apple Push Notification services on October 6th. You can catch up here on my back and forth with them on why they really shouldn’t be doing that (and how it’s very much against the rules put forth by Apple.)
This is what Shazam Encore’s notification settings looked like on October 6th, when the offending ad was pushed:
Here’s what that same view looks like today after the latest update that just shipped:
Doesn’t it look so much nicer now? While it didn’t even make it into the release notes, I’m very happy that Shazam did the right thing and removed push ads from their paid product.
Apple just had its best quarter ever. The iPhone, released just four years ago, is now their most important product. The iPad, released just last year, is a bigger business than the Mac. Earlier this month, Apple pushed past Exxon as the most valuable company in the world. This is Sandy Koufax retiring. This is Barry Sanders retiring. This is John Elway hanging it up after winning two Super Bowls in a row. This is Rocky Marciano walking away undefeated.
Multiple APK Support in Android Market
With multiple APK support, you can now upload multiple versions of an APK for a single product listing, with each one addressing a different subset of your customers. These APKs are complete, independent APKs that share the same package name, but contain code and resources to target different Android platform versions, screen sizes, or GL texture-compression formats. When users download or purchase your app, Android Market chooses the right APK to deliver based on the characteristics of the device.
So, Google’s solution to rampant fragmentation in device features and OS molestation is to make the developer ship multiple versions of the same app on a per device basis? Sounds like an open-faced shit sandwich to me.
Do we want multi-user profiles on our devices?
As more and more of our devices are able to tweet and offer personalization, we need some sort of way to do multi-user profiles. Sounds straightforward enough but the challenge will be making it beautiful, fast and simple.
This is one of the more exciting areas where I believe we’ll see major innovation in the next 3 to 5 years. But it won’t hinge on entering a username and password when we pick up a communal device (yuck!) Manually switching profiles into sandboxes is a terrible user experience. This is where near-field communication (NFC) can really change things, and where we need buy-in on standards and features from Apple, Google and Microsoft.
Imagine that whenever you approached a laptop, PC, iPad, etc. you were automatically recognized and authenticated because the iPhone in your pocket created a secure, ad-hoc connection to the device you want to interact with. The Facetime camera does a quick check to make sure it’s really you. Once you’re authenticated, your documents, music, movies and web profiles are linked to the filesystem asynchronously in the background. Your Dock shifts into place. The wallpaper seamlessly crossfades. When you get up and walk away the system senses that you’re no longer in proiximity and reverts back into guest mode. If you aren’t recognized then the device simply lives in guest mode. No media, settings or recommendations are loaded and everything has to be done the hard way. That’s the kind of seamless experience that can be achieved with smart technology like NFC.
But outside of the basics of having your settings, media and web-based accounts available to you when you switch, there’s a huge issue with recommendations right now. There’s dozens of start-ups trying to build better recommendations for you but they’re having a hell of a time because of dirty data. Let me give you a few examples. You pick up your family laptop and buy a lens for your camera on Amazon. A few days later your wife buys The Hunger Games on her Kindle (which was your Kindle before she figured out how great it was.) But you’re both using the same Amazon account. Now your recommendations are full of Twilight books and camera straps. I’m sure some of you are thinking, “well, why are you using the same Amazon account?”, but I’m sure most of you are thinking, “that happens to me all the time.” Or maybe you’re scrobbling your library to Last.fm to get better music recommendations but one of your friends comes over to your house that’s going through a reggaeton phase. Now, your recommendations are shot. They’re shot because profile switching is a barrier that someone has to actively interact with. And while there may be no value in it to them there may be a lot of value in it for you.
Switching should be seamless and passive. And now that we’re all walking around with truly personal, powerful, sophisticated devices, it really could be. So the answer to the question is an emphatic yes, we definitely want multi-user profiles on our devices. But this time, we want them to be simple, smart and actually work.
Which circle will you end up in?
By Taylor LeCroy. Via Jeff Kelley.
Carousel 1.1
We’ve been working hard to make Carousel even better and we’re excited to bring you our first big update!
Search, pinning, gestures, likes and more. It’s like xmas in June for Instagram and Mac fans.
Sofa Acquired by Facebook
A lot of people were surprised — the Sofa guys do great work but don’t seem to do the sort of things Facebook would be interested in. I don’t think this is the last such design talent acquisition they’re going to make. Facebook is building a serious, world-class design group.
Maybe this is just a design talent acquisition, or perhaps Sofa was doing exactly what Facebook is interested in. Take a look. This is the current state of the Mac App Store top free social networking page:
5 out of the top 10 apps are Facebook-based apps. And in the top spot? A 3rd-party Facebook app (ahead of the official Twitter app, I might add.)
I don’t believe that Facebook is going to take a crew of designers and developers that create beautifully crafted apps for Mac and shoehorn them into their existing web design groups. Those two worlds are very different. I believe that someone at Facebook has recognized that:
- There will be a lot of people opening the Mac App Store everyday looking for apps in the very near future. Their competitors will be there, and they’ll need to be there, too.
- A Mac app is no different than an iOS app from a promotional standpoint.
- They need to control the image of their product just like Twitter has with its fleet of apps. This smattering of questionable 3rd-party experiences could potentially damage the Facebook brand.
All Facebook needed was a talented, seasoned, willing team of world-class Mac developers to make sanctioned Facebook Mac apps. It looks like they got what they needed.
Carousel Featured In The Mac App Store
It’s been an exciting first month for Carousel but we were genuinely surprised when we launched the Mac App Store last night and saw this:
And just in time for WWDC!
Thanks to everyone who purchased a license through the Mac App Store and the Mobelux Store. It allows us to continue developing apps like Carousel. We can’t wait to show you what we have in store for 1.1!
So proud of Carousel and the whole Mobelux team. On a somewhat related note, Jamie will be our official WWDC representative this year so if you see him walking around Moscone or at one of the many parties, give him a congratulatory beer. Or arm-punch. Or both.
Airpush
Sounds like hell on earth.
What John is referring to is Airpush, and yes, it does sound like hell on earth. But the worst thing about a push ad service is that it’s a cure for a symptom, and the Android app market is sick.
Apparently, Android users aren’t spending money. And it’s not their fault. These are people that thought they were the on the bleeding edge of technology when they got a RAZR for $49. Two years later they go back to the same Verizon store to get their free upgrade and they get the Android deal du jour. They don’t care about apps. They never wanted an Android device. They wanted a phone. Just like they never wanted a Windows Vista. They wanted a computer.
So Airpush comes along and figures, “Hey, these people aren’t spending money. What can we get away with? Force monetize them! Push ads? Fuck it! Can Google stop us from doing it? Nope! Android is Open™! What are the people that download Airpush-enabled apps gonna do about it? Delete the app? Go ahead! They didn’t pay for it anyway!”
And it becomes a numbers game. If, as forecasted by Gartner, there’s going to be 630 million Android handsets out there by 2012 a good portion of those handset owners will download apps. A good portion of that portion won’t deactivate Airpush because they a). won’t care, or b). won’t know how and they’ll keep accidentally tapping ads and you’ll see it on your Mom’s phone and cringe, but it won’t matter. Because this is what Android is. This is what it has become. This is what happens when too many cooks are allowed in the kitchen. They start bringing chainsaws to carve the roast and slathering everything in grease and eventually your restaurant gets known for shitty food.
I hope Google is hungry.
Update. Looks like Google is flaking in and out about rejecting Airpush-enabled apps. I hope for the sake of the platform they affirm a policy to suspend offenders until push ads are removed. (Via Daring Fireball.)
The two year wait was tough, but the OP-1 is just as incredible as I’d hoped it would be.
Mandatory racism: another vital part of the Consistent User Experience™.
I’ve decided not to use official Twitter clients until the trend bar is either an option or gone altogether. This situation is exactly why. To be clear, I have no issues with ad-supported software. If Twitter wants to run an ad at the top of the scrollview, Twiterrific-style, I’m all for it. It’s your platform. Monetize away. But the problem with the trend bar implementation is that I’m being subjected to what I find to be the poor taste of millions of mouth-breathing buffoons in my own timeline.
To put it another way, it feels like Twitter put up a Thomas Kinkade in my living room. While many people may truly enjoy the Painter of Light™, I am not one of them.
iPad: The Microwave Oven of Computing
Matthew Guay (via Brian Chen):
The microwave isn’t easier for every cooking task, and perhaps it takes longer to prepare a complicated meal in a microwave. Perhaps no award winning meal will be created in one, unless it’s a special contest for microwave cooking. But it simplified simple cooking, and consumers around the world saw it as a necessary piece of equipment within in years of it becoming popular.
This is a must-read for those of you that still don’t get modern tablet computing. When iPad showed up no one had a clue what to do with it. Within a year it had widespread appeal to an immense audience and had defined clear use cases for its self.
And it happened organically, just like the microwave.
Chasing Apple
Yonhap News Agency (via Macrumors):
Lee Don-joo, executive vice president of Samsung’s mobile division, said that Apple has presented new challenges for the South Korean company with a thinner mobile gadget that is priced the same as its predecessor.
“We will have to improve the parts that are inadequate,” Lee told Yonhap News Agency. “Apple made it very thin.”
Translation: off-the-shelf components just aren’t going to cut it anymore.
“The 10-inch (tablet) was to be priced higher than the 7-inch (tablet) but we will have to think that over,” Lee added.
So you’re going to engineer it to be thinner and sell it cheaper? Good luck, Mr. Don-joo.
This brave new Apple is fast, agile and and above all, cool. Well, to be fair they’ve almost always been cool, but there’s something different this time. This isn’t like the iPod or the iPhone (or even the iMac for that matter.) The iPad marks a shift in the company. Before 2010 they had the luxury of waltzing into an existing market, picking a product, reinventing it and saying, “look how much better we made this.” With iPad, all that changed. Now that they’re creating markets Apple is finally forcing the competition to ask, “how are we going to keep up?” This is perhaps the first time a successful Apple product is in the lead and a generation beyond the also-rans. And they’re scaring the pants off of the competition.
DisplayPort of Pain
Mobelux picked up a couple Mac Pros recently, as you might have seen. Beastly 8-Core Mac Pros. So when it came time to decide on displays for mine, it wasn’t a tough decision. Dual 24” Apple LED Displays for me, please.
Life was good.
I tend to run multiple graphically intensive applications at once. It isn’t uncommon for me to have Photoshop, Illustrator and Maya beating on the video card simultaneously so I tend to spend the cash on a higher-end video card. When I found out that Apple was offering the ATI Radeon HD 4870, it was again, an easy decision to make.
But there was a problem. The Mac Pro can’t support 2 24” Apple LED Displays with the 4870. There are only two ports on the the ATI (and the shitty NVIDIA as well, by the way): DVI and Mini DisplayPort. No big deal. Just pick up a DisplayPort to DVI adapter, Right? I would’ve, except that they don’t exist.
That’s right. You cannot adapt DisplayPort to DVI. There are a few manufacturers working on the issue but there solutions are essentially DC-powered breakout boxes and cost around $180 and won’t ship until the fall. Mark my words. That will never function properly.
The Apple business rep’s solution: just put in another video card! While I have a moral opposition to putting another $350 video card that’ll only be half utilized, I caved. Dual 4870’s for my dual 24” LED Displays it shall be.
This guy said he even called ATI and Apple to guarantee compatibility.
“They said it’ll work fine. And I’ll stand behind the solution. If it doesn’t work we’ll make it right”.
So I get my 4870, crack open the Mac Pro (which is a engineering work of art internally I might add), drop the card in the PCI slot, hook up the power cabl…wait, where the fuck are the other two powe…no. No fucking way. How could there only be two power leads on the motherboard for all these PCI slots!?! They’ve got to be here somewhere!
Nope. Just the two. And the original ATI card took up both.
So there I was, staring at $1300 worth of hardware that I couldn’t use, despite being told that I could. File this under ridiculous.
In the end, the Apple business rep gets to make good on his word. I’m packing up both the LED Display and the ATI and shipping them back to the mothership. If I feel like I really need a second display I’m going to pick up a nice DVI-based model that has more flexibility for less trouble. I was shocked to find that the Dell 24” UltraSharp supports just about every video connection that exists, supports vertical orientation and is height-adjustable for half the price of an Apple LED display. The color gamut and panel quality is probably not as good, but it’ll be for nothing but Xcode/TextMate, so none of that matters.
And let’s be honest here. Like the hot girl in high school, the 24” is beautiful but ultimately just a high-priced, manipulative bimbo. The USB, MagSafe Power Cable and Mini DisplayPort Cable are comically short. I had purchase an extension from Monoprice just to have the Mac Pro on the floor. It has no adjustment other than tilt and picks up fingerprints if you look at it too long. But yeah. It sure is pretty.
Bottom line: Apple should know better, and pushing this hard, this early on DisplayPort was a mistake. I’m all for shaking up hardware like Apple did with the iMac (by dropping the floppy), but only when it’s viable. There simply isn’t enough support for the DisplayPort standard, even from Apple.
Lesson learned. I’ll think harder about buying high-margin Apple auxiliary equipment from here on out, which is apparently what Apple has hoping for.
