pixxa

Apple's AI Strategy: Let Rivals Spend .6T in Data Centers.

The "back end" vendors (Google, Microsoft, Amazon AWS, Facebook) don't have much of a choice than to jump in head first, to compete with likes of OpenAI and Anthropic.

Apple owns distribution of profitable "front end" consumption, so she can afford to 'rent-to-own', albeit to the chagrin of us developers. Wait the competition out, fund good deals when the investment cycles run out?

This is true (about Twitter.)

Apple falls very far from that tree. Lots of money is being transferred to developers even today. It's just hard to see because so much is getting sloshed around.

Developers on Apple's platforms pour their careers and lives into building apps that predominately depend on Apple. This is a very large commitment, yet most developers tend to have a scant understanding of Apple's business model beyond the usual headlines about AppStore's 30% commission or supply chain rumors about the next product.

Given the significance of this investment by us developers, perhaps it makes sense for us to better understand the business of Apple, which we all depend on.

The question is: how?

"Best stuff" depends on who "we" are...

Here are some other users who may feel they are getting the "best stuff":

Compiler designers, programming language researchers, or even CS students the Swift core is a fount of of information to learn from, modify, experiment.

Teachers whose school could not afford Macs. They can now use Swift on cheap Linux machines, and eventually on Windows.

...

It's in Apple's advantage for server-side Swift to take off, and do so quickly and robustly.

It also makes little sense (nor is in character) for Apple to agree to open source Swift and not take a leadership role in the effort.

One step at a time...

Speculation of course is that this is the foreshadowing the arrival of Kindle Phone.

A more intriguing possibility is that Amazon is setting stage for its next move in Platform Wars. Between his gigs at Microsoft & Amazon, Kindel was an advisor to the Buddy mobile cloud platform. (See http://www.geekwire.com/2011/exmicrosoft-mobile-exec-charlie... ) Many other startups (such as parse.com, ubran airship) are attempting to build this layer, most of them built right on top of Amazon AWS, but it is hard to imagine such a product going mass-market amongst developers without the trust of a brand such as Amazon.

Amazon is in great position for this. AWS is probably the best-regarded major cloud platform amongst developers, in contrast to Apple's trouble in wooing developers to use its cloud platform ( http://rms2.tumblr.com/post/46505165521/the-gathering-storm-... .) While Google has enormous cloud resources, they are mostly there to serve Google's own purposes, not to mention its "spring cleaning" practices which make the developers less than comfortable. This leaves nice space for a flanking campaign by Amazon: to create a universal mobile cloud services API that works well across all platforms.

If true, this could move the basis of competition away from the device and toward the cloud (and in Amazon's favor) and may lead to the establishment of a third (and thus different) mobile platform beyond iOS and Android. Note that this approach mirrors Amazon's Kindle consumer strategy: to sell their own hardware, but also to proliferate their platform on all other devices.

Interesting times to come...

The referenced Heer & Robertson paper discusses chained animated transitions that take you from one type of visualization to another in a way that explains the relationship between the two visualizations. The usefulness of chained transitions is debatable, but it is important to note that Chart.js's implementation seems to starts from nothing and animate to the final position of a single type of chart. This is not really adding: "empty" is not an interesting state, so the transition is frivolous. Moreover, because it forces pixel movements on the page, the users are left with looking for meaning, and are distraction so I'd contend this impedes with overall usability. And yes, it is great eye candy, and the corporate powerpoint junkies will probably love it, but remember: they also love those 3D pie charts.

...And Urs Hoelzle worked on the implementation of Self programming language when he was a PhD student at Stanford. Self was the result of a drastic simplification of Smalltalk. Applying Occam's Razor, Self used the prototype concept as the central organizational mechanism as opposed to Smalltalk's classes. Prototypes later were popularized by JavaScript (and of course, mangled in the usual JavaScript ways.)

See http://labs.oracle.com/features/tenyears/volcd/papers/intros... for a historical note. Smith & Ungar's "Self: Power of Simplicity" is a must-read for anyone interested in this topic: http://ranger.uta.edu/~nystrom/courses/cse3302-fa10/selfPowe...

> This is leaps and bounds better than Apple Maps and even the original maps client on iOS that used Google Maps.

Thus Apple has achieved its goal of upgrading the map experience on iOS!

Taking the blame sure beats blaming others (see tragic case of Philip Greenspun's ArsDigita http://rura.org/blog/category/businesscompaniesarsdigita/ )

Having said that, and realizing this is a motivational piece "It's my fault" is a complex statement (combining loaded notions of Self & Fault), and some interpretations allows (you or others) to sweep real issues under the carpet.

When sh*t happens the real thing to do is to admit that there was a failure instead of denying it and have a frank conversation about it with the parties involved instead of blaming others. (Note: sometimes the same person may take both parts of this conversation.) Sometimes it helps to separate Responsibility from Accountability, and assessing "fault" usually is counter-productive in this regard. In contrast, the Truth and Reconciliation movement in South Africa is a prominent example of coming to peace without placing blame. There, they separate concerns which gives room to people to more easily admit their mistakes.

1) Hard to use for mere mortal users (QA, testers, normal users posting issue for an App, etc. 2) If uploaded to another site, the images are under a different protection domain (for protected repositories.)

Horace Dediu of Asymco has produced a much better graphic and analysis to go along with it: http://www.asymco.com/2012/01/17/the-rise-and-fall-of-person...

My wish came true in less than one day! Check it out https://github.com/blog/1347-issue-attachments

The #1 missing feature in github for our team is that we can't attach files directly from Issues Web UI. Usually we need this for screenshots, but sometimes data files, logs and other artifacts. Workarounds are aplenty but all painful and problematic. See https://github.com/thisduck/gh-attachment or http://feeding.cloud.geek.nz/2012/06/attaching-files-to-gith... not to mention countless internal homegrown hacks that exist out there.

This lack of attachments makes it a lot harder for non-techies to use Issues (e.g., for casual or QA testing). Don't get me wrong, I absolutely LOVE the minimalist approach of Issues, and it is definitely _almost_ good enough feature set, but this one missing feature makes it difficult for one to imagine the use of issues at-large in broad organizations--an undiscovered area of growth for github.

I would definitely add this to the "I <heart> github, but..." list.

P.S., experiment0, great execution of a "feature request".

Jacob Nielsen details many of the usability issues of Metro design, see Flat Style Reduces Discoverability in http://www.useit.com/alertbox/windows-8.html .

At the highest level, Metro design feels like a case of design overgeneralization. It tries at once to apply the same look & feel principles in Touch, Desktop, and Web context.

Jack of Many Trades, Master of None.

Most Desktop web browsers provide quite many affordances for links, and do so automatically upon hover: change cursor, underline, pop up link description, show URL in status area.

Touch UIs can't have these "introspective" affordances because hover is not practical in a touch-based UI.

Even with all these affordances, if a Web UI didn't distinguish a link from other content visually, it would make for a difficult interface to traverse.

To get a sense of clarity of his vision, read Jobs's 1985 Playboy Interview where he predicts the future before setting out to spend the rest of his life to invent it.

http://www.txtpost.com/playboy-interview-steven-jobs/

RIP Steve Jobs

Has there ever been another story (besides Jobs's death) that took over the front page of HN?