Tag: Daring Fireball

The Concept Electronics Show

The Concept Electronics Show (Daring Fireball)

Concepts allow designers to ignore real-world constraints: engineering, pricing, manufacturing, legal regulations, sometimes even physics. But dealing with real-world constraints is the hard work of true design.

Bohn’s main point here is spot-on — there’s something wrong with a show where none of the most exciting announcements are for actual products coming to market soon. But I disagree that it’s about “confidence”. It’s that all of these companies are bad at designing actual products. It is highly instructive that the one company best known for shipping genuinely exciting, groundbreaking products never shows concept designs.2 Concept designs (and worse, concept videos) are a sign of dysfunction and incompetence at a company. It’s playing make-believe while fooling yourself and your audience into thinking you’re doing something real. Concepts allow designers to ignore real-world constraints: engineering, pricing, manufacturing, legal regulations, sometimes even physics. But dealing with real-world constraints is the hard work of true design. Concepts don’t stem from a lack of confidence. They stem from a dereliction of the actual duties of design.

2019-03-16 08.18.24

On Spotify’s Complaints About the App Store

What Apple should do is allow apps that opt out of IAP to explain that users need to subscribe or make purchases using a web browser, and allow them to link to their website from within the app (even if they’d be required to open that link in Safari, as opposed to an in-app web view).

Everything else in Spotify’s list of complaints seems like noise to me, and distracts from the central issues — which happen to be the issues where Spotify should be on the strongest legal footing.

Apple published a detailed response to Spotify’s complaints today. It’s a cogent read and their points are all well-made — but Apple conspicuously avoids addressing the fact that apps like Spotify aren’t even allowed to tell users how to subscribe using a web browser. Apple executives should take a hard look at why they chose not to defend that policy.

Apple is a profit-driven business as much as Spotify is, but it is time for Apple to rethink its 30 percent rate.

2018-12-29 14.40.57

NYT: ‘Inside Facebook’s Secret Rulebook for Global Political Speech’ by John GruberJohn Gruber

Are there Facebook apologists remaining? It’s very clear that Facebook’s top priority was and remains growth at all costs. The side effects of what they’ve enabled — allowing formerly fringe hate groups to gather, organize, and fuel each others’ hatred, forming effective like-minded communities — should have been obvious all along. No one forced them to scale their platform worldwide faster than they could police it. They chose to do so for profit. It’s clear they have almost no control over it.

 

Facebook is, in my opinion, the most dangerous company in the world, and ought to be broken up and then severely regulated. Again I say, Facebook is to privacy and civil discourse what Enron was to accounting.