Readability’s Open Letter to Apple

Steve Jobs:

We support two platforms at Apple: HTML5. Fully open, uncontrolled platforms forged by widely respected standards bodies. The second platform we support is the App Store. It’s a curated platform

Readability: An Open Letter to Apple

As far as Readability is concerned, our response is fairly straight-forward: go the other way…towards the web.

This seems a little strange.

We can offer you Coke or Pepsi.

An open letter to this restaurant: We don’t like Pepsi. Until you change things, we will go the other way...Coke.

Whether Apple’s policy towards subscriptions is good or not is beside the point. Apple explicitly supports the web route for anyone who doesn’t like the terms of the iOS App Store. And, hey, you were already there anyway. What was your point again?

Honestly, though, Readability’s set-up seems really screwy. Why would anyone pay those authors extra to get a readable version of their content. They ought to have worked with people who would have presented it in a readable fashion in the first place.

Anyway, I hope Apple’s policy doesn’t force Kindle off of iOS. I wouldn’t be happy about that.

All human knowledge

I wish I had seen this in high school.

The Illustrated Guide To a Ph.D.

Since that circle of all human knowledge is just getting bigger and bigger, doesn’t that mean our ability to apply that knowledge is getting smaller and smaller. Sure, we specialize and operate in parallel, but it seems to me that you get to a point where even that gets overwhelmed.

Which isn't even considering knowledge we may be letting fall through the cracks and get lost.

Using 3D well

In a comment to a previous post, Anonymous Dimwit wrote:

I don’t even understand what “use 3d well” is supposed to mean from a cinematic context.

I certainly understand that Anonymous Dimwit will probably never be a fan of 3D, and that’s fine. It doesn’t work for everyone.

I think that’s a valid question, though. What do I think is using 3D well?

Actually, I think it is pretty simple. You shoot with a 3D camera.

It is also best to step up to a decent frame rate, but that’s something movies need to do anyway. 3D needs a higher frame rate, but the 24 frame/second that they’re using isn’t even good for 2D. (Or has there already been progress in that area?)

Of course, simply using a 3D camera does make things a bit more difficult. You also lose some tricks that rely on the lack of depth in 2D. Still, making a good 3D movie isn’t really different from making a good 2D movie. If you change what you’re doing significantly for 3D, then you’re most likely using 3D poorly. If you are adding 3D in post-production rather than using a 3D camera, you are almost certainly using 3D poorly.

In my opinion.

AT&T not so bad after all?

Perhaps the “good but not that good” sales of the Verizon iPhone merely shows that AT&T isn’t quite so awful as the pundits make them out to be?

Record sales

I had a post scheduled with a comment on this chart, but since, seemingly better charts and analysis have been posted by Michael DeGusta.

The take-away seems to be that album sales are falling, single sales are rising, but single sales aren't up enough to offset the drop from albums.

Questions that come to mind:

1. Is any of this due to people having a lot more to spend money on today? e.g. mobile phone plan, mobile data plan, TV provider, ISP, among many others.

2. What about the larger music industry. Live music? Selling music to businesses rather than consumers?

AT&T and the App Store

A quote from AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson on the iOS App Store: (courtesy TiPb)

“You purchase an app for one operating system, and if you want it on another device or platform, you have to buy it again,” Stephenson said in a keynote speech at the world’s largest mobile-phone trade show in Barcelona, Spain. “That’s not how our customers expect to experience this environment.”

Well, here’s what experience has taught me to expect. I can choose from:

• Live in a closed world where I have to buy the same things over and over again for the rest of my life
• Live in an open world where my life is often made harder by companies who give lip-service to openness but don’t believe in it

There are trade-offs, and so I do a little of both.

I’m not going to hold my breath that AT&T is really going to become my champion here. Especially when I pay them every month for the same thing.

Sexist gaming art

So, there’s been a lot of talk lately in certain corners of the Internet about sexism in gaming and particularly about art. While I have been aware of sexism in gaming, I’ve personally tended to steer well clear of it, so it isn’t something I encounter regularly. It doesn’t seem so pervasive that I can’t effectively avoid it. (Though, how much of it do I encounter and just not see?)

After reading a lot of the talk about art, though, I have to say that I’m much more concerned with the effect that the “war on obesity” in this country may have on my daughter’s body image than any artwork.