fox @ fury

Seriously Rielle, what did you expect?

2010-03-15T20:20:05Z

Edwards mistress Rielle Hunter conducted an interview and photo shoot with GQ magazine and wasn’t happy with the result:

I cried for two hours after seeing those repulsive pictures.

Is that enough for a river?

WinPhone7 App Marketplace: Like Apple but, um, better!

2010-03-15T20:13:15Z

Turns out that Windows Phone Series 7 users can only load apps via the Windows Phone Series 7 marketplace, where developers submit apps for approval and publication. This explains why last week Steve Ballmer did an about face and said “Apple’s done a very nice job” with their App Store.

Lest Microsoft be caught imitating or lauding Apple too much, they claim their store won’t have any of Apple’s approval ambiguity, with all approval/rejection decisions being very straightforward and transparent. Sounds easier than it is in practice, I suspect. Just a few months ago Microsoft was making videos poking fun at the Windows Marketplace approval process:

Speculating (wildly) about just-in-time iPad provisioning

2010-03-09T03:00:08Z

In the category of ’speculation’: The three weeks between when iPad pre-orders start and the April 3rd delivery date sounds like just enough time for Apple to gauge what proportion of iPads to make in each of the 16/32/64GB configurations.

In the category of ‘wild speculation’: It would be interesting, given a high enough proportion of buyers opting for the higher-margin 32 and 64GB models, if Apple were to decide to order the build with cameras included since, if they’re not currently slated for inclusion there seems to be plenty of evidence that they were at one time, and may simply be a drop-in part at build time.

Is Apple punting on the iPad calculator and other small iPhone apps?

2010-03-08T23:31:07Z

John Gruber seems to have it on good authority that the missing iPad apps are missing because Apple couldn’t figure out how to keep them elegant in a large-screen environment, and that no ‘Dashboard view’ is in the works. I don’t doubt his sources, but I’m frankly very surprised.

Looking on the bright side, the absence of these core apps will pave the way for hundreds of developers to try innovating on their own to make a better version, knowing they’ll be vying for the attention of an entire iPad user base with no built-in calculator, weather, finance or timer app. There should be a lot of interesting innovation in the space (and yes, a lot of nickel and dime crap).

At the end of the day though, the problem persists: If Apple can’t come up with a suitable usability model for small ’subtask’ apps like peeking at stocks, responding to an instant message or performing a quick calculation then it’s unlikely that third-party developers will be able to, because the difficulty is inherent in a large-screen, completely modal interface.

Considering that Apple’s been thinking about tablet devices for over a decade and has held beck because the prototypes didn’t meet Steve’s high bar, it’s extremely surprising to me that they’d launch without a real answer for such simple tasks. April 3rd notwithstanding, this is a problem that Apple will absolutely solve at some point. The only question is when.

Why 3D pie charts are bad

2010-03-02T16:57:08Z

I made a 3D pie chart that, while absolutely accurate, is an example of why 3D pie charts are bad:

Qwer.org Goes Down Hard. Both Remaining Users Pissed.

2010-02-26T19:49:31Z

Yesterday I shut down the 9 year old url shortening service qwer.org. I pointed all traffic from qwer.org to a penguin flash game with a banner ad at the bottom.

Scandal! Uproar! Mea Culpa! The kind of scandal that lead a social media pundit to email me this morning asking me to explain the series of events that led me to turn a link shortening service into a profit vehicle. The kind of uproar that causes a person to make an anonymous Twitter account for the sole purpose of asking me to explain my path to the dark side.

It all sounds pretty nefarious and nasty until you discover that the site was shut down because it had only two users: one a black-hat SEO driving traffic and pagerank to illegal pharma sites and a person who used the content-hosting features of Qwer to host Second Life patterns in a way that could be accessed in-game, and that his pages have been whitelisted for 4 weeks until I shut down stuff completely.

Average number of daily visitors to qwer.org? 11. Average number coming from somewhere other than Second Life? 3.

I hate being such a boring scandal.

The struggle of innovation

2010-02-24T21:29:59Z

Ed Colligan, Palm CEO, asked about the prospects of an Apple phone in November of 2006 (two months before the iPhone unveiling):

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.’”

‘We’ve struggled for years’ may not be the best phrase to convince people that you’re going to stay the market leader.

[side note: 'struggle' has now joined 'acquitted' on my list of words that probably shouldn't make their way on to your resume]

The iPad keyboard’s ‘blank key’: More evidence of a dashboard?

2010-02-22T20:12:18Z

9to5mac reports on the conspicuously blank function key at the iPad demo and speculates, quite reasonably, that it may be more evidence of the dashboard functionality I wrote about a few weeks ago.

Given that the iPad doesn’t have the concept of F#-style function keys, each key on that row has one and only one dedicated purpose. Other buttons in that row include ’search’, ‘home screen’, ‘photos’, brightness and audio controls, and a lock button. The deliberate hiding of a button’s functionality, in my mind, can only mean one of two things: A dashboard widget screen toggle or a Camera app button. Either one would point to a feature announcement coming in the next few weeks.

Jesse Schell’s mindblowing talk on the future of games (DICE 2010)

2010-02-19T22:26:05Z

Jesse Schell’s talk about the future of game design as it invades the real world is just astounding. If you do experience design of any kind it’ll be the most valuable (and entertaining) 20 minutes you’ll spend all week.

Dell’s John Thode on Apple’s certainty of success

2010-02-19T01:26:01Z

Dell’s VP of Mobile Devices John Thode, speaking to the Wall Street Journal about, what else, mobile devices:

If anybody tells you they know exactly what’s going to happen here, they’re either Apple or they’re smoking dope.

Somebody give this guy some weed.