Marco.org

→ Now I’m very confident there will be another Mac Pro

Wed, 30 May 2012 22:09:33 EDT

From today’s episode of Amplified, Jim Dalrymple’s podcast on 5by5:

[30:39]
Dan: Is there any chance that Apple’s going to can the Mac Pro?
Jim: No.

[4 seconds of silence]

Dan: OK… you’re pretty confident, you feel good about that?
Jim: [laughs… laughs…]
Dan: Good! Good! That’s what we want to hear! [changes the subject]

It sounded exactly like the audio version of Jim’s famous “Yep.”

That’s all I needed to hear.

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→ WWDC app may be showing a new UIKit iPhone theme for iOS 6

Wed, 30 May 2012 20:37:10 EDT

Cult of Mac posted screenshots of the WWDC app. The same visual style is also in the purported iOS 6 Maps photos.

I’d love to see a modern refresh of the iPhone UIKit widget styling. The blue-gradient style doesn’t look bad, but it does look dated. It was probably designed in 2006, and it shows.

When was the last time you saw an iPhone app with the stock blue UIKit widgets that you thought was well-designed?¹ It’s out of style.

I think Tweetie 2 was the last one for me. It was released in 2009. ↩

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→ Sweep the Sleaze

Wed, 30 May 2012 14:47:31 EDT

Information Architects arguing against the pervasive third-party “share” buttons that publishers and bloggers vomit all over their post headers and footers:

Or do you seriously think that in ten years we will still have those buttons on every page? No, right? Why, because you already know as a user that they’re not that great. So why not get rid of them now? Because “they’re not doing any harm”? Are you sure?

I don’t embed any sharing buttons for one big reason: they look cheap and desperate. They would devalue my voice and reduce my credibility.

For me, every other issue — clutter, load times, scrolling speed, privacy, security — is secondary to that.

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→ Tim Cook at the D Conference: Between the Lines

Wed, 30 May 2012 14:23:58 EDT

Great article from Dan Frommer on the not-very-subtle hints that Tim Cook dropped last night.

Within a year, I’d expect an Apple TV set, Facebook integration in iOS 6 and Mountain Lion, and the cancellation of iAd and Ping. (It wouldn’t surprise me to see iAd canceled as soon as iOS 6’s release.)

None of these are big surprises, but Cook all but confirmed them.

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Review: Tonx Coffee

Tue, 29 May 2012 19:50:23 EDT

People always ask me how they can make great coffee.

I’ve never had a good universal answer. The real answer is to get an expensive grinder¹ and an inexpensive AeroPress, then brew freshly roasted beans and drink it black.

Anyone with enough money can buy the equipment, but most people don’t have a good source of freshly roasted beans. Very few people live within a convenient distance of a coffee roaster, and even for those who do, the nearest roaster might not be particularly good: it might roast poor-quality beans, or it might roast them much too light or dark for your taste.

I solved this problem by home-roasting. But home-roasting is impractical, time-consuming, and fussy. If you’re asking yourself whether you should home-roast, the answer is definitely “No.” (I shouldn’t, either, but I do it anyway.)²

I wasn’t able to roast for a few months during a recent home renovation, so I signed up for Tonx, a coffee subscription service. The deal is simple: every two weeks, they mail a 12-ounce bag of freshly roasted coffee to you for $19. (It’s billed at $38 every 4 weeks, so it’s effectively $19 per bag.)

As coffee goes, this is very expensive. But for high-quality, freshly roasted, mail-ordered coffee, it’s competitive: ordering a similar 12-ounce bag from Stumptown runs about $23 after shipping.

No good mail-order service will compare well to buying it locally: Tonx is effectively $25.33 per pound, while I’ve rarely seen beans at local roasters priced above $16 per pound. But even “expensive” coffee isn’t completely out of reach: if you use 15 grams of beans per cup, a cup brewed with Tonx beans only costs about $0.84. By comparison, $16-per-pound local coffee is about $0.53 per 15-gram cup. We’re not talking about a lot of money either way.

Since I signed up on February 1, Tonx has been very consistent: they’ve sent very good coffees reliably every two weeks, and I usually get them about 3 days after they’ve been roasted, since they’re sent via Priority Mail from Los Angeles.

This is close to ideal. Coffee actually doesn’t taste very good right after it’s been roasted — the full flavor takes 2–3 days to develop.³

While every Tonx coffee has been very good so far, none of their picks have blown me away. This might be because they roast a bit too light for my taste:

Left to right: A local roaster, Tonx, my home-roast. Tap to enlarge.

I’m not qualified to tell you exactly what roast level they use, but my home-roast above is between City and Full City.⁴ Maybe their roasts are a fairly light City. Regardless, I like it a bit darker, but I think most coffee nerds would be very pleased with their roasts.

Their customer service is excellent: my first shipment got misrouted by the USPS and was going to be almost a week late, so they sent me another one, expedited, at no additional cost. That was the only issue I’ve had to date, and they handled it extremely well.

Tonx is a great option if you want great coffee delivered to your house without having to think about it.

Now, I have a great universal answer whenever anyone asks me how to make great coffee: Get a burr grinder, get an AeroPress, and subscribe to Tonx.⁵

Recommended.

A lot of people have asked me about manual hand-crank burr grinders. I have the Hario MSS-1B for occasional travel use, and it’s acceptable for a coarse or medium grind (although people nearby will make fun of you). But it takes far too long and far too much cranking to achieve a fine grind, and since the AeroPress is best with a fine grind, I don’t recommend using a manual grinder with it. ↩
If you decide to home-roast, well… you really shouldn’t. But if you decide to do it anyway, get the Behmor. Roast under a window and put a good box fan on the sill, blowing out. Open a window on the other side of the room for intake. ↩
I once imagined inventing a truly all-in-one coffee machine that would roast, grind, and brew the beans freshly for each cup. The flavor-development delay after roasting is one of many reasons why such a machine should never exist. I have many terrible ideas. ↩
Normally I roast to Full City, sometimes just before Vienna, but that would be a poor choice for a fine Kona. ↩
You can even save some money on a great grinder if you buy it via Tonx after you subscribe. See the “Tonx Perks” section in your account’s control panel. They ask that people keep this relatively quiet, so it’s in a footnote. Nobody reads footnotes. ↩

→ Sponsor: Go Couch to 5k by Radiant Tap

Tue, 29 May 2012 11:11:06 EDT

Regular, light running is the best way to keep your body fit. Go Couch to 5k is the perfect app to get you off the sofa and introduce you to the world of running. It shows animated (near) real-time speed while you run, keeps detailed history of runs (with maps), works great with background music, and features voice coaching guides telling you when to change pace. In the end, you can share your achievements to dailymile, Facebook, Twitter, and more. Don’t forget: your mind will work better if your body is fit.

Bonus for Marco.org readers: the first 5 people to contact Radiant Tap will get free promo code — use “Marco sent me” in the subject line or as first line in the message.

Thanks to Radiant Tap for sponsoring the Marco.org RSS feed this week.

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→ Three Things That Should Trouble Apple

Mon, 28 May 2012 23:25:28 EDT

Great article by Guy English.

A big one I’d add: Apple’s software quality is declining.

I’m not just talking about the most recent releases of everything, or the last couple of months — I’ve noticed this trend for about 2–3 years. As Apple’s software has grown to address larger feature sets, hard-to-solve problems such as sync and online services, shorter release cycles, increasingly strong competition, and Apple’s own immense scale, quality has slipped.

The list of exceptions to “It just works” is growing quickly.

That, more than anything, scares me about Apple’s future.

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→ The 16:9 iPhone

Mon, 28 May 2012 22:54:50 EDT

Rene Ritchie goes into great detail with excellent mockups of what apps may look like in 16:9 on the rumored taller-screened iPhone.

I still don’t like it. Video looks better in landscape, but I think apps and photos look worse in both orientations. I’m still hoping that any screen-size changes maintain the current aspect ratio, although the rumor mill seems to think that the chances of that are pretty slim.

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Speculation on the next Mac Pro

Sat, 26 May 2012 13:58:43 EDT

The Mac Pro seems like a ridiculous computer in the age of quad-core laptops. Even I thought so when I switched to a MacBook Pro last fall. But I had some major issues that have only been partially resolved. And in many other ways that I didn’t expect, this setup is far more complex, less elegant, and less reliable than a Mac Pro.

I really hope Apple isn’t done with the Mac Pro yet, because a Xeon E3/E5 update would be awesome.

Back in March, I speculated that the dual-2.9 GHz E5s would reach around 36,000 on Geekbench (64-bit). This now looks like it’ll be correct: Rob-ART Morgan just tested a PC workstation with a pair of the new, Mac Pro-ready Xeon E5 CPUs, with 16 total cores at 3.1 GHz. It scored a whopping 41,242 on Geekbench in Windows.

The fastest Mac Pro you can buy today, the two-year-old, $6200, dual-X5670 2.93 GHz model, scores “only” about 24,262.¹

I’m still not sure that the Mac Pro delay is a sign of Apple not caring about it. Remember, they haven’t been waiting for two years because they didn’t feel like updating the line: it has taken Intel two years to deliver the next generation of Xeons.

Assuming Apple still cares a bit about the Mac Pro, what might an update be like?

I don’t think we’ll see a switch to consumer-level CPUs or the price drop that could bring, since consumer chips would require Mac Pro buyers to give up a lot of what they need. If the Mac Pro is going to continue to exist, it should still be a Xeon workstation.

The current Mac Pro is so old that it’s the only Mac still shipping without Thunderbolt, since it predates the introduction of Thunderbolt by six months. Obviously, Thunderbolt would be nice to have on the new Mac Pro. But so would USB 3.0, which inconveniently isn’t built into Intel’s Xeon-compatible chipsets yet. (It’s supposedly coming to the Ivy Bridge updates to the laptops because Intel’s Ivy Bridge chipsets natively support USB 3 for “free”.) Incorporating either of them will require dedicated controller chips on the motherboard. This doesn’t preclude them, but makes them slightly less likely if Apple isn’t particularly dedicated to getting them in there.

I’d love to see the optical-bay area and SATA controller modified to natively support a cluster of four 2.5” drives to accommodate SSDs. (Current Mac Pros can be modified with aftermarket bay adapters and SATA controller cards, but that’s a complex and messy solution.) To make room without other case modifications, one or both optical bays could be removed, or the optical drive could be changed to a slot-loading, slim laptop drive.

I suspect that Blu-ray will still be ignored, mostly for software reasons: while you can buy any BD-RW drive on the market and read or burn data discs from a Mac, you still can’t legally watch Blu-ray movies on OS X. Advertising Blu-ray support without being able to play Blu-ray movies is questionable, and it serves Apple’s strategic interests better to continue pretending that Blu-ray doesn’t exist. Anyone who wants to add a BD-RW drive to their Mac Pro, internally or externally, can do it themselves very inexpensively.

One big question is Retina-display support. If Retina displays are coming to the MacBook Pro soon, would they spread to the rest of the Mac line within a year or two? If so, wouldn’t the next Mac Pro generation need to support them, presumably with the release of a Retina Thunderbolt Display? That’s a big requirement alone, and it would also require special video cards that could drive two or three of them. (The sheer amount of manufactured pixels and GPU throughput required to pull that off makes me think that Retina Thunderbolt Displays might not exist for a while.)

The lack of a Mac Pro update until this point is slightly suspicious, but not cause for much concern. I’m guessing that Apple’s holding back the Mac Pro until USB 3 debuts in the MacBook Pro, a Retina Thunderbolt Display is available, or Mountain Lion is released. If we don’t have a new Mac Pro by the end of the summer, I’ll start to be worried for its future.

To put Mac Pro performance into perspective, the fastest Mac outside of the Mac Pro line is currently the 3.4 GHz 27” iMac at about 12,532, with the recent 2.5 GHz i7 MacBook Pro close by at 11,851. That’s approximately the same performance as a midrange early 2008 Mac Pro. ↩

→ JC Penny’s “Fair and square” pricing isn’t working

Sat, 26 May 2012 13:23:17 EDT

Bob Sullivan reporting on the radical pricing strategy implemented by former Apple Retail head Ron Johnson:

No more coupons or confusing multiple markdowns. No more 600 sales a year. No more deceptive circulars full of sneaky fine print. Heck, the store even did away with the 99 cents on the end of most price tags. Just honest, clear prices. …

Shoppers hated it.

The campaign, which launched on Feb. 1, appears to be a disaster. Revenue dropped 20 percent for the first quarter compared to last year. Customer traffic fell 10 percent. Last year, the company made $64 million in the first quarter; this year, it lost $163 million.

Sad.

(Via Dan Frakes.)

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→ More on Apple’s Removal of Airfoil Speakers Touch From the App Store

Fri, 25 May 2012 13:55:26 EDT

John Gruber gets the story about this App Store removal of a very good app from our friends at Rogue Amoeba.

After some interesting back-and-forth with a few informed sources, I think Apple’s removal of Airfoil Speakers Touch from the iOS App Store is not as mysterious or capricious as I first thought.

It sounds like Airfoil Speakers Touch wasn’t removed for no reason — it was removed for what many developers might consider a bad reason. According to Underscore David Smith:

In order for these apps to simulate an AirPlay receiver they must reverse-engineer the AirPlay protocol. The protocol (outlined here) is cryptographically secured to prevent anyone other than Apple or its approved vendors from using it. Last year James Laird hacked out Apple’s private key from an old Airport Express and published it.

As best I understand the technical details of this, in order for any of these apps to operate they must then make use of this private key to impersonate an Airport Express. It seems entirely reasonable that Apple would not condone the use of their hacked private key in this manner, least of all in an App Store app.

It’s debatable whether this is fair. But, at the very least, Apple’s communication to developers still needs improvement, and it sucks that this app was approved and had been promoted, improved, supported, and maintained by Rogue Amoeba for three months before being pulled by Apple, probably permanently, with only two days’ notice.

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→ Old Farts Know How to Code

Thu, 24 May 2012 15:14:46 EDT

Nick Bradbury:

The startup culture is similar to professional sports in that it requires a fleet of fresh-out-of-college kids to trade their lives and their health for the potential of short-term glory.

“Old farts” are often excluded from that culture, not because we’re lousy coders but because we won’t put up with that shit. We have lives, we have families, we have other things that are important to us.

I never put up with that shit, even in my twenties, and it definitely damaged my relationship with various bosses that expected it.

In addition to the sexism that has been discussed a lot recently, software engineering suffers from extreme ageism and workaholism.

I’m about to turn 30, I’m married, and we just had a baby. This will implicitly (and illegally, of course) disqualify me from working at almost any startup.

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→ Coda 2 released, half-price today

Thu, 24 May 2012 11:26:54 EDT

Huge update:

So, you code for the web. And in Coda 1, we revolutionized that process, and put everything you needed in one place. An editor. Terminal. CSS. File management. SVN. But we knew we could do more.

Now, with Coda 2, we went beyond expectations. We added tons of highly-requested features, and a few nobody expected, then wrapped it all up in a shiny, groundbreaking UI fit for the future.

Today it’s half-price from Panic’s site or the Mac App Store.

And the new, perfectly named Diet Coda for iPad looks like an amazing app itself.

I’ve previously done all of my web development in TextMate, but I bought both Codas today and I’m going to give them a shot. Panic’s other apps are so great that I trust them enough to take the chance.

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→ Safari Reading List adds offline support in Mountain Lion

Wed, 23 May 2012 13:37:38 EDT

I’ve known about this for about a week (thanks, various Twitter and email tips). I wouldn’t be surprised if offline support showed up in iOS 6, too. It’s a glaring feature omission, and it’s far more important on iOS than on Macs.

Like today’s Reading List, it will certainly prevent some people from buying Instapaper, but might encourage more customers to seek out a more robust app to solve this problem.

Since Reading List’s release in Lion and iOS 5 last year, a lot of people have asked me about its effect on Instapaper. It’s effectively impossible to correlate long-term App Store sales trends to their causes, so I really can’t be sure. So far, Instapaper’s sales are still strong despite far more (and far stronger, and all free) competition this year. Maybe sales would have been stronger without Reading List, but I doubt it.

I predict approximately the same effect — nothing obvious — when Mountain Lion and presumably iOS add offline saving to Reading List this year.

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→ Sponsor: Newton Academy

Wed, 23 May 2012 13:00:28 EDT

Newton Academy is a revolutionary school training students for careers developing apps for iPhone and iPad. Apple is selling more than 500,000 of these magical devices every day. The App Economy is skyrocketing, and iOS app developers are in incredibly high demand, with over 5,000 jobs available now.

Our training program takes about a year to complete, and does not require any prior programming experience. You can learn on your own time, at your own pace, in your own space. Our immersive video lessons include graphics, animations, diagrams, and tutorials. Collaboration with fellow students is encouraged in our Virtual Workshop. You’ll also have real time support from your instructor available for exercises and assignments. Our graduates have been very successful, in large part because we offer every student an apprenticeship, during which we’ll mentor and guide you through every step of the process of completing your first full-fledged app. We can even help you find a job, or if you prefer, set up shop as an independent or indie aiming for fame and fortune. Available spots are filling fast, so apply today.

Thanks to Newton Academy for sponsoring the Marco.org RSS feed this week.

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→ Next iPhone may have 3.999-inch, 1136x640 screen

Tue, 22 May 2012 18:18:10 EDT

9to5Mac:

We know of two next-generation iPhones in testing with a larger display: the iPhone 5,1 and iPhone 5,2. These phones are in the PreEVT stage of development and are codenamed N41AP (5,1) and N42AP (5,2). … Both of these phones sport a new, larger display that is 3.999 inches diagonally. … The new iPhone display resolution will be 640 x 1136. That’s an extra 176 pixels longer of a display. The screen will be the same 1.9632 inches wide, but will grow to 3.484 inches tall. This new resolution is very close to a 16:9 screen ratio, so this means that 16:9 videos can play full screen at their native aspect ratio.

John Gruber also lends credibility.

The rumors about a taller-screened iPhone are piling up so much recently that it’s looking fairly likely. I’ll reserve final judgment until I use an iPhone with this display shape, but tentatively, I’m skeptical.

Why do people like larger-screened phones? My guesses on the biggest reasons:

Photos look much better.
They look better in the store.
To get LTE, which in practice still requires a larger phone and battery, and therefore, a larger screen.

The rumored ≈16:9 iPhone doesn’t really solve any of these. And I still think it would look weird in portrait.

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→ Build and Analyze: The Opposite of Instapaper

Mon, 21 May 2012 17:50:16 EDT

Speaking of ways I recently said things that were easier than writing, on today’s podcast, Dan and I discussed Flattr, API versioning, web frameworks, and my formerly secret App Store experiment.

On the After Dark: USB 3 chipsets, follow-up on BMW 1-series cup holders, and my grim political philosophy.

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→ My On The Verge interview

Mon, 21 May 2012 17:41:57 EDT

On The Verge’s bizarre combination is a lot of fun: extremely geeky topics, hosts, and guests with a well-funded late-show format.

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→ Macworld’s review of the Accelsior PCIe SSD

Fri, 18 May 2012 14:48:23 EDT

Their findings support Bare Feats’: this looks like a great option for Mac Pro owners.

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→ Responsive Images and Web Standards at the Turning Point

Tue, 15 May 2012 17:45:11 EDT

I like the proposed <picture> markup except for the tag name. “Picture” is much more specific than “image”, and I bet a very large portion of images used on the web are not pictures. “Photo” would be worse, but “picture” still implies a complete photo, illustration, or diagram, whereas “image” encompasses those plus patterns, textures, gradients, and every other use of image data in use on the web today.

How about using that proposed <picture> markup but instead calling the top-level tag <image>?

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