Jeff Bezos Buys The Washington Post

⌘ Permalink

Paul Farhi:

The Washington Post Co. has agreed to sell its flagship newspaper to Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos, ending the Graham family’s stewardship of one of America’s leading news organizations after four generations.

Bezos, whose entrepreneurship has made him one of the world’s richest men, will pay $250 million in cash for The Post and affiliated publications to the Washington Post Co., which owns the newspaper and other businesses.

It’s important to note that this transaction will take place separate from Amazon, a fact Bezos mentioned in his memo to WaPo staffers:

I won’t be leading The Washington Post day-to-day. I am happily living in “the other Washington” where I have a day job that I love. Besides that, The Post already has an excellent leadership team that knows much more about the news business than I do, and I’m extremely grateful to them for agreeing to stay on.

Bezos goes on to write that “the Internet is transforming almost every element of the news business: shortening news cycles, eroding long-reliable revenue sources, and enabling new kinds of competition, some of which bear little or no news-gathering costs.”

Famously, newspapers have not faired well in the age on instant — and free — news. Bezos surely knows this, and hints that “experiments” will be taking place in the future to address this.

All in all, I really don’t know what to think about this. It’s really weird, but if anyone is crazy enough to try to save print journalism, maybe it’s Jeff Bezos.

Of course, maybe Bezos doesn’t care about the word print in that phrase…

The Newtonians ⇢

⌘ Permalink

Wired takes a look at the Cult of Newton.

In college, I used an upgraded MessagePad 2000 to take notes in class. I had the official hardware keyboard, and synced it all back to my PowerBook. This article makes me want to pick one up again.

App Updates and iOS 7 ⇢

⌘ Permalink

Craig Hockenberry:

Like many of my fellow developers, I am in the middle of an update of an app for iOS 7. As you’d expect, it’s a lot more work than previous versions of iOS. But results are stunning: both David Lanham and I have commented that our shipping version was “feeling old and clunky.”

While cranking along on the update, a couple of thoughts occurred to me: how many other developers were doing the same thing and were they going to commit fully to iOS 7? The depth and breadth of the changes in iOS 7 makes it difficult to support older versions of the OS.

So I just asked.

The information he’s gathered is eye-opening. This fall is going to be crazy.

365 Days ⇢

⌘ Permalink

Federico Viticci:

Today, when I remembered that exactly one year ago I was hospitalized for 22 days for a series of treatments to save my life, I tweeted about it. And then I opened Day One.

In the app’s Calendar view, I changed the year to “2012″ and, sure enough, the “August 1, 2012″ entry was there, showing photos of my hospital room; my girlfriend sending a selfie from home; and a note that I wrote about the doctors being “nice”. Bits of life. A combination of old thoughts and visual memories that I still have, in some form, in my brain, but that here, in this app — right now — I can hold and directly look at. It is, indeed, far more powerful than memory alone.

On OS ‘Ten’ ⇢

⌘ Permalink

Dr. Drang:

On ATP 25, Casey Liss was shamed after asking whether the new Logic Pro X should be pronounced “Logic Pro Ex” or “Logic Pro Ten.” This came a few days after a similar incident on The Prompt when poor Myke Hurley was laughed at for saying “Logic Pro Ex.”1 And there was, I believe, an incident back in January on The Frequency when Haddie Cooke committed the unforgivable sin of saying “Oh Ess Ex” instead of “Oh Ess Ten.”

The Good Doctor goes on to explain that he believes the X should be pronounced as “Ex” and not “Ten,” laying out three very reasonable reasons why. On Twitter today, there’s been talk about how referring to Mountain Lion as “Oh Ess Ten TEN Point Eight” is awkward at best.

Again, Dr. Creepy Snowman:

But we are, as I said, twelve years down the line now, and Apple has been giving point release version numbers to its full releases for too long. It’s time to stop playing X games. Apple should resolve its numbering problem with a deus X machina.

Twelve years is a long time, and according to comments at WWDC, Apple’s looking at another decade or so of OS X releases. The problem isn’t going to get any better.

So, what will happen after 10.9 is released? Would Apple release a 10.10?

“They have to go to OS 11!” will be the cry of bewildered analysts who will be lighting themselves on a fire, the flames fueled by logic and gasoline.

(God forbid they release a 10.10.10, but a 10.11.12 would be adorable.)

I think all of this is why Apple is moving away from numbering its operating system releases. The only place I have seen OS X Mavericks referred to as 10.9 is on the installer itself and in the footnotes on Apple’s website. From a marketing perspective, it’s “OS X Mavericks.”

I wouldn’t be shocked if Apple moves away from the “10.x.x” nomenclature for minor updates as well.[1] “OS X Mavericks Update 1” or “OS X Mavericks Release 2” still gets the point across, without tripping over itself.

At the end of the day, I think this whole conversation is probably a little silly. It’s “ten” because that’s how Apple’s executives pronounce it on stage. (And in this support article.)

It’s easier to think about X as a statement or simple label instead of a number. While that doesn’t make much sense, it’s what Apple’s done, and we should just continue to embrace it.

It isn’t perfect, but it is what it is.

  1. When Apple released 10.4.10, some bloggers exploded.  ↩