512 Pixels

Greg Peters, from Netflix’s product development group, about the company’s forthcoming Android app:

The hurdle has been the lack of a generic and complete platform security and content protection mechanism available for Android. The same security issues that have led to piracy concerns on the Android platform have made it difficult for us to secure a common Digital Rights Management (DRM) system on these devices. Setting aside the debate around the value of content protection and DRM, they are requirements we must fulfill in order to obtain content from major studios for our subscribers to enjoy. Although we don’t have a common platform security mechanism and DRM, we are able to work with individual handset manufacturers to add content protection to their devices. Unfortunately, this is a much slower approach and leads to a fragmented experience on Android, in which some handsets will have access to Netflix and others won’t. This clearly is not the preferred solution, and we regret the confusion it might create for consumers. However, we believe that providing the service for some Android device owners is better than denying it to everyone.

Android is starting to feel more and more out of control.

[ via Phandroid, who didn’t see any downside to this whole thing]

In The Washington Post:

We live now in a cable news universe that celebrates the opinions of Olbermann, Rachel Maddow, Chris Matthews, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly - individuals who hold up the twin pillars of political partisanship and who are encouraged to do so by their parent organizations because their brand of analysis and commentary is highly profitable.

The commercial success of both Fox News and MSNBC is a source of nonpartisan sadness for me. While I can appreciate the financial logic of drowning television viewers in a flood of opinions designed to confirm their own biases, the trend is not good for the republic. It is, though, the natural outcome of a growing sense of national entitlement. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s oft-quoted observation that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,” seems almost quaint in an environment that flaunts opinions as though they were facts.

And so, among the many benefits we have come to believe the founding fathers intended for us, the latest is news we can choose. Beginning, perhaps, from the reasonable perspective that absolute objectivity is unattainable, Fox News and MSNBC no longer even attempt it. They show us the world not as it is, but as partisans (and loyal viewers) at either end of the political spectrum would like it to be. This is to journalism what Bernie Madoff was to investment: He told his customers what they wanted to hear, and by the time they learned the truth, their money was gone.

Just let that soak in. How can these changes be good for anyone except the networks themselves?

[ via Joshua Schnell]

Thank goodness:

Dave Caolo, bringing some logic to the whole “iOS 4.2 is delayed” thing:

Here’s the thing. That November 12th release date was supplied by the rumor mill, not Apple. If iOS 4.2 fails to ship by then, it will still be on schedule.

Jobs said that iOS 4.2 will ship by November. Let’s not call the delivery “delayed” until it actually is.

Cute yet vaguely depressing.

[ via @brizzyc]

Oh, man. While this seems a little sketchy, it’s a lot better than torrenting a beta build of OS X.

Sadly, even this doesn’t let me print to my aging HP LaserJet 5200.

[ via Mac Stories]

Riccardo Mori at System Folder and Dave Lawrence at Newton Poetry have been playing with using Simplenote on old Macs. After trying several browsers, it seems that Classilla is the way to go.

Now you know, in case you find yourself needing your text notes while on an antique Mac. I just love this stuff.

Phil Libin, CEO of Evernote, in an interview Richard MacManus:

The company was founded by Stepan Pachikov, who was kind of this brilliant mad scientist from Russia. He and his team were behind a lot of the pioneering work that went into the Apple Newton, fifteen years ago. The handwriting recognition engine was built by these guys. They had a company called ParaGraph, which Apple licensed.

So the original idea really started in the Newton days. Back then it was just a device, but it grew to be more of a service that would let you keep all of your memories. [It would] just remember everything.

Damn.

Ben Brooks, in a discussion about iPad news apps:

Again I ask, would it not be more helpful to have a summary of the story on the front page, instead of the industry standard ‘we put as much of the stories text that we can fit even though it provides no value’?

Without a doubt, most iPad news (and magazine) apps are crappy. Without a doubt, the news industry really doesn’t get the Internet, let alone mobile devices.

I know in my years of designing The Daily Helmsman at the University of Memphis, we sucked at using our website as a useful platform. We were always about the print product, and the website was a place to shovel stories. That’s the wrong approach, even though many papers still cling to it.

I would say that a lot of newspapers and magazine are actually pretty good at teasing stories in their print editions. The goal is to summarize a story in a way that hooks readers. Having teaser text that is just the first few lines of a story doesn’t work. The Reuters app is exceptionally bad at this, as Ben shows in his screenshot.

I disagree with the philosophy Ben puts out as the “industry standard” of cramming text onto the front page.

Newspapers are dying. As their death spiral continues to spin faster and faster, they are doing everything they can to keep advertisers happy.¹ They know that if they can get readers past the front page, they will see more ads. Which is good for advertisers, and thus, good for the paper. Space for news stories continues to shrink.

Cramming text onto a page doesn’t do anyone any favors. The front page of a newspaper is very much an ad for the paper itself. Design a hard-to-read front page, and no one will pick up your paper that day. Filling the front page to the brim isn’t an industry standard. Designing a newspaper people want to read, however, is.

Crappy teasers don’t draw people in. Thoughtful, well-written ones do, however. It’s a skill — just like writing headlines, editing copy or taking photos. It’s a lot harder than running some copy through OS X’s “Summarize Text” feature.s

I think Ben’s thoughts betray the public’s thoughts about journalism — that it is easy, and that it should be free.

Both of these are wrong. Finding a story, reporting it and packaging it in a way so people can understand is are all really difficult tasks. Not just anyone can do it. The fine art of turning events into news is just that — an art. Sadly, newspapers aren’t use to their art being on a digital canvas.

While Ben makes some great points about iPad news apps, I don’t think it is fair to expand his conclusions to journalism on the whole. Apps and content are different things. An app is just a vehicle for content delivery. For example, Reuters is generally good about writing helpful summaries. I bet their iPad app just lobs off the text, mindlessly, after a certain number of characters. If this is true, the fault lies with the app, not the journalist.

Over the last two days, the Apple-centric part of the Internet has shat it pants over a rumor that Apple had cut some features from AirPrint, a component of the upcoming iOS 4.2 release. The release of 10.6.5 late this afternoon seems to confirm that iOS devices will only be able to print directly to printers that support the technology, and not to printers simply shared from a Mac or PC.

Which is a bummer. It means that only customers with fancy new HP printers can enjoy the feature for now.¹

It’s been a little surprising to me the outcry I’ve seen online today over this issue.

While I understand that limiting this feature to a few select printers is a letdown, I can understand why Apple may have pulled the plug.

Just sit back and think about it. How many average consumers can set up printer sharing? I’m pretty sure neither of my parents — average users — could get printer sharing up and running without calling me.

What happens if the host Mac or PC is asleep or off the network? Suddenly, iOS printing doesn’t work. The average consumer isn’t going to understand why they can’t print — they are just going to think their iPad is “broken.” That’s not a good situation for anyone.

Add to this printer driver issues, jammed print queues on a host computer and a range of other issues that arise with shared printers. Not good at all.

Apple always chooses shipping a paired back (but good) feature over shipping a more complex, less polished feature. I see AirPrint simply being another example of this philosophy. Printing directly to a network printer is a clean, simple solution. And Apple likes clean, simple solutions.

Yes, it sucks. But having the feature may have sucked more, at least for non-geeks.²

And I think we have to swallow that pill, at least until something changes.

Marco, on what has to be the most clever software update I’ve seen in a long time:

The iPhone’s font panel also got its most highly requested feature, a Light/Dark toggle without needing to leave the article:

But you won’t need to use it as often, because I’ve added a ridiculous little feature:

You can now have Instapaper automatically use dark mode at night and normal (light) mode during the day.

But how, exactly, do you define “night”? There’s no API access to the iPhone’s ambient light sensor, so I can’t just enable dark mode in dark rooms.

And I can’t just define hour boundaries, because 8 PM in December is much darker than 8 PM in June.

And I can’t just look at hours and the date, because 5 PM in December is much darker in Alaska than in Costa Rica.

So I used with the most reliable method I could think of: sunset times in your location. Yes, Instapaper is now location-aware, but only for this feature. (Leave it to me to come up with the least-social use of locations possible.)

Instapaper 2.3 is propagating through the App Store now.