tag:kfury.com,2014:/feedKevin Fox2016-09-06T14:42:25-07:00Kevin Foxhttp://kfury.comSvbtle.comtag:kfury.com,2014:Post/bringing-the-lightning2016-09-06T14:42:25-07:002016-09-06T14:42:25-07:00Bringing the Lightning<p>A last-minute prediction for the iPhone 7.</p>
<p>As usual, the hardware specs for the upcoming iPhones have been well leaked while the software surprises are subject to a lot more speculation. The iPhone Plus has dual cameras, but to what end? Super-resolution? Hardware-supported zoom? Synthetic aperture control (‘bokeh on demand’)? The event invitation would seem to allude to the latter, though the three aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive.</p>
<p>But I’m here to talk about the bigger elephant in the room: Headphones. Sure, Apple has a reputation for removing ports and drives from their devices before the public thinks it’s time to, but the 3.5mm headphone jack’s lineage and pervasiveness far exceed either the floppy drive or the optical drive, and people are having a hard time swallowing this pill. But within a few years this will be seen as a natural and obvious move.</p>
<p>Bluetooth, maligned early on for sub-par connectivity and audio quality, has come a very long way, and within a few years wired headphones will be seen as much an outlier as a wired mouse or trackpad. It’s Apple’s style to predict and support this transition at the hardware level by taking away the safety net of a headphone plug that hasn’t changed fundamentally since the ¼" jack was introduced 138 years ago. <em>Nobody alive today has ever known a world without this plug.</em></p>
<p>To put it bluntly, headphones that plug into the 3.5mm jack are dumb. Literally. At the base level, they’re just wires conducting current to tiny speaker coils, without electronics at all. Sure, some are smarter with inline controls or analog signal processing such as bass boosting or noise cancellation, but most headphones are just dumb wires. And we know how Apple feels about wires, even if they’re pretty smart.</p>
<p>So what advantages do Lightning-based headphones offer? At least three things:</p>
<p><strong>Lossless digital sound</strong>: When the digital-to-analog processing happens in the headphones the output can be precisely tuned for the speakers they’ll be playing on, with any adjustments being applied without having to translate an analog signal back to digital and back again to analog, or being limited to analog circuitry throughout. Bottom-of-the-line headphones will get a little more expensive when an Apple-certified Lightning plug has to be used, but those plugs, just like the inevitable Lightning-to-3.5mm adapter, will have a digital-to-analog chip incorporated in it, so beyond that point the hardware doesn’t have to change at all. More advanced headphones have so much profit margin built in to the price that they’ll be happy to differentiate themselves with a Lightning-ready set of cans. The upshot is equivalent sound for dumb headphones and superior sound for smarter headphones. And that’s not even counting the advantages to 5.1 channel-capable headphones.</p>
<p><strong>Phone-enabled noise cancellation</strong>: Along with digital audio out channels come digital- audio in channels. A pair of headphones with external microphones can give the iPhone all the data it needs to do realtime noise cancellation <em>on the phone</em>, giving the headphones just the signal they need to provide the same noise cancellation as premium headsets. Quality noise cancellation can easily add $200 to the price of a headset, but users would get the feature for free, since the headsets (or earbuds) wouldn’t need the robust on-ear computation that current noise-cancelling headphones require. By the way, this is a feature that couldn’t be accomplished over Bluetooth, since the latency, however small, is far too long to make the roundtrip in less time that sound takes to get from the outside of the headset to your ear. One other upside to on-phone noise cancellation is that the headphones wouldn’t run out of batteries, as they would need almost no power, and that would be provided by the phone. Which brings me to…</p>
<p><strong>Power</strong>: The Lightning port is designed to both accept power (for charging the phone) and supply power (Apples Pencil is a good example of something charged from the iOS device). This is important because Apple’s strategy to transition from wired headphones to wireless isn’t just embodied by a move from the 3.5” port to Bluetooth, but also in new EarPods that can work as Lightning earphones while charging and then automatically transition to Bluetooth when the cord is unplugged from the earbuds. The clunky Bluetooth pairing process would be replaced by the ‘pair by wire’ process that the Apple Keyboard, Magic Trackpad and Pencil all use, automatically pairing when the device is plugged in for charging and continuing to work seamlessly when unplugged.</p>
<p>There are a few remaining questions:</p>
<p>How much of the new stuff will work with current iOS devices? I think most of it. Apple has been pushing their support of Lightning headphones for over a year, paving the way for their forcing of the issue with new hardware, and not much if any of the functionality I described above should require new hardware. It’ll probably be baked into the OS, even if it’s been obscured in the betas thus far.</p>
<p>What will come in the box? This is where things get tricky. Apple has to ensure people can listen to music right out of the box, which would either mean Lightning EarPods or an adapter or both. A 3.5mm adapter alone is unthinkable. It would be a sign of failure, providing a step backwards in the user experience with none of the new functionality Lightning would provide. On the other end of the scale, the Lightning+Wireless EarPods I described would be unlikely by default as it would add too much to the build cost of the iPhone, and severely cut the upsell opportunity to other Beats wireless headsets.</p>
<p>My guess is Lightning wired-only EarPods that take advantage of the noise-cancellation functionality, which would already make them much cooler and more useful than current EarPods. It might also be possible that they would bundle these outside the box to enable an upsell ($49-99) to ‘AirPods’ (wireless Lightning EarPods) instead of the basic wired version.</p>
<p><strong>But what about iPads?</strong> Same thing. If they’re getting rid of the headphone jack in favor of Lightning, they’re getting rid of the headphone jack across iOS.</p>
<p><strong>MacBooks?</strong> <em>Now things get interesting.</em> Will Apple transition MacBooks away from 3.5mm? They have to. There’s no way they’ll expect someone to have Lightning headphones that they have to use an adapter (whether 3.5mm or USB-c) when plugging in to their Mac. No, the only way I can see this going is bringing the Lightning port to the Mac.</p>
<p>I know that breaks all the walls between iOS and macOS but it’s the only way, and there are big advantages, beyond all those that apply to the iPhone. There are a slew of adapters (HDMI, SD-card, etc.) for Lightning that can be just as useful on a Mac. It’s a shame we’ve had to double-up on Lightning and Thunderbolt (think about that one for a second) adapters to cover our Macs and our iPads and iPhones. USB is becoming the new Thunderbolt (which was the new FireWire which was the new SCSI), and Lightning becomes the new USB (which was the new ADB which was the new Serial). A Lightning-Lightning cable wouldn’t be an unthinkable thing either.</p>
<p>Well that’s my take. I have this bad habit of writing predictive posts with really short shelf-lives and most of this post will be completely outdated by Wednesday afternoon, but if you find it interesting, please share it early and often before the announcement, and as always, <em>Happy iPhone Day.</em></p>
tag:kfury.com,2014:Post/the-first-apple-homepage2015-04-16T08:45:12-07:002015-04-16T08:45:12-07:00The First Apple Homepage<p><img src="https://svbtleusercontent.com/urjhakfghvrcw.png" alt="Header image"></p>
<p><strong>Update:</strong> Based on feedback from readers, it looks like this may still be the earliest Apple home page, but is more likely from 1993 or early 1994.</p>
<hr>
<p>Last week I happened across a <a href="http://charliehoehn.com/2013/01/14/15-years-of-apple-dot-com-homepage/">blog post showing the history of Apple.com over the past 17 years</a>, complete with screenshots culled from the very earliest days of the Internet Archive Wayback Machine. It’s a serious trip down memory lane, but it didn’t go back far enough. This is the earliest mirror of Apple.com, captured shortly after the Wayback Machine went live:</p>
<p><a href="https://svbtleusercontent.com/rfoncukfduxgra.png"><img src="https://svbtleusercontent.com/rfoncukfduxgra_small.png" alt="Apple.com in 1997"></a></p>
<p>But that was 1997. What did Apple.com look like at the very birth of the World-Wide Web? Say around 1992?</p>
<p>I’m a digital pack-rat, and I’ve been on the Internet a long time. I remember a very different, more playful Apple.com homepage. I remembered a page that was more Fractal Design Painter and less grids and columns. I remember taking a screenshot of that page because I liked the look of it. But where would it be today?</p>
<p>Every four or five years I migrate my life-backup to a bigger drive, both for redundancy and to make room for new stuff. The result is a nesting-doll of archived data. Searching for images with “apple” in the filename didn’t turn it up, so I did what any archaeologist* would do. I dug down to the proper level sifted through the file hierarchy by hand. [*any archaeologist would actually be fired and ostracized for digging willy-nilly through layers to get to what he’s looking for, but that’s imperfect metaphors for you.]</p>
<p>The proper level in this case was an archive of a backup that had been burned to CD-R in 1995, found on a spindle in a cardboard box in 2006 and copied into the life-backup a couple hard drives ago. Still fruitless in my search, I wondered if I might have stored it in the Scrapbook for safe-keeping. For those of you who haven’t used a Mac prior to OS X, the Scrapbook was one of many Desk Accessory apps you could get to any time from the Apple menu. It was a sort of super-clipboard where you could paste items in and page through them like a scrapbook to get at them later (sometimes, apparently, decades later). People usually used it for clip-art. It even came with a half-dozen pieces of clip-art to get you started.</p>
<p>I copied that backup’s Scrapbook file to my computer and used Photoshop to try and extract the PICT resources containing the individual images. No go. A little Googling found that the venerable <a href="http://www.lemkesoft.de/en/image-editing-slideshow-browser-batch-conversion-metadata-and-more-on-your-mac/">GraphicConverter</a> would do the job. GraphicConverter, by the way, has been serving the needs of Mac users for over 23 years, keeping backward compatibility alive.</p>
<p>Paging hopefully through the default images, suddenly there it was. It was so tiny! And oh god, so pixellated. But this was absolutely it. Without further ado, the earliest known (so far as I can tell) Apple home page:</p>
<p><a href="https://svbtleusercontent.com/oxizbs1fioisg.png"><img src="https://svbtleusercontent.com/oxizbs1fioisg_small.png" alt="1992: The earliest known Apple.com Homepage"></a></p>
<p>There are a bunch of things to note here:</p>
<ul>
<li>Tiny! Remember, this had to look good on the computers of the day, and that included the Mac Classic II, with a screen size of 512 by 342, as opposed to today’s megapixel HD displays.</li>
<li>There is no real text. The entire page is one graphic with text burned-in.</li>
<li>The pixellation is completely normal for the time when ‘web safe colors’ actually meant something and most color monitors displayed only 256 colors. </li>
<li>Bevels <em>and</em> drop-shadows, oh my.</li>
<li>Navigation was by way of a server-side imagemap. You’d click on the image and the browser would send the x and y coordinates of the click to the server, which would use them to decide what URL you should be directed to and send a redirect. Client-side imagemaps wouldn’t be a part of the HTML spec until HTML 3.2, but that was 5 years away. Javascript? It wasn’t even a thing. Heck, when this page was live you couldn’t even put text on the same row as an image.</li>
<li>Search? There wasn’t such a thing as a text field in HTML at this stage. Browsers had a native Search box that would send a search request to a URL defined by the page, if the page supported search at all. Search engines weren’t even a thing back then, and you were more likely to find what you needed on Gopher or Usenet than the web.</li>
<li>Smorgasbord?</li>
</ul>
<p>To give a little more context, I used a few screenshots of NCSA Mosaic and some reconstructive photoshopping to replicate as closely as possible how this would have looked on a Mac Classic:</p>
<p><a href="https://svbtleusercontent.com/ov3aqotjljgmcg.png"><img src="https://svbtleusercontent.com/ov3aqotjljgmcg_small.png" alt="1992 Apple.com home page in NCSA Mosaic browser"></a></p>
<p>So there you have it. The earliest Apple.com web page I know of. At least 22 years old. If this post makes its way to an Apple archivist who has any more definitive data or an earlier screenshot or mirror I’d love to see it!</p>
tag:kfury.com,2014:Post/the-official-2014-kfury-apple-predictions-post2014-09-07T19:33:02-07:002014-09-07T19:33:02-07:00The Official 2014 KFury Apple Predictions Post<p>September is my favorite time of year. It’s my wedding anniversary, Summer gives way to Fall, and Apple releases its magic.</p>
<p>As much hype as usually precedes an Apple Event, this year is special. This may quite simply be the most-hyped Apple Event since the announcement of the iPhone in January 2007, and just as notable is the fact that the excitement isn’t exclusively around a single product.</p>
<p>iPhone 6, iWatch, iOS 8, HealthKit, HomeKit, the promise of an iPhone payment platform, and perennial hopes about the evolution of the AppleTV. Rumors have been bouncing around the echo chamber ranging from well-sourced leaks to wistful speculation, and the only certainty is that much will be revealed Tuesday in what will likely be the most-watched company presentation of the decade so far.</p>
<p>After writing Apple prediction posts for the past 15 years (no, seriously, I <a href="http://fury.com/2001/05/apples-ipad-the-next-big-thing/">predicted the iPad in 2001</a>) I’ve learned that the most accurate predictions are rarely the ones that get the most link-love, but I’m drawn to the task like a moth to the flame, so here goes:</p>
<h3 id="iphone-6_3">iPhone 6 <a class="head_anchor" href="#iphone-6_3">#</a>
</h3>
<p>The hardware design of the 4.7" iPhone has been well documented and I have no reason to believe it’s anything other than spot on. The 5.5" model has been less well-documented, but there are enough telltales in enough places (hardware leaks, hints in XCode config files) that it’s pretty certain as well. There’s been some speculation that the 4.7" is ready to roll, but the 5.5" won’t come out for another month or two, and as much as I’d like to believe that they’ll be ready for simultaneous launch, it’s highly likely that if schedules got close they’d focus on getting the factory lines perfect on one and push back the other rather than risk quality or pushing back both phones a month or more. So, <strong>iPhone 6 goes on sale on Friday, September 19th, and iPhone 6 air goes on sale in ‘mid-November’</strong>. Both will use Corning’s Gorilla Glass 3, but don’t expect the term to be uttered during the keynote, as this will be the last premium phone to ship without a sapphire screen. Both screens will have another row of icons on the home screen (rather than simply stretching the current screen).</p>
<p>Style-wise, Apple is trying to make its phones more hand-friendly, and I suspect they’re tired of having their iconic industrial design covered up in cheap plastic cases. The metal halo of the iPhones 4 and 5 made them slipperier, and the beautiful chamfered edges did nothing to help. The new rounded edge, most reminiscent of the original iPhone and iPhone 3g but much thinner) and a more tactile backplate will encourage more people to ‘go nude’ with their phones.</p>
<h3 id="iphone-5cs_3">iPhone 5cs <a class="head_anchor" href="#iphone-5cs_3">#</a>
</h3>
<p>Last year’s introduction of the iPhone 5c felt like a move beyond Apple’s traditional playbook. The standard iPhone update cycle has been to significantly revise the phone enclosure every second year, and continue offering the previous year’s model as the ‘low cost’ model. In the off years, minor changes would be made to the phone’s exterior in favor of internal changes like a faster processor, a better camera and, using last year as an example, Touch ID. The addition of the iPhone 5c in a ‘down year’ may have been seen as a necessary aberration to cater to a larger audience who wants a more fashionable phone without the stigma of outdated technology.</p>
<p>So how does this change the iPhone product development cycle? My guess is that we’ll see <strong>an update to the iPhone 5c (called the iPhone 5cs?) incorporating the processor, camera, and Touch ID present in the iPhone 5s</strong>. (It will also support NFC, but more on that later.) Going forward, we can <strong>expect to see a ‘color’ redesign every other year staggered from the ‘standard’ redesign</strong>, meaning an iPhone 6c with a new body rolling out in Fall 2015 alongside the inevitable iPhone 6s.</p>
<h3 id="iwatch_3">iWatch <a class="head_anchor" href="#iwatch_3">#</a>
</h3>
<p>Will there be an iWatch unveiling this week? <strong>Definitely</strong>. It’s possible to ignore the circumstantial evidence surrounding the magnitude of the event, the choice to hold the Event at the Flint Center, a larger venue which Apple has historically only used for launches that are major even by Apple’s standards. The original Macintosh was unveiled there, as was the iMac, and the joint unveiling of the move from the 860x0 processors to the PowerPC-based PowerMacs and the Apple Online Store. It can hold three times as many people as the Yerba Buena Performing Arts Center (5 times more than the Town Hall theater on Apple’s campus), and is the largest stage other than the old Macworld Expo keynotes at Moscone Center. The huge white ‘expo pavilion’ erected in secret just outside the auditorium is another indication of the magnitude of the event. (I would guess it’s essentially an Apple Store decked out to promote these products in the same fashion that they’ll be shown to the public in other Apple Stores soon enough.)</p>
<p>In the last week, Sony, Samsung, LG, Motorola, and ASUS have all either unveiled or begun shipping new models of smartwatch. The timing of these announcements is clearly with the desire to get out there prior to Apple’s entry in the same way that dozens of tablets were hurriedly introduced at CES in the weeks before Apple’s iPad unveiling. It’s also worth noting that Samsung rushed their first Gear smartwatch to market last September in fears that Apple was about to unveil their entry in the market. When it was clear they had more time they quickly pulled the watch and reinvented it (three times in the last 12 months).</p>
<p>Still, none of this specifically points to an iWatch announcement. There are several new initiatives (HomeKit, HealthKit, and the possible Payments platform) that would make great use of a large demo area after the presentation.</p>
<p>Over the weekend however, it was noted that several fashion bloggers were invited to the event, and while a new iPhone design often gets attention (both good and bad) from a style perspective, Apple would be unlikely to invite criticism in an area where it didn’t feel that it had a very strong upper hand. A new phone and a revised collection of Beats headphones wouldn’t justify a blogger footing the bill for a round-trip from Manhattan, and <strong>a cadre of pissed off fashion bloggers is the last thing Apple wants</strong>.</p>
<p>What will the iWatch entail? I’ll refer to <strong><a href="http://kfury.com/what-an-apple-watch-is-good-for">my iWatch prediction post from January 2013</a></strong>, as I think most of it is still spot on. (Note also that this was written over a year before Android Wear was announced.)</p>
<p>Addendums would be <strong>sapphire glass screen protection as a certainty</strong>, a greater emphasis on biometrics for HealthKit, and the <strong>incorporation of WiFi to make the watch more functional as a standalone device</strong> when the phone isn’t present, or if the owner doesn’t even have an iOS device.</p>
<p>The immediate takeaway is that the device will be one or two generations beyond current Smartwatch offerings in terms of size, visual appeal, and possibly functionality.</p>
<p>I’m also positing that the watch will be <strong>assembled in the United States</strong>, both based on the fact that Tim Cook has stated the desire to have multiple product lines assembled stateside and, frankly, the fact that there haven’t been any hardware part leaks yet.</p>
<p>Could we be surprised with near-term availability? Possible, but <strong>January/February is more likely, with a developer SDK available by the end of October</strong>.</p>
<p>Also, it’s going to be freaking thin, and I’ll double-down on my Siri bets made in that post.</p>
<h3 id="ios-8_3">iOS 8 <a class="head_anchor" href="#ios-8_3">#</a>
</h3>
<p>They’ll run through the major consumer changes in the OS, and will start pushing it to phones somewhere around September 13th. The biggest story will be HealthKit and real-world examples of HomeKit and iBeacon integration.</p>
<p>If there are any other completely unexpected surprises then they’ll probably come in the form of new apps.</p>
<h3 id="payments-and-nfc_3">Payments and NFC <a class="head_anchor" href="#payments-and-nfc_3">#</a>
</h3>
<p>The time has come. Several times over the last three years Apple has bragged that it has the largest database of credit-card-backed accounts in the world (larger even than Amazon or PayPal). After years of making it easy for people to buy music and apps, <strong>Apple’s ready to make it easy for people to pay for real things in the real world</strong>. Other companies have tried to incorporate digital wallets into their phones (Android’s fragmentation has hindered the success of Google Wallet) but none have reached the critical mainstream traction necessary for widespread adoption by stores at the point-of-sale. </p>
<p>With the support of Visa, MasterCard, and American Express, people will be able to authenticate credit cards into their phones and leave them at home. Using Touch ID for authentication and approval at purchase time, Passbook will find a home beyond getting through TSA or paying for your Starbucks.</p>
<p><strong>Incidentally, this will also drive NFC integration throughout the iOS line</strong>. Expect the revised 5c to have NFC and Touch ID, as well as the long-neglected iPod touch. Whether iPads are revved this week or not, expect them to add Touch ID and NFC as well when they are.</p>
<p><strong>Stretch prediction:</strong> It’s conceivable that the 5s already has NFC capability in it, turned off and unused, lying in wait. The teardown sites aren’t always as thorough as they seem, and boards can be tricky.</p>
<h3 id="wish-we-could-say-more_3">Wish we could say more… <a class="head_anchor" href="#wish-we-could-say-more_3">#</a>
</h3>
<p>Almost a prediction within a prediction, the invitation taglines are like little puzzles, highly thought out and carefully phrased to have a clear and obvious meaning, with a hidden meaning that isn’t intended to be able to be deduced except in hindsight.</p>
<p>This year’s phrase “Wish we could say more” has on the surface been thought to mean that Apple will be holding back, that they will be saving some items for a second announcement later in the Fall. While I think there will be a sister MacOS event in October, I think this interpretation is bunk.</p>
<p>The assumption is that the phrase is intended to be parsed as “We [Apple] wish we could say more” but what if it means “We [all of us] should wish that we could say more”. <strong>‘Wish’ as a future directive, rather than a present regret.</strong></p>
<p><strong>This interpretation makes a strong case for Siri news</strong>. Many of us have often wished that we could say more to her, that she would listen more often and more accurately, and that she would be more capable. At WWDC Apple announced that Siri would support an ‘always listening’ mode when plugged in to power (specifically in the car). Siri’s response time, in both directive and dictation modes, has lagged far behind Google Now, and a faster (or better yet, device-interpreted) Siri would go a long way toward closing the gap.</p>
<p>In addition to a larger vocabulary, <strong>the ability to use Siri as a way to perform more complicated tasks on the iWatch</strong> makes a lot of sense.</p>
<h3 id="all-the-rest_3">All the rest <a class="head_anchor" href="#all-the-rest_3">#</a>
</h3>
<p>Macs will only be talked about in the context of Yosemite’s and iOS 8’s Continuity features, and there won’t be any product revisions.</p>
<p>iPads are possible, but if they are it’s a sign that they’ll also be moving to an every-other-year cycle, with their minor revisions folded into the Fall announcements. I doubt it, however, and think they’ll be getting an announcement of their own in the February/March timeframe.</p>
<p>AppleTV is unlikely as well. The next big AppleTV move won’t be an actual Apple-branded television with AppleTV built in, but rather an AppleTV box with the gaming power of an iPhone 5 or later. All the MFi (Made for iPhone) game controller efforts are really pointed at creating controllers for AppleTV entertainment boxes, be they standalone, or augmentations to turn iPhones into controllers with handheld screens. AppleTV’s destiny is as a media and gaming center. It’s just a matter of when Apple will open their gates to developers. The market’s ready for it, but the lack of leaks indicates that the time might not be here just yet.</p>
<h3 id="that39s-all-folks_3">That’s all folks <a class="head_anchor" href="#that39s-all-folks_3">#</a>
</h3>
<p>Have a great simulcast, and maybe I’ll see you in line at the Apple store next week!</p>
tag:kfury.com,2014:Post/statement-of-purpose-revisited2014-08-21T11:29:21-07:002014-08-21T11:29:21-07:00Statement of Purpose, revisited<p>Last week my mom sent me an email including scans from the folder my dad kept of various memorabilia from my life. Among them was the statement of purpose I wrote when applying to grad school back in 2001.</p>
<p>I’ve often thought about that document but, even though I’m an assiduous information pack-rat, this piece of writing apparently slipped through the digital cracks. And so I was so happy to find that when I sent it to him for feedback so many years ago, my father had kept a hardcopy.</p>
<p>I clearly remember how hard it was to write this. What document could be more all-encompassing, more defining than a statement of purpose. Who are you? Why are you here? What do you hope to achieve? I struggled with the document for weeks leading up to my application deadline. I wrote several completely different attempts but never seemed to rise above the trite or cloying.</p>
<p>The night before the application was due, I took scissors to every attempt I’d made, literally, cutting out each paragraph, laying them all out on the floor of my apartment, discarding most, keeping a handful I was proud of, and reshuffling them into something to reveal the hidden narrative trying to get out. After that moment of clarity it was about a half-hour’s work to put it down in prose.</p>
<p>It may not hit you the same way it hit me, but this encapsulated my hopes and aspirations when looking forward beyond my undergraduate degree, and it’s even more satisfying to read from the far side of a decade beyond the graduate program I was yearning for.</p>
<p>I hope you enjoy it. Happy Throwback Thursday.</p>
<blockquote>
<p><strong>Statement of Purpose - Kevin Fox</strong></p>
<p>I want to change the world. Perhaps not in a big way, maybe not in a way people would even attribute to me, but deep in the design patterns people will come to accept as simply ‘the way things work,’ I hope to leave my mark.</p>
<p>It’s a simple truth that computers, or at least the methods by which we interact with them, are in their infancy. A person who learned to drive a car or use a telephone fifty years ago could still use the modern instantiations because their design patterns have become relatively fixed. In contrast, the computer user of today would have little hope of understanding the computer of half a century hence, in the terms by which he currently defines a computer.</p>
<p>The design patterns for the ways people and computers interact are still quickly evolving, and the ubiquitous computing movement will only accelerate that evolution. My objective in pursuing a Master of HCI degree is to play a part in this evolution, specifically in a research and development or advanced technology group at a company interested in new directions, but also motivated to move ideas quickly from the lab to the real world. More specifically, my interests lie in two areas: computer-mediated personal communications, and pre-attentive interfaces.</p>
<p>I would like to attend the HCII Masters Program because I feel that the professors, research, and curricula closely match my interests and objectives, and that this is the best place for me to realize my potential. Professor Robert Kraut’s research in social computing and the HomeNet initiative aligns closely with my interests, and Professor Brad Meyers’s work, blurring the line between the user and the programmer, is particularly interesting to me.</p>
<p>I’ve devoted several years of my life to HCI and, now that I’m continuing my formal education in the field, there is no place that I feel is more appropriate to do so than the CMU HCII.</p>
</blockquote>tag:kfury.com,2014:Post/people-tools2014-01-21T15:57:19-08:002014-01-21T15:57:19-08:00People Tools<p>It’s been a while since I’ve blogged. Lately I’ve been focusing more on observing more than expounding, breathing in more than breathing out. It’s all a cycle.</p>
<p>My uncle Alan has a similar cycle, though offset from my own. An entrepreneur before it was cool, Alan’s been running a very successful real estate company for decades. In an industry that is all about people, he’s thrived by understanding what people really want (despite what they say or even think) and using these tools to build a booming business and organization.</p>
<p>After decades of sharing fragments of these tools with his investors, tucked inside the company’s quarterly updates, Alan has compiled, written, refined, edited, added, edited again, and finished a book of 54 of these ‘<a href="http://54peopletools.com/">People Tools</a>’ and today, with a huge exhalation, it’s <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1590791428/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1590791428&linkCode=as2&tag=5587-38-20">available at Amazon</a>.</p>
<p>In a time where the bookshelves are filled with technological how-to guides from Dummies to O'Reilly, this book plays a more important role, teaching how to interface better with people and how to be better at the human side of whatever you do for work or at play.</p>
<p>Much more autobiographical than a 'self-help’ book, it’s a conversational anthology of stories-as-lessons that’s far more relevant to the human condition than the latest high-profile autobiography (sorry <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Duty-Memoirs-Secretary-at-War/dp/0307959473">Gates</a>).</p>
<p>In short, you should read it. I’ve been lucky enough to know and learn from Uncle Alan my whole life. I’m thrilled that this book gives other people a chance to learn some of what I have.</p>
tag:kfury.com,2014:Post/thank-you-for-using-google-reader2013-06-28T14:17:10-07:002013-06-28T14:17:10-07:00Thank you for using Google Reader<p>As one of the <a href="http://blog.persistent.info/2013/03/the-people-behind-google-reader.html">dozens of talented people</a> who made Google Reader a reality over the years, I would like to extend my gratitude to you, the millions of users who made it part of your routine and your lives.</p>
<p>Looking on the bright side, closing down a site with an active user base gives us all the opportunity to celebrate the product’s 7.5 year run in a much richer way than the far more common ‘last one here please turn off the lights’ kind of demise. In the last three months there has been a renaissance of activity in the RSS/newsreader world. Products that had long been idling <a href="http://netnewswireapp.com/">renewed development</a>, products that relied on Google Reader for their back-end have <a href="http://feedly.com">successfully shifted to their own infrastructure</a>, and major Web players rushed to create <a href="http://digg.com/reader">their</a> <a href="http://reader.aol.com/">own</a> <a href="http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/technology/2013/06/facebook-reportedly-working-on-news-reader-application/">readers</a> to fill the imminent gap.</p>
<p>Am I melancholy? Of course. Do I wish that Google wasn’t shutting down Reader? Duh. Yet in the midst of my mourning I’m excited by how many flowers are blooming in Reader’s wake. It’s really unprecedented. A testament both to the ever-lowering barrier to entry for website and mobile app creators, and the global demand for managing constantly growing streams of information (hardly just news sites), this is a cottage industry that is being reborn with vigor right before our eyes. I’m certain that in the coming years we’ll see a new breed of product, borne on the backs of ‘news’ and ‘social’ that both owes its invention to those aggregators that came before, and makes them look primitive in retrospect.</p>
<p>But back to the here and now: Google Reader will fall off the face of existence on Monday, so you should export all the data you’ve got in there. <a href="http://blog.persistent.info/2013/03/the-people-behind-google-reader.html">Mihai published a great tool and guide for this today</a> and there are dozens of articles giving recommendations on which <a href="https://www.google.com/search?hl=en&gl=us&tbm=nws&authuser=0&q=google+reader+replacements&oq=google+reader+replacements">Google Reader replacement</a> to turn to.</p>
<p>Wherever you go, thank you for using Reader. The most fulfilling aspect of being a UX designer is knowing that people find utility and pleasure in the things I help create, and we don’t often enough take the opportunity to thank our users.</p>
<p>Read on.</p>
tag:kfury.com,2014:Post/a-modest-google-calendar-proposal2013-06-20T18:09:54-07:002013-06-20T18:09:54-07:00A modest Google Calendar proposal<p>It’s been over seven years since I did any design work on Google Calendar, and there are always parts that I wish I’d gotten to before I moved off the project. Rough edges get smoothed with time, and products get more refined and it’s best not to hold on too tight.</p>
<p>That said, can we please advance the science of Google calendar from this, where it is today:</p>
<p><a href="https://svbtleusercontent.com/kfury_24691984465068.png"><img src="https://svbtleusercontent.com/kfury_24691984465068_small.png" alt="gcal-before.png"></a></p>
<p>to something more like this:</p>
<p><a href="https://svbtleusercontent.com/kfury_24691984600032.png"><img src="https://svbtleusercontent.com/kfury_24691984600032_small.png" alt="gcal-after.png"></a></p>
<p>That’s all, really. Consider it a lollipop to distract me from the imminent destruction of Google Reader.</p>
tag:kfury.com,2014:Post/translation-of-national-intelligence-directors-193word-statement-about-prism2013-06-07T09:10:13-07:002013-06-07T09:10:13-07:00Translation of National Intelligence Director's 193-word statement about PRISM<p>James Clapper, US Director of National Intelligence, released the following statement defending PRISM. Translation added:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>The Guardian and The Washington Post articles refer to collection of communications pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They contain numerous inaccuracies.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>We need to spin this ASAP, and make two of the most respected news outlets in the world look like sensationalist supermarket rags.</em></p>
<blockquote>
<p>Section 702 is a provision of FISA that is designed to facilitate the acquisition of foreign intelligence information concerning non-U.S. persons located outside the United States. It cannot be used to intentionally target any U.S. citizen, any other U.S. person, or anyone located within the United States.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>We ‘target’ non-U.S. persons in the middle of a wide-angle lens. If you’ve ever been called or emailed by someone who called or emailed a non-U.S. person then we’ve got data on everyone you called or emailed. It’s called ‘content chaining’, or ‘incidental collection’. Don’t worry about it. Unless you have something to worry about.</em></p>
<blockquote>
<p>Activities authorized by Section 702 are subject to oversight by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the Executive Branch, and Congress. They involve extensive procedures, specifically approved by the court, to ensure that only non-U.S. persons outside the U.S. are targeted, and that minimize the acquisition, retention and dissemination of incidentally acquired information about U.S. persons.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>Most people don’t realize that the public is supposed to be a check on the Judicial branch of government, and as long as we cloak FISC from view the public never has to worry about it.</em></p>
<blockquote class="short">
<p>Section 702 was recently reauthorized by Congress after extensive hearings and debate.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>Thankfully, Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall, both of whom are members of the Senate Intelligence Committee and had classified knowledge of PRISM and the depth to which it collects data on U.S. persons, were legally forbidden from revealing the extent or existence of the program to their Senate colleagues when the FISA Amendments Act went up for debate.</em></p>
<blockquote>
<p>Information collected under this program is among the most important and valuable foreign intelligence information we collect, and is used to protect our nation from a wide variety of threats.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to a man who rises and sleeps under the blanket of the very freedom that I provide, and then questions the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said thank you, and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a weapon and stand a post. Either way, I don’t give a damn what you think you are entitled to.</em></p>
<blockquote class="short">
<p>The unauthorized disclosure of information about this important and entirely legal program is reprehensible and risks important protections for the security of Americans.</p>
</blockquote>
<p><em>While your privacy can be waived at our convenience, ours is sacrosanct. If anyone else within our organization says a peep about this initiative they’ll find themselves so deep in shit that Bradley Manning will look like Mr. Clean.</em></p>
<hr>
<p>In other news, the NSA is considering sponsoring the creation of a prime time television series featuring a secret machine that spies on what everyone in the country is doing or saying, and the machine is portrayed as the protagonist.</p>
tag:kfury.com,2014:Post/what-an-apple-watch-is-good-for2013-02-12T10:11:00-08:002013-02-12T10:11:00-08:00What an Apple Watch is good for<p>Rather than speculate on whether Apple is making a watch, when they might unveil such a product, and how much it would sell for, I’m going to take a few minutes to talk about how such a device would fit into the ecosystem of products and why you’ll want one.</p>
<p>It wasn’t so long ago that most people wore watches and used them to tell time. Long after the majority of adults carried early-generation cellphones or pagers that kept more accurate time than fobs on wrists, we still wore them because digging out (or unholstering) a phone just to check the time was a chore.</p>
<p>As phones shrank into our pockets this slowly changed, but it wasn’t until we started seeing cellphones and pagers as small multi-function devices that we started leaving our watches on the nightstand. By 2008, <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-205_162-2488301.html">nearly two-thirds of teens never wore watches</a>, and only one in ten wore a watch daily.</p>
<p>The watch’s core function of timekeeping was easily taken up by mobile phones, and they quickly took on – and improved upon – secondary watch tasks like alarms, timers, calculators and calendars. Cases and leashes even let phones take on some of the fashion duties previously shouldered by the wristwatch. Watch sales are less than half what they were a decade ago and many watch manufacturers have pivoted to sports, driving sales of GPS watches, heart-rate monitors, and ruggedized waterproof timepieces to maintain relevance via unique functionality.</p>
<p>In a time when so many people have reached the point of attention saturation, dividing their moments between smartphones, tablets, laptops and televisions, there seems little justification for a ‘fifth screen’ that provides no new capability while depriving us of a chance to glimpse our online life while checking the time.</p>
<p><strong>Watches have become anachronisms.</strong></p>
<p>Most people would probably be surprised to discover how many times they pull out their phones on an average day. (There should be a pedometer-style app just to count phone unlocks. Oh wait, <a href="http://www.appszoom.com/android_applications/entertainment/unlock-counter_brcke.html">there is</a>.) Yet for all the power at our fingertips, most times we pull the phone out of our collective pocket it’s in response to an alert or to check a small piece of information. And it’s this kind of interaction that may give the watch a way to get back in to the game.</p>
<p>Let’s start with the simple stuff a watch could provide if it were linked via Bluetooth to the phone in your pocket, purse or bag: Of course there’s telling time. There’s also controlling your music. There’s finding out why your phone (or wrist) just buzzed or, if you’re one of those afflicted by phantom buzzing, <em>whether</em> it buzzed. Want to read the text that just came in? A 320x240 1.7" screen has exactly half the pixels of the original iPhone. Plenty of room to display meaningful data. Want to see who’s calling before you decide whether it’s worth digging out your phone? Easy.</p>
<p>But let’s go a little deeper and find the balance between a simple notification device and a full ‘wrist smartphone’. First, battery life is critical. Bluetooth 4.0 support was introduced with the iPhone 4S and allows ‘always listening’ peripherals to use extremely small amounts of power. By now most of the iOS devices in use support Bluetooth 4, and nearly every new Apple phone, iPad or iPod Touch supports it. Even the new iPod nano supports Bluetooth 4. Only the discounted iPhone 4 lacks Bluetooth 4 support, and that model will almost certainly be discontinued this Summer.</p>
<p>A Bluetooth watch slaved to a phone (like the <a href="http://getpebble.com/">Pebble</a>) gets to leverage the power of its master, but third-party watches can only integrate as deeply as the OS will let them, and as broadly as third-party developers specifically include support. An Apple watch would not only enjoy deep OS and service-level integration and APIs, but would also bring to bear Apple’s decade of experience making smaller and more powerful personal electronic devices. Most people are loath to wear a chunky watch, and Apple would never sell one. Like the iPad, in the works in one way or another for over a decade at Apple, an iWatch would never be productized until it reached a form factor that wasn’t a compromise.</p>
<p>So let’s assume a 1.7" 320x240 screen (vertical, because a landscape watch screams ‘computer-strapped-to-wrist’). Let’s also assume Apple tries to make a design statement with a curved display, lowering the profile of the watch to half that of an iPod nano on an accessory wrist strap. We may need to use an OLED display instead of LCD both because of improvements in power consumption and contrast ratio on a small bright screen and because of the difficulties in getting LCD backlighting to illuminate evenly across such a pronouncedly curved surface. Earlier today Tim Cook disparaged OLED’s color fidelity, but Apple has a long track record of dismissing technologies or form factors right up to the moment they unveil their own version, where they overcame the limitation and “got it right.”</p>
<p>The iPod nano (6th generation) had a square 240x240 1.4" display at 220ppi. A 240x320 1.7" watch would have a third more pixels and, at 235ppi, it would have a higher resolution than a MacBook Pro Retina display. More importantly, the nano proved that multitouch gestures are useful even on a 1.4" display. You wouldn’t hammer out texts on it, but as the primary input interface (secondary actually, but we’ll get there) it would be completely suitable for the general navigation and control gestures needed for wrist-top apps.</p>
<p>Let’s take a quick tour through some of the basic built-in apps and consider what value a wrist experience would bring:</p>
<ul>
<li> <strong>Messages</strong> - Being able to see new messages as they come in without having to pull out a phone? Simple and useful.</li>
<li> <strong>Calendar</strong> - See upcoming appointments, even navigate the month calendar with a bottom swipe-picker to find free time in the future.</li>
<li> <strong>Photos</strong> - Browsing albums. Probably no camera. (Dick Tracy will be crushed.)</li>
<li> <strong>Maps</strong> - Current location on a pinch-zoomable mini-map. Walking directions. Automatic “where did I leave my car’ feature, based on the last time the phone connected to your car’s bluetooth. Throw in a compass and accelerometer and you have a powerful live scrolling map on your wrist. This is actually pretty killer.</li>
<li> <strong>Weather</strong> - At a glance. Weather has always felt like it was designed for the small screen.</li>
<li> <strong>Stocks</strong> - See weather. Charts, scrolling portfolio list. Done.</li>
<li> <strong>Reminders</strong> - Shopping and to-do lists are particularly useful on the wrist when your hands are busy, and geofencing makes it even better.</li>
<li> <strong>Clock</strong> - Well, yeah. With timers, alarms, and stopwatches of course.</li>
<li> <strong>Passbook</strong> - This is where it starts to get really interesting. Passbook’s utility is growing now that you can use it in place of tickets at many movie theaters, instead of your wallet at Starbucks and instead of your boarding passes on many airlines. This would be even easier (and yes, cooler) if you just had to flash your wrist at the reader instead of fishing out your phone.</li>
</ul>
<p>Consider that any iOS app developer could quickly add a second, basic interface to their app, one that would run on the watch. Pandora would have a station selector and standard play/pause buttons. Facebook and Twitter would do well at formatting their micro-content to a micro-screen.</p>
<p>With an accelerometer and deep integration with the phone, an iWatch would easily be a replacement for the recent spate of wrist-based fitness trackers. Fitbits, Jawbones UP and Nike Fuel bands would become redundant when Apple releases its own fitness app, and/or incorporates a ‘fitness API’ into the OS for third-parties to leverage.</p>
<p>While the iWatch would be a fantastic ‘lightweight consumption’ device, a small touchscreen doesn’t lend itself well to composition tasks. Sure, playing and pausing music is fine, but replying to a text? No way. But this apparent deficiency would actually be the iWatch’s masterstroke.</p>
<p><strong>Siri.</strong></p>
<p>The watch would have only one button, on the side. A single press brings the watch to the home screen. Two presses puts it to sleep. Holding the button down for a moment brings up Siri, just as it does on your iPhone. A microphone in the watch accepts your commands and the audio is sent to the phone for processing (and from there to the cloud, if onboard processing hasn’t yet made it to iOS).</p>
<p>Now an iWatch is a fully functional texting client. Voice commands become the fastest (but not the only) way to pull up most pieces of information or to execute most commands. Initiate a phone call. Create calendar entries, find locations in Maps, check the weather or stocks, add reminders. Do the quick single-action tasks that fill your day without having to mode switch from the real world into ‘iOS land’ just to add an item to a shopping list.</p>
<p>Since the watch would probably have a speaker as well as a microphone you could use it for phone calls in a pinch, though you’d probably still pull the phone out for that, or use a Bluetooth or corded headset.</p>
<p>The watch itself would need little to no memory of its own. It would be a thin client tied to the iOS device. If your phone runs out of juice the watch would still have a minimal amount of utility, but not much. Think alarms, but no calendar access. If you leave your phone behind somewhere though, you can bet your watch will let you know when it falls out of Bluetooth range.</p>
<p>Without the heavy-lifting that an iPod nano contends with an iWatch should be able to last several days between charges, and should be able to get a day’s worth of charge in the time it takes to shower. I’d be surprised if it didn’t have a Lightning connector.</p>
<p>It’s possible that such a phone could have more standalone functionality, with a mini-runtime for calendar and other apps, but that starts to fuzz the line between a secondary input and display peripheral and another device with its own codebase, which could be a much bigger hassle for developers and cause more user confusion.</p>
<p>Strategically, an iWatch makes a lot of sense. It’s a (ahem) peripheral strategy. Unlike the latest generation of iPhone, it can fail without spelling disaster. It doesn’t cannibalize sales of other Apple products. The idea of watches is a proven one, and by overcoming (and actually being supported by) the reasons that watches fell of favor over the last 20 years, there’s a good chance that we’ll see their return.</p>
<p>Apple can easily make this a proprietary play. The OS-level integration means nobody else can play at their level on the iOS platform. An Android initiative would be challenged by the slow adoption rate of new Android OS releases and hardware fragmentation, in addition to possible turf wars between Android device vendors.</p>
<p>Like iTunes, an iWatch can also be a differentiator, driving new user adoption in iOS. All else being equal, they may go to the platform with the integrated watch. For the hundreds of millions of current iOS users, the watch is an opportunity to get more out of their current device at a marginal cost.</p>
<p>Above all, done right, an iWatch could be a play in the classic style of both Apple and Google: An attempt to dramatically redefine a market that had grown stagnant through lack of innovation.</p>
<p>So, when will we see it? If I had to guess I’d say we’d see an official announcement by this Spring’s WWDC at the latest. If you want developers to augment their apps to support a wrist-top experience, you’d have to sell the vision at WWDC, if not before.</p>
<p>And if I guess correctly, this year’s WWDC is going to be largely about Siri. It’s been a year and a half of incremental changes, and given Google’s performance lead in on-board voice recognition I have to think Apple is burning the midnight oil to match that capability while also creating a cogent strategy to extend Siri’s capability to third party apps.</p>
<p>Oh, and that front-facing camera I said wouldn’t be there? Maybe next year. You’ve gotta have a reason to upgrade, after all.</p>
tag:kfury.com,2014:Post/several-prestigious-universities-follow-california-with-ambitious-new-logos2012-12-10T12:00:00-08:002012-12-10T12:00:00-08:00Several prestigious universities follow University of California with ambitious new logos<p><img src="http://fury.com/images/badlogo/ucalifornia.png" alt="University of California"></p>
<p>This week the University of California unveiled a striking new logo and brand for their network of campuses, and it hasn’t gone un-noticed. Following the trend of emotions and bright colors over words and nuance, several of the nation’s most prestigious centers of higher education scrambled to cement their own continued relevance in this new era.</p>
<p>First to react was Harvard University:</p>
<p><img src="http://fury.com/images/badlogo/harvard.png" alt="The Harvard Square"></p>
<p>Steeped in tradition but wanting to keep its image fresh and accessible to future generations, Harvard sought a logo that represented its historical role of bridging the gap between the upper-middle class and the ultra-wealthy.</p>
<p>The red square is representative of Harvard Square.</p>
<p>Just across Cambridge, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology displayed their own vision of the future, seen here:</p>
<p><img src="http://fury.com/images/badlogo/mit.png" alt="MIT wordmark"></p>
<p>Formalizing its cherished nickname, ‘The 'Tute’, the new wordmark also integrates important aspects of the university’s cultural history. The drop-shadow, invented there in 1976, is integrated tastefully into the logo, as is the quote “How does that make you feel?”</p>
<p>One of the first statements made by ELIZA, the groundbreaking chatbot created by MIT professor Dr. Joseph Weizenbaum in 1966, the statement is included to give a sense of introspection, hope, and ambition to those who read it.</p>
<p>Back in California, Stanford, which <a href="http://www.stanforddaily.com/2012/11/15/1073130/">recently unveiled their own new branding system</a>, scrambled embarrassedly to scrap it and replace it with the Stanford Worm, shown here:</p>
<p><img src="http://fury.com/images/badlogo/stanford.png" alt="The Stanford Worm"></p>
<p>Stanford’s press office announced the new logo this afternoon, citing that “The university’s mascot, the Stanford Cardinal, is a bird. The early bird gets the worm. We want to attract the most ambitious students in the world, so what better logo to bring them here than an enticing worm?”</p>
<p>Asked why the university eschewed its traditional cardinal red in the new branding, they replied, “Everyone else is using red, and we wanted to be different.”</p>
<p>Finally, the University of Colorado, seeing to keep itself well outside the umbrella of the larger and more famous UC, also relied on a fresh new palette to differentiate itself from the pack.</p>
<p><img src="http://fury.com/images/badlogo/ucolorado.png" alt="University of Colorado"></p>