IT Director for a non-profit in Washington, DC. Man About Internet.
Horace Dediu, writing for Asymco:
Last week I proposed that there were two significant markets for the new iPhone: 1) the existing iPhone user base 2) smartphone “non-consumers”. Today I want to dig a bit deeper into the first market to get an idea of what it amounts to. Very good analysis.
Credit to Jim Dalrymple who linked to this article over on The Loop. Original article:
According to The National, accidents fell 20% in Dubai and 40% in Abu Dhabi. Lieutenant General Dahi Khalfan Tamim from the Dubai Police department said his force saw the largest decrease among young drivers and men. Jim made a good point: If BlackBerry users had Siri, they wouldn’t need to read their texts manually.
Ben Brooks, writing on The Brooks Review:
Instapaper has now gone version 4 and Marco Arment has been kind enough to let me test out this new version. I can say that this new version is, without a doubt, fantastic. Arment is fond of saying that Instapaper has the most generous update policy (every update has been free) and I would argue that the only software company more generous is Apple with iOS. But, why — why wouldn’t Arment charge for these fantastic updates? Let’s let him explain:
There’s no good way to charge for updates in the App Store. Maybe Apple will add this functionality in the future, but they don’t seem to care so far. Maybe they’ll add it when they want upgrade pricing for the next version of Aperture or Final Cut Studio. But I’m not sure I’d charge regardless. I get a lot of goodwill from my customers by continually improving the product that they bought months or years ago, and that goodwill helps spread the word and drive new sales. I know I charge a “premium” compared to many other apps, but I want people to feel like Instapaper is a ridiculously good deal. In my book Instapaper is certainly a “ridiculously good deal” and that may sum up Instapaper 4 perfectly. Read Ben's entire review for a complete overview of each new feature.
Marco Arment, posting on the Instapaper blog, has announced the release of Instapaper 4.0 for the iPhone & iPad. Marco's post outlines, in detail, all of the new features packed into 4.0 including: * complete navigation UI redesign * tweaked reading UI redesign * support for wikipedia lookup * footnote support * multi-select support * expanded sharing support for browsing - see all links in your Twitter/Facebook/Tumblr feeds that friends have shared * complete reading and archive list search support * app directory showcasing Instapaper compatible apps * other minor features App Store Link
M.G. Siegler, writing for Techcrunch:
In the bigger picture, this is something that Apple seems to understand time and time again that their rivals do not. Technology is an ever-important part of everyones’ lives, but the only way to make it truly accessible to the vast majority of users is to humanize it. That’s Siri. Google, Microsoft, etc — they all fail miserably at doing this. There are many good sections that it was hard to quote just a single paragraph. Read the entire article.
Federico Viticci, writing for MacStories:
With the iPhone 4S, Apple went back to announcing “1 million units sold” — only with pre-orders and after 24 hours, not three days. In the launch weekend, as reported this morning, the company reported over 4 million iPhone 4S units sold in the seven countries the device launched on October 14th: US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Australia and Japan. Also, check out MacStories' graph:
CUPERTINO, California—October 17, 2011— Apple® today announced it has sold over four million of its new iPhone® 4S, just three days after its launch on October 14. In addition, more than 25 million customers are already using iOS 5, the world’s most advanced mobile operating system, in the first five days of its release, and more than 20 million customers have signed up for iCloud®, a breakthrough set of free cloud services that automatically and wirelessly store your content in iCloud and push it to all your devices. iPhone 4S is available today in the US, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the UK, and will be available in 22 more countries on October 28 and more than 70 countries by the end of the year.
While Apple usually gets everything right, they occasionally drop the ball. Here is an instance of them dropping the ball: Marco Arment writes:
Instapaper has stored its downloaded articles in Caches for years, since I didn’t want to slow down iTunes syncing for my customers or enlarge their backups unnecessarily, and full restores don’t happen often enough for it to be a problem for most people. This new policy now locks me into using Caches: I no longer have a choice. But in iOS 5, there’s an important change: Caches and tmp — the only two directories that aren’t backed up — are “cleaned” out when the device is low on space. … A common scenario: an Instapaper customer is stocking up an iPad for a long flight. She syncs a bunch of movies and podcasts, downloads some magazines, and buys a few new games, leaving very little free space. Right before boarding, she remembers to download the newest issue of The Economist. (I think highly of my customers.) This causes free space to fall below the threshold that triggers the cleaner, which — in the background, unbeknownst to her — deletes everything that was saved in Instapaper. Later in the flight, with no internet connectivity, she goes to launch Instapaper and finds it completely empty. … When customers save an article with Instapaper, get a book in iBooks, or download a podcast with Instacast, they expect it to be there next time they launch the app. Even though it’s technically redownloadable, customers see that as their data — they put it there, and it’s theirs to remove if and when they see fit. When the cleaner wipes it out, it appears that the app has failed and deleted their data. And customers won’t know that it’s an iOS 5 behavior — they’ll understandably blame the app developers. Even though it’s not our fault, it’s certainly going to become our problem. There needs to be a file storage location that behaves the way Caches did before iOS 5: it’s not backed up to iTunes or iCloud, it’s not synced, but it’s also never deleted unless the app is deleted. I posted large excerpts of Marco's article because I want to help get the word out on this issue. This is generally more than I would like to repost from someone else's site, but considering the circumstances, I would think Marco would be fine with it.
