Edges of the Fiberhood  →

On this week’s episode of The B&B Podcast, Ben and I talked about the Kansas City rollout of Google Fiber and the just-announced Google Fiber TV, internet speeds and privacy policies, Mountain Lion, the Mac App Store, Notification Center, Sparrow’s acquisition and email clients in general, and speculations about the future of Apple TV and how that could relate to either Siri and or the theoretical iPad Mini.

Edges of the Fiberhood

Google Fiber  →

The long and the short of it is that Google will begin offering Gigabit internet access to Kansas City, KS and central Kansas City, MO starting around September 9.

They’re offering three plans:

  • Gigabit Internet for $70/month.
  • Internet plus their newly-announced Google Fiber TV service for $120/month (and the TV plan comes with a free Nexus 7 to use as your remote control).
  • Or free internet (for up to 7 years) if you’ll pay for them to run the fiber optic cable to your house. It’s not gigabit speeds though; they’ll cap you at 5Mb down and 1Mb up.

Since each house that signs up for Google Fiber will have to have a fiber optic cable physically run to their home, Google is picking which neighborhoods to begin residential activation in by having people pre-register their “fiberhood”. You pay $10 to pre-register your house and then the neighborhoods with the most registrations will get set up first.

Alas, since I live on the southern edge of Kansas City, Google Fiber isn’t yet available in my neighborhood.

Google Fiber

The iPad’s Missing Price Points  →

Ryan Jones:

On a past Apple conference call, Tim Cook said “one thing we’ll make sure is that we don’t leave a price umbrella for people”. What’s that? A price umbrella is when a company with dominant market share maintains high prices, leaving an opening for new competitors to enter at lower price points. In the case of the iPad, the price umbrella until recently was at $499. Someone could enter that market at lower prices and exhibit classic disruption to push them out from the bottom up.

(Via Jim Dalrymple.)

The iPad’s Missing Price Points

Mountain Lion Miscellany

As a card-carrying member of the Apple Fanboy Brotherhood™ it’s my unspoken responsibility to write something nerdy about the Mountain Lion. And so here are a few of my favorite changes, updates, and nit picks which are to be found in OS X 10.8.

(My article about Mountain Lion and the simplification of OS X is here.)

In Safari

  • The blue progress bar that loads in the Address Field has a faded out right-hand edge instead of the sharp edge. Once the page has fully loaded the blue progress bar shoots across the remainder of the Omni Box and then it all fades out from dark blue to light blue to white. And since the “Reader” button is blue, it’s as if the loading bar fills the Reader button up with color.

Interestingly, it was the animation of the blue loader that first attracted me to the Mac and OS X back in 2004. And even now it’s one of my favorite “little things” about the operating system.

  • The Syncing of iCloud Tabs is great. I only have one Mac so it’s currently of no use to me, but I’m very much looking forward to when it will sync my tabs across all my devices including my iPhone and iPad.

  • The RSS button in Safari is gone completely. If you come across a site and you want to subscribe to its RSS feed you’ll need to either have your own bookmarklet that adds the site to Google Reader or Fever, or the site will need a link to its RSS feed.

  • Click and hold on a bookmark’s name in the Bookmarks Bar and you get the option to rename it.

  • Rocking a lot of tabs? Do a pinch on the trackpad (or View → Show All Tabs) and all the tabs will turn into their own mini-window within the current window and you can scroll through them. It’s pretty great.

Safari Tabs

Regarding Notification Center

  • Without some fine tuning Notification Center could prove to be a bit distracting. While I love the implementation from a design and functionality standpoint, I’ve found that more often than not the notifications waiting for me inside Notification Center are irrelevant by the time I look at them. If it’s not showing me emails I’ve already read then it’s showing me Tweets I’ve already seen, or calendar events that are already over. While I love the growl-like pop-up notifications, I think I’m still learning how to get the most out of Notification Center itself.

  • You can define a system-wide keyboard shortcut to show/hide Notification Center by going to: System Prefs → Keyboard → Keyboard Shortcuts → Mission Control → Show Notification Center.

  • You can also launch Notification Center from your trackpad by sliding two fingers onto the trackpad from the right-hand edge. And then, a two-finger swipe from left-to-right will hide Notification Center.

  • With Notification Center showing, if you scroll to reveal the top then you’ll discover a preference to not show notifications. When this is enabled, the icon fades to gray and all alert popups and banners are hidden. If a calendar reminder goes off while Notification Center is set to not show alerts and banners, then your Mac does not alert you to the event. You can also enable this by simply Option-clicking on the Notification Center icon in the Menu Bar.

  • Notifications for new emails only appear when Mail is running. So Notification Center doesn’t get new email messages on its own.

In Mail

  • New layout of the email message window: The date sent is in the top-right corner, next to an avatar of that person (If there is one. And since Mountain Lion can link your Contacts with their Twitter profile, you may start seeing some people’s email avatars as being the same as their Twitter avatars.).

  • Deleting an email takes you to the one below or above the current in-view message based on which way you were previously navigating the message list. I love having the next-below message come into view as, in my opinion, it’s better quickly processing through emails.

  • New options for emailing links from Safari: when you hit CMD+SHIFT+I to send the current web page you can send it as just a link, a PDF, the text-only version, or the whole website embedded within the email body. I always opt for just a link:

Mailing a Web Page

AirPlay

The “Display Preferences” icon that used to sit in the Menu Bar has been changed from its old Cinema Display-like icon to the AirPlay icon found also in iOS.

With AirPlay you can now mirror your Mac’s display and audio to your Apple TV. However, the system sound only channels through the HDMI cable of the Apple TV. And so, if, like me, you have video piped to your TV via HDMI but audio piped to a separate sound system via the optical audio cable, then the sound system does not receive the audio signal when doing AirPlay mirroring from the Mac.

But fortunately, if you AirPlay a video using the iTunes option (found in the lower-right-hand corner of iTunes) then the audio will go through the optical audio port.

RIP: “iCal”

iCal is now called “Calendar”. If, like me, your LaunchBar habits die hard, did you know you can tell LaunchBar that you want “ic” to be the abbreviation for Calendar.app? Yeah. Just type “Calen” (or whatever it takes until Calendar is selected), then Control click on LaunchBar and choose “Assign Abbreviation”.

Assigning a Custom Abbreviation in LaunchBar

Contacts

  • The application formerly known as Address Book threw off the horrible page-turn functionality from Lion.

  • You can send someone an iMessage from within Contacts. I hope LaunchBar adopts this functionality. It’d be great to pull up someone’s contact info and then fire off an iMessage to them all from the keyboard.

Sending an iMessage From the Contacts App

The Other Two New Apps

Believe it or not, I don’t use Reminders or Notes. I use OmniFocus and nvALT with Simplenote.

The Finder and Overall OS Miscellany

  • In a Finder window, if you choose to sort by kind, then your files and folders are, well, sorted by kind. And as you scroll, the file-type header stays at the top. Like in iOS when scrolling a list, such as Calendar and how the date sticks to the top until you scroll through to the next date and so on.

  • While downloading a file from Safari, you see a progress bar within the file icon itself and a time countdown:

Downloading a File in Safari

This in-context progress bar is for several things, such as transferring or copying files and folders.

  • A couple new Menu Bar icons: Notification Center and AirPlay. If you like to keep your Menu Bar as sparse as possible, Apple is making it an uphill battle.

  • The keyboard shortcut for “Save As” is back, but it’s different. Apple says: Use Command-Shift-Option-S to save a document using a different name and location.

Mountain Lion Miscellany

Mountain Lion and the Simplification of OS X

“When you first start off trying to solve a problem, the first solutions you come up with are very complex, and most people stop there. But if you keep going, and live with the problem and peel more layers of the onion off, you can often times arrive at some very elegant and simple solutions. Most people just don’t put in the time or energy to get there.”
— Steve Jobs

Software’s natural vector is towards complexity.

When thinking of how an application can be improved we love to ask what could and should be added. Rarely do we ask what is present that, once removed, will make the software better.

A smart man once said, “Sometimes a design decision is what you don’t put in, as opposed to what you put in.”

With the iPhone OS Apple got a clean start to build something insanely great and incredibly simple. And that’s exactly what they did. What Jeff Atwood points out regarding the iPad is true also of iOS:

Once you strip away all the needless complexities, isn’t a tablet the simplest form of a computer there can be? […] it sidesteps all the accumulated cruft and hacks the PC ecosystem has accreted over the last 30 years.

This is what Apple got to do with iOS. When Apple was designing the operating system that would run on the iPhone they had no rules, no traditions, no boundaries.

Anything that wasn’t ready for the iPhone OS didn’t have to be included (two premier examples: copy and paste and 3rd-party apps) because Apple had no responsibility to support any of the hacks, cruft, or dated workflows which their Mac OS had accumulated over the years.

Apple took their brand new device with its brand new input method and brand new operating system and they started over. And, for better or worse, Apple ended up writing the rules that all the world would play by for what we know now is the beginning of the Post-PC Era.

Over the past 5 years, Apple’s software and hardware have re-defined the mobile and tablet industries. Google, Samsung, RIM, Amazon, HP, and others have all tried to follow suit. But to date their offerings have been sub par; good enough at best.

When you’re competing with Apple, good enough is not good enough. Because even to Apple, good enough isn’t good enough. If you use only the resources, time, and knowledge currently at your disposal you’ll never break through into a superior product.

Good enough is the byproduct of doing the best you can do based only on the resources and knowledge currently available to you.

Throughout Apple’s recently-released recruitment video, they spend a lot of time talking about the company’s internal commitment to excellence and innovation.

About 1:25 into the video we meet Gary who says, “There is no such thing as good enough. It just has to be the best.”

Anyone who is even remotely familiar with the leadership attitude of Steve Jobs and internal attitude of Apple knows this to be true.

But the story in this video that stood out to me the most was an actual example of what it means for there to be no such thing as “good enough” at Apple. John, who was on the iPad 2 Product Design Team, tells the story of the magnets on the Smart Cover:

When we started the design of the iPad 2 we knew from the very beginning that the cover was going to be an important part of the story. The challenge was: How do you attach the cover?

Our implementation of magnets was a really challenging engineering task. One of the engineers on the team actually became an expert in doing computer simulations on magnetic field.

It was a tremendous amount of work by a large number of people who, through the course of this product, have become genuine experts in new areas because they had to figure out how to make this product.

This story of the iPad 2 magnets could be extrapolated out to convey the same story about OS X. To develop iOS, Apple had to become genuine experts in the area of very powerful, very simple software. Now they are taking that new knowledge of all they’ve learned and they are applying it to OS X.

iOS is both the learning ground and the excuse for the simplification of OS X.

To build iOS, Apple needed its years of experience making OS X. And now, to refine OS X, Apple needs its newfound expertise from iOS to bring power and simplicity back to the Mac.

As complex software evolves, usually it turns into less than the sum of its parts due to its increasingly complex nature. Not often does it become more usable and more user friendly over time. That a piece of software — let alone an entire operating system — can progress and add functionality while staying simple is nothing short of a design miracle.

Mountain Lion and the Simplification of OS X