New universal iOS app from Apple. Use it to manage your Wi-Fi network and AirPort base stations from your iPhone or iPad.
“A Second Interface to iOS” →
John Gruber in his review of the iPhone 4S:
In a sense, Siri is like a second interface to iOS. The first interface is the app interface. Launch, tap, drag, slide. The Siri interface is a different world. As stated above, this new interface is in many ways the opposite of the regular one — open-ended and implicit instead of narrowly defined and explicit. I don’t mean to imply that Siri doesn’t fit in or feel right at home — it does. But Siri is indicative of an AI-focused ambition that Apple hasn’t shown since before Steve Jobs returned to the company. Prior to Siri, iOS struck me being designed to make it easy for us to do things. Siri is designed to do things for us.
Apple’s Fourth Interface
When introducing iPhone in 2007 Steve Jobs listed three revolutionary user interfaces that Apple has brought to the market: the mouse, the click wheel, and multi-touch.
Now they’ve brought a fourth interface: voice recognition and artificial intelligence. Siri is Apple’s fourth interface.
Steve said that each of the three user interfaces made possible a revolutionary new type of product. The mouse enabled the Macintosh. The click wheel enabled the iPod. Multi-touch enabled the iPhone. What will Siri enable?
“I Hope You Don’t Say That to Those Other Mobile Phones, Jim” →
Jim Dalrymple’s iPhone 4S review. Regarding Siri:
Siri is not your typical voice recognition technology. You don’t dictate to Siri, you interact and have a conversation with Siri. It’s difficult to explain how good Siri is, but you’ll find out soon enough.
Maybe Siri being iPhone 4S-only truly is just a sales tactic. Maybe Apple is confident that Siri is so great and clever that it will actually compel a decent amount of people to upgrade who weren’t otherwise planning on it. However, on the other hand, for some reason that doesn’t sound very Apple-y to me.
“This Is the Best iPhone Yet” →
MG Siegler’s review of the iPhone 4S. Regarding Siri:
A number of folks have written that while Siri looks good, it seems like a feature that gives good demo but won’t actually get used. I disagree. I think this is a feature that will sell the device. And I think all of Apple’s rivals will have to act quickly to counter it. We’ve all seen the science fiction television shows and films where people talk to their computers like human beings and the computer understands them. That future is now.
“Like It Says on the Box, I Was Designed by Apple in California.” →
Joshua Topolsky’s short and sweet iPhone 4S review.
Jason Snell’s Conversation with Siri →
I’m Impressed at how quickly Siri takes dictation — when I’ve used Dragon Dictation on my 4 it is about half as fast. Of course, I’m sure part of Siri’s speed has to do with the 4S’s A5 chip. And side note: Siri needs to learn how to spell iPhone 4S.
From the Archives: The Potential of MobileMe →
Written a year ago last week, I’d say it was pretty spot on.
The Free 3GS →
Tony Bradley on why the iPhone 3GS is Apples “secret weapon”:
The iPhone 3GS will still have iOS 5 once it ships on Wednesday. It will still have iMessage, and access to iCloud. It will have Twitter integration, reminders, and notifications. It will have AirPlay, and—perhaps most importantly—it will have access to the 500,000-plus apps and games available from the Apple App Store.
There are a lot of reasons that someone in the market for a free smartphone will eagerly embrace the iPhone 3GS.
I don’t think Apple ever releases model-specific breakdowns, but I would be very curious to see what the breakdown between 3GS, 4, and 4S sales are in a year from now. Also it will be interesting to see how how the 3GS fares in future NPD Mobile Phone Track reports.
Indroducing The Syndicate RSS Sponsorship Network →
Starting November 1, RSS sponsorships on shawnblanc.net will be handled through The Syndicate.
The Syndicate is the first RSS sponsorship network I know of, and I am honored to be a part of its starting lineup. The network has some incredible and influential sites with a very healthy readership: Khoi Vinh, Marco Arment, Horace Dediu, Ben Brooks, Stephen Hackett, Kyle Baxter, Marcelo Somers, and myself.
Booking a sponsorship on The Syndicate gets your product, service, or company promoted across all the sites in the network.
The Syndicate network’s readership is creative, influential, entrepreneurial, and nerdy. We reach an audience of over 92,000 daily RSS subscribers and more than 1,300,000 monthly web page views.
We’ve just launched today and already 2011 is sold out save one slot.
Timing for Mac [Sponsor] →
Many thanks to Timing for Mac for once again sponsoring the RSS feed.
Timing is a utility app, it runs in the background in your Menu Bar, and it’s primary function is to keep track of how you spend your time when at your computer.
I have been using Timing ever since I first learned of it nearly 3 months ago. I have it set to start automatically on login, and I just ignore it and let it do its thing. What I like about this app is:
- The fact that it uses virtually no CPU when running in the background.
- The way it tracks and displays how I am spending my time.
- Its ability to build custom projects and contexts that target only certain apps.
It’s important to me to stay focused and intentional about how I spend my time throughout the day. Members of Shawn Today will know that a few weeks ago I once again began making a detailed schedule for my days and mapping my to-do list in OmniFocus to blocks of time in my day.
When the day or week or month is over, I can open up the Timing interface and examine which applications received my time and attention. Timing does all the heavy lifting of tracking what apps I’m active in, what websites I’m spending time on, and more. All I have to do is asses the information and see if the way I’m spending my time in reality is the way I perceive I’m spending my time.
Timing for Mac not only keeps track of which applications I’m using, but it also keeps track of what I am doing in the app. So, for example, in the past 30 days I have spent 17 hours actively working in MarsEdit (keep in mind I do most of my long-form writing in other apps). But Timing even breaks that down and lets me know exactly how much time I’ve spent working on posts for this site, Tool & Toys, or Shawn Today.
Which means I can bundle certain apps and certain paths within those apps into “projects”. And a project can be treated as a context, an area of focus, or whatever.
For example: MarsEdit, Byword, TextEdit, and iA Writer are all in my “writing” project. And since I can have the same app in multiple projects I can place Twitter in a “communication” project as well as a “time sinks” project.
As I said before, you need to give Timing at least a week or more to collect some useful stats that you can look over in aggregate to see how you are spending your time, where you’re spending it, and if there are certain apps or websites you need to be more conscious of in order to be more focused and productive.
I use it and I recommend it. Moreover, this week only, Timing is on sale for 40% off in the Mac App Store.
Sans-Qwikster
Reed Hastings, 3 weeks ago:
For the past five years, my greatest fear at Netflix has been that we wouldn’t make the leap from success in DVDs to success in streaming. Most companies that are great at something — like AOL dialup or Borders bookstores — do not become great at new things people want (streaming for us) because they are afraid to hurt their initial business. Eventually these companies realize their error of not focusing enough on the new thing, and then the company fights desperately and hopelessly to recover. Companies rarely die from moving too fast, and they frequently die from moving too slowly. […]
Some members will likely feel that we shouldn’t split the businesses, and that we shouldn’t rename our DVD by mail service. Our view is with this split of the businesses, we will be better at streaming, and we will be better at DVD by mail. It is possible we are moving too fast — it is hard to say.
Reed Hastings, today:
It is clear that for many of our members two websites would make things more difficult, so we are going to keep Netflix as one place to go for streaming and DVDs.
This means no change: one website, one account, one password… in other words, no Qwikster.
And then, in the very next sentence:
While the July price change was necessary, we are now done with price changes.
Besides pointing out the complete change in tone and conviction between Reed’s announcement from 3 weeks ago and his announcement today, I have two questions:
- After all the conviction he had 3 weeks ago about the fast yet necessary move to create Qwikster, if Reed is now admitting that it was the wrong decision, why should I believe that their current price structure is as sustainable as they say? What if the people who researched and suggested the new pricing model the same people who suggested spinning off the DVD-by-mail service?
-
Has a company ever gone from being so beloved by its customers to being so disliked in such a short amount of time? Sure, nobody likes price hikes, but the back-and-forth wishy washiness of Reed Hastings’ announcements have made things so much worse.
Since the July 12 announcement about the new pricing structure, Netflix stock has dropped from $297.98 to around $120. I’m almost expecting yet another blog post in a week or two with another apology of how they messed up again. Oy.
iPhone 4S Pre-Orders Top One Million in First 24 Hours →
Let’s play with some numbers: AT&T reported that their first-day pre-orders were over 200,000. That leaves 800,000 remaining units. Let’s just assume those remaining units were split evenly between Verizon, Sprint, and the additional countries you could order an iPhone from: the UK, Canada, Australia, France, Germany, and Japan. That would mean each saw more than 114,000 pre-orders for the iPhone 4S.
Of course the numbers didn’t actually land like that, but no matter how you slice it, it’s still a lot of pre-orders for just a 24-hour period.
If Apple had introduced a new form factor would they have been able to keep up with this demand?
How John August Writes →
In the spirit of The Setup, John August shares his writing routine, hardware, software, etc. Oh my nerd. (Via Garrett Murray.)