minimalist

Ok, this was damn cool piece. I was one of the people who considered a senior Verge editor leaving the internet for a year to be a self-indulgent gimmick. But this is not the kind of naval gazing articles I anticipated would come of such a stunt. If this helps the Verge (and Paul) spread their wings and go deeper than ever before then maybe it is a good thing after all.

Ok, if we ditch the technical portions how about practical information that actually tells us how this things perform? A description of the sound quality might be a good start since 700 bucks for a small powered sub is a pushing up into audiophile territory. A video of a quarter on edge on the cabinet top tells me very little about how this thing actually sounds.

Yeah, driver size and frequency response might be a good thing to mention in a review of a sub. You can get some fantastic 10" powered subs for $700 that go way deep. This thing looks slimline so the drivers appear capsule shaped. I’m guessing from the photos the drivers might be 4 or 5 inches wide and maybe 6 or 7 inches long? I am somewhat suspicious of this things ability to produce the deepest frequencies.

This half assed solution will go nowhere. The only way book publishers can fight Amazon’s dominance is by enabling independent ebook sellers to sell books with the tagline “our ebooks come with no limitations”. “Our books come with some limitations” just doesn’t have the same ring to it does it? People won;t bother to go out of their way for that. They will just continue to buy locked down books from Amazon because its easier.

Even if Apple is guilty of encouraging publishers to conspire against Amazon, why on earth would you want the only two real competitors against Amazon’s complete dominance of the ebook market to “go away”? You do realize that competition is the only reason Amazon prices books so low?

Personally I hope this case forces publishers to drop DRM so that more booksellers can compete against an Amazon dominated marketplace.

Having free navigation would be a nice bonus add for casual users but its not a substitute for on phone navigation. Many times I need my navigation when the network is out of reach.

I’d be fine with apple using their own maps as long as they function as well as the ones offered by Google.

It’s all in the implementation and what’s being shared. Spotify makes it easy to listen privately when you don’t want to share and listen publically when you do. The WaPost social reading app spammed everyone’s feeds with every random thing their friends clicked on.

That’s not frictionless sharing. That’s frictionless vomiting. Sharing requires discernment…. Something these apps can not provide.

I’m actually starting to avoid “free” apps with their aggressive ads and constant pestering to purchase every little thing possible. The freemium model has been so exploited by sleezeballs that its become a real race a race to the bottom. There’s certainly no shortage of shortage of bottom feeders looking to cash in on it (Capcom selling 99 dollar buckets of “smurfberries” to kids, Zynga integrating ads into their draw something’s gameplay, etc)

The apps that I end up using the most are usually the ones that provide a polished experience at a fair price.

I’m thinking the exact same thing. The iPad physical volume buttons are hidden under the hood when you have it propped up on your lap with a smart cover. And double tapping home and swiping to the left to adjust the volume seems overwrought.

Not one reviewer that I know of has mentioned another glaring omission…. a volume slider. If you are listening to a playlist and the song volume jumps drastically, the last thing you want to do is fumble around with the iPad to get to the awkwardly located physical volume buttons. Double tapping home and swiping to the left also seems a cumbersome solution. An always available, on screen volume slider (like the ones that just about every other music playing app on the planet prominently features) would seem to be a no brainer.

If anything unplugging in the modern western workplace is a luxury of the wealthy or powerful. Do you think Paul could have unplugged (and kept his job) if he were a lowly intern at the Verge? Something tells me not.

A senior editor at a technology blog unplugging and having a Walden moment may make for clever weeklong experiment for a week. But something tells me a year of this is going to drag on.

Do not get me started on AutoCAD’s horrible new ribbon. That damn thing got me to give up Autocad and go straight to Revit. I figured if I was going to have to completely relearn software I might as well choose software that’s in its ascendancy, not its decline. The result is that our office is buying fewer seats of Autocad and more of Revit (instead of buying both like we used to). By making needless changes to Autocad that pull the rug out from underneath their users, Autodesk effectively decreased their revenue.

“Why not just split the programs?”

Which might just be MS’s undoing. As we move away from reliance on all things Microsoft to a diverse world of connected post PC devices there is less and less reason to HAVE to use office.

Not to mention Amazon often sells albums for 5.99 or 7.99. That’s a whole lot better than the 17 and 18 dollars a CD we were paying in 1999.

I agree. People forget that the Redbook Audio standard contained on CD’s was created over 30 years ago and is probably not the most efficient way to pack bits into a file in the year 2012. Modern compression algorithms have given us lossless audio (Dolby TrueHD, etc) on Blu-rays that takes up a fraction of the space of PCM audio but deliver the exact same waveform. So why is it such a stretch to imagine that even though lossy algorithms eliminate some information that they are much more efficient at storing data than system designed in 1980?

Why do people always assume that anybody who would be happy with an mp3 or AAC’s sound quality is a simpleton using stock iPod ear buds? I have a relatively expensive home system and can hear no difference between the two formats in the blind tests I’ve done. When it comes to music I never want to deal with a plastic disc again but that doesn’t mean I ’m oblivious to quality. It means that the quality difference, if there is any, is so infinitesimal that its not worth my time.

I can’t imagine why most people will even need to think about transcoding. People are already happy with what they have and we are quickly moving towards a cloud based future when our media can be swapped out for newer versions with the press of a button. What we will pay for in not the file itself but access to that file in as many situations as possible and the ability to download on demand. iTunes match has made music management so much simpler for my library that I will gladly pay 25 bucks a year for it. I have one local copy that gets backed up just in case of absolute catastrophe but thankfully the days of constantly updating all my libraries across all devices and computers are gone. Its easier to just let the cloud take care of it.

Whether they actually sound better will be immaterial. What matters is that people actually believe they sound better.

We will likely get high resolution files in the future if from iTunes, Spotify, etc if for no other reason than it gives the industry an opportunity to get us to upgrade again or to give us an incentive to boost our subscription payments.

The CD v. digital files war is almost as tiresome as iPhone v Android or Mac v. PC. Most of it is about articles of faith, not reality. I’ve got a 3,000 dollar playback system. So according to the audiophile faithful, I am supposed to have nothing but disdain for lossy sound files, right? But the truth is that to me they sound identical to the CD audio, even sitting in the sweet spot paying close attention to the music. Now overuse of dynamic range compression is huge problem in modern recordings but it affects all formats across the board (even a lot of vinyl). I really wish we could put this argument to bed.

Maybe I don’t understand the specifics of how editors on the Verge work but I know most teams who work collaboratively rely on everybody being connected. If I, as an architect, decided to go back to drafting by hand (or even Autocad) it would throw a monkey wrench into my team’s entire workflow (not to mention cause my coworkers a great deal of pain as they would have to translate what I had done in the analog world into its proper digital format).

Being in a modern workplace seems fundamentally incompatible with this romanticized, Waldenesque existence. Disconnecting is a luxury that few can afford these days.

The ribbon has been a source of confusion for casual user who need to use office for their work.. System wide standardization (file, edit, etc pulldown menus) made it easy for those people to get in, do what they needed to do and get out. A truly great UI in my opinion should offer simplicity for causal uses while offering depth for pro users.

I too think cross platform standardization is a bad thing. Most people work within a single platform for their main computing not a single app across platforms. Standardization should happen on a system level, not an app level. Because each platform has its advantages and disadvantages that must be harnessed or dealt with. App level standardization gives us interface abominations like Adobe Air.

If Clear was using well established system wide gestures it would be fine. The problem is that ever app decides to use these gestures in a slightly different way. And clear, like many of the other apps striving for simplicity at all costs, is so stripped sown that it gives no visual hints as to what those gestures might be. So users are left hunting and pecking hoping something will give them the effect they desire.

In my opinion well designed apps are both simple and obvious. Clear represents a trend toward simplicity without the obvious part.

“Elitist” and “pretentious” sure sound like grumpy and dismissive class warfare rhetoric to me. How exactly is someone with an opinion about the production of art an “elitist”

You have a point. The paper guys took “focus” to a new extreme.. So while they made great tools with finesse they left out some basic iOS functions everyone has come to expect. I understand the impulse to keep it simple, but its not like a zoom function is going to confuse anyone who has used an iPad for more than 2 minutes. Nor would the ability to double tap a color and replace it with another of your choice.