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VidBITS: Election Tech, Intel Chips, and Beating Glenn

Watch the latest TidBITS staff roundtable to get our take on the role of technology in election coverage, how likely it is that Apple will switch away from Intel-based CPUs in Macs, and the products we’re investigating right now.Show full article

The U.S. presidential election has come and gone, and in this half-hour TidBITS staff roundtable, we discuss how we watched the results roll in, and what changes we saw in how technology has changed election coverage. For a number of us, that meant watching Web sites with election maps updating in real time, while simultaneously comparing the results against the state-by-state predictions from Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog at the New York Times. Silver is a quant who has applied serious number crunching to the historical and polling data surrounding the election, and while the media was calling the election a “tossup,” his numbers had long been pointing at an Obama win in the Electoral College. Silver isn’t alone in this field, and while the Romney camp undoubtedly had analysts too, there’s a fascinating article at Time that looks at how President Obama’s quants helped direct his campaign.

Next, we talked through the latest news about Apple potentially dropping Intel chips in Macs in favor of custom ARM-based chips along the lines of the A6X used in the fourth-generation iPad. The staff consensus is that it would be totally in character for Apple to switch to their own custom chips. We strongly suspect that Apple is compiling Mac OS X for ARM-based chips even now, much as the company did with Intel-based chips while shipping for PowerPC chips. It seems likely that Bob Mansfield, now heading up a new Technologies group at Apple that includes the semiconductor division, would be evaluating the feasibility of such a switch over the next few years. The big question in such a scenario is what would happen with virtualization.

Lastly, here are the products we’re looking into for reviews or other coverage:

The Matias Quiet Pro keyboard doesn’t have quite the feel of the Tactile Pro, but Adam has found that it’s a whole lot quieter for those who don’t want their typing to be a public event.
We aren’t currently planning a full iPad mini review, but Jeff has written an article about how the iPad mini works for photographers (see “Thoughts about the iPad mini for Photographers,” 12 November 2012).
As a self-described “truly terrible cartoonist,” Michael has been playing with a Bamboo stylus from Wacom along with the Autodesk SketchBook Pro app for making really bad cartoons on his iPad.
In a confessional moment, Glenn admitted that while he enjoys the Letterpress game for iOS, he has discovered that he’s really bad at it. Challenge him to a game quick, before he deletes the app!
Spookily, Joe has discovered that he has inadvertently been following in the life footsteps of Mac developer Jeff Holland, whose backup app is called, wait for it… Déjà Vu.

Let us know how you liked this staff roundtable, and if you have any suggestions as we continue to refine our approach.

Article 3 of 5 in series

Inside TidBITS | 17 Dec 2012 | Listen

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VidBITS: iTunes 11 and Comparing Antivirus Apps

Watch (or listen to) the latest TidBITS staff roundtable to get our take on the continuing story of iTunes 11 and the varying levels of accuracy among antivirus apps.Show full article

iTunes 11 continues to occupy our thoughts, largely thanks to all the comments and email that we continue to get about it, so we devoted a lot of this 45-minute staff roundtable to discussing just why iTunes 11 is so important. Michael Cohen hit the nail on the head with his comment that iTunes 11 is actually a sort of meta-operating system, and how that makes it fertile ground for user interface experimentation (and mistakes!). Matt Neuburg pointed out that iTunes 11 is nearly identical in interface to the new Remote app for iOS, leading to some argument about whether Apple is pushing all interfaces to be more like iOS. Other issues that came up include problems being encountered by classical music buffs, the Command-1 and Command-L tricks for getting back to Music from wherever you might be, how to sort the Albums view with View Options, and the continued lack of any coherent approach for sharing a single set of music within a family.

Next, responding to a number of recent reports about the differing accuracy of antivirus apps, Rich Mogull educated us about the techniques that different apps use to identify viruses and why they do better or worse at identifying viruses. This still isn’t as big a deal on the Mac as on Windows, where Rich said there are, by some counts, 65,000 new virus variants appearing every day. But most interesting were Rich’s insights into the murky world of cybercrime, where companies offer virus-creation toolkits with 24-by-7 support and sites where new viruses can be tested against all existing antivirus programs before being released. Rich also shared his experiences infiltrating this world with a fake identity that applied for a job as a “money mule,” culminating in a phone call to his recruiter while on stage at the DEF CON security conference.

Though there are a few visual jokes in the video, you won’t miss anything important if you instead listen to the audio-only version, which you can do by clicking the Listen link above, or by subscribing to the TidBITS podcast to listen during your commute or workout.

Article 4 of 5 in series

Inside TidBITS | 17 Jan 2013 | Listen

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VidBITS: Ways that Apple Could Improve iOS

Watch (or listen to) the latest TidBITS staff roundtable to get our not-so-humble opinions about ways that Apple could improve iOS.Show full article

On the one hand, given how magical the iPhone and iPad remain, it almost seems ungrateful to cavil about problems in iOS 6 that we’d like to see Apple address, but on the other, we’re as much Apple’s customers as anyone else, and probably more so than most. And so, constructive criticism is the goal of this 45-minute staff roundtable in which we run through a number of suggestions for ways that Apple could improve iOS for our everyday use, if only they’d listen to feedback (which Matt Neuburg equates, memorably, to the lack of feedback in the toilet industry). A lot of the suggestions fall under the general rubric of making iOS more flexible and acknowledging the fact that some people really do have more significant needs than others, something that Apple seems to have lost track of while focusing on the lowest-common-denominator market. The discussion hit the following main points:

Centralized file system. Apple has long avoided allowing iOS apps to access any sort of central file storage area, forcing each app to maintain separate copies of its documents and relying on the clumsy Open In system for copying documents between apps. Increasingly, Dropbox has become the de facto file system for iOS, with numerous apps integrating support. If Apple wanted to regain control over this space from Dropbox and move away from the per-app file storage approach, we could imagine an iCloud-based service that goes beyond the traditional folder-based filesystem by automatically scanning files for malicious code, presenting only appropriate file types to different apps, and generally updating the conceptual model that we use to think about documents.
Open Siri up to other apps. As we’ve become more accustomed to using Siri, the technology’s limitations become increasingly obvious. Most notably, why can’t we use Siri to work in apps other than Apple’s? Apple could allow iOS apps to register a Siri dictionary of sorts, in much the same way a Mac app can have an AppleScript dictionary, that would lay out what phrases Siri would recognize and what actions those phrases would trigger. We’d also like to see Siri gain some alternative voices.
Extend the home screen. The iOS home screen — technically known as the Springboard — is completely broken. It’s nearly impossible to find any apps after the first screen or two, and many of us have fallen back on Spotlight and Siri to open apps. Worse, unlike Android and Windows Phone, iOS can only display app icons on the home screen, which seems downright quaint in a world where information rules. There’s a site displaying Android home screens that puts iOS to shame, given how gorgeous and useful these screens look. Apple needs to make some serious strides in this area, if iOS is to continue to compete against the alternatives.
Fix the bugs! From what we can tell, iOS 6 is the buggiest version of iOS yet. Matt explains one of the low-level bugs he’s run into, and notes that he has reported more bugs against iOS 6 than all other versions of iOS combined. Our theory is that the problems stem from a lack of communication within teams at Apple, and the hope is that the shakeup that ousted Scott Forstall might improve internal communication. But even still, we’d like to see more resources devoted to testing.
Give us a look under the hood. There’s no question that Apple has done, and should continue to do, a good job of hiding complexity in iOS. But that has come at the cost of technical transparency for those of us who both want more detail and aren’t offended by complexity. For instance, we’d like to be able to find out exactly what is taking space in that “Other” category (which often seems unreasonably large), we’d like to have an Activity Monitor-like app that would show which apps were using a lot of CPU or battery power, we’d like more feedback about and control over the Wi-Fi networks to which we connect, and we desperately want to be able to find out exactly which individual apps are consuming cellular bandwidth (Apple has once again removed DataMan Pro from the App Store — see “Track Per-App Data Usage in iOS with DataMan Pro,” 20 November 2012). We’re fully aware that this goes against Apple’s grain, but hey, as long as we’re wishing for things that would make our iOS lives better, more visibility into the workings would certainly do so.
More-granular parental controls. Apple acknowledges that parents might want some control over how their children use iOS devices, but iOS’s current parental controls aren’t nearly focused enough to be useful. We’d like to see the capability to restrict particular apps by time (no game playing after bedtime) and by overall usage amount (no more than 30 minutes of a particular game per day). Plus, it would be nice to be able to eliminate the possibility of cellular data overuse.
A more-coherent approach for Settings. It has become increasingly difficult to find any given setting in the Settings app, particularly on the iPhone, because there are so many, and if you return to the Settings app from another app, it’s difficult to figure out where you are.
A unified approach to alarms and reminders. With iMessage and iCloud-synced reminders, we’re all being inundated with notifications on multiple devices, with very little acknowledgment that if you’ve seen an alarm on one device, you don’t need to see it on all the others. iMessage even does a little of this, but Apple needs to extend iCloud’s awareness of what device is currently in use appropriately so we aren’t just being nagged non-stop.

Though it may be easier to figure out who is talking by watching the video, you won’t miss anything important if you instead listen to the audio-only version, which you can do by clicking the Listen link above, or by subscribing to the TidBITS podcast to listen during your commute or workout.

Article 5 of 5 in series

Inside TidBITS | 13 Feb 2013 | Listen

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VidBITS: Why Do We Still Support Apple?

Watch (or listen) to the latest TidBITS staff roundtable for our thoughts on just why Apple has engendered such loyalty in the past, and continues to do so in today’s very different world.Show full article