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Amazing. By Mat Honan.

(Via John Moltz.)

In this week’s episode: Our theme song, too many to-do apps, Google I/O keynote reactions, localization, Google kicking Apple’s butt in services, Google Play Music All Access Glass Map Hangouts, and Apple’s quietly updated Javascript bridge.

Sponsored by An Event Apart and CocoaConf.

By Mark Wunsch, the web developer:

There is no unified Google that is “good” or “evil”. There is just an organizational clusterfuck that is unable to decide what it thinks is truly the best way to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”. Is that by forcing web authors into a social network in order to improve directory results? Is that by dipping a toe into the music business? Is that by abandoning standards like RSS and XMPP/Jabber? I don’t think so.

Google has a problem. The problem is that nobody says no. Google effectively owns the Web, and they’re lousy managers.

A great take on the increasing, sprawling power that Google has over such a huge portion of the web.

For Google, Android was a detour from their focus on owning and dominating web services; it ensured that those services would be freely accessible in this new world of computing, including on the iPhones and iPads that were used liberally in nearly every keynote demo. And, now that Android is successful, Google is back to focusing on “the best of Google”.

Speaking of John Gruber being smart, are you reading everything by Ben Thompson yet?

Excellent, succinct post by John Gruber about Larry Page’s attempt to change the conversation whenever Google rips something off or crushes a market.

Politicians and executives do this all the time. “Arguing about [controversial thing we did], focusing too much on [our weakness], or implementing [regulation that benefits the public but makes us less profitable] isn’t constructive and/or is holding back progress/jobs/children/America.”

Among its many other similarities to ’90s-era Microsoft, Google seems desperate to prove that it’s a major innovator of original product ideas, despite most of its strengths lying in improving, extending, devaluing, and better executing everyone else’s.

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Thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring Marco.org this week.

Ben Thompson:

Design is about identifying, understanding, and ultimately feeling your end users’ needs, and then meeting those needs. Facebook Home, like countless SV startups, looked beautiful, worked elegantly, and didn’t meet any needs.

I’d go a bit further and say it’s actually designed badly. Facebook Home rested on two major assumptions:

1. Your friends put good, recognizable pictures of themselves as their profile photo.
2. Your friends post photos so good that you’d like to see a selection of them, chosen automatically, on your lock screen.

OK, show of hands:

1. How many of your friends’ profile photos are either barely recognizable from poor lighting or angle choices (if you’re under age 25), or have become pictures of babies instead (if you’re 25 or older)?
2. How many of your friends’ photos are so good that you’d rather see them randomly on your lock screen instead of a great photo of your choice that you took?

Facebook Home was flat-out badly designed: it’s designed for optimal input and failed to consider real-world usage.

And it looks like demand for Home was from the same imaginary world as their perfect input.

Matt Gemmell on skeuomorphism and intuitive design:

Our industry isn’t young anymore, but it’s still full of fear about whether so-called non-technical people will be able to use its products. I think we’ve been trying to get to less adorned, more information-centric interfaces for quite some time, but we’re still making the same tired old arguments from the golden age of human-computer interaction, about how humans need faux three-dimensional cues about the affordances of on-screen objects. Buttons apparently have to look “pushable”, or no-one will push them.

The reality is more nuanced. Our tastes, and capabilities, have moved a bit beyond screamingly-obvious knobs and dials. We don’t need drop-shadows to encourage us to poke at something. All we need is an invitation, in the form of icons or labels or animations which imply functionality, and a consistency of presentation which allows us to make a good guess about what we can interact with.

Matt, a programmer by trade, addresses the skeuomorphism debate more effectively than most designers I’ve heard arguing about it.

This is a very serious problem — not only does this cross major ethical lines, but it reveals a severe lack of security at Bloomberg.

Why did Bloomberg News reporters — rank-and-file employees of an entirely different division — have so much access to customer data from the financial-terminal division? Why should reporters have any access to customer information? Who else in the company needlessly has access to it?

Since JPMorgan Chase reportedly had a similar issue last summer, this had to be happening for quite a while. Does a company as big as Bloomberg, dealing with such sensitive data with such huge possible financial risks, not log and audit employee queries of customer data?

This isn’t the result of a fluke hack or a couple of bad employees — this is serious security negligence.

I applied for a job at Bloomberg in 2006.¹ I wonder how many reporters there have access to all of my personal information.

In this week’s podcast: Tick-tock in iOS, PHP framework theory, passwordless logins, the Mac Mini’s accidental success, the word “podcast”, and Apple providing a sync platform for developers.

Sponsored by Mac Mini Vault and Hover.

This is how Business Insider re-titled my kit-lens post. This is why people who write opinions online get so much unnecessary shit from people: they read these inflammatory headlines that other people write, then they get unfairly angry at the original posts’ authors.

I didn’t say don’t put a “cheap lens” on your SLR. I said don’t use the kit lens — specifically, the 18–55mm lens that comes with most Canon SLRs for about a $150 premium over getting the body alone. Instead, I recommended getting the EF 40mm f/2.8 prime, which retails for… $150.

Their headline turned my argument about quality and value into elitist-sounding flamebait.

But I shouldn’t be surprised, because Business Insider knows nothing about quality and value.

Ben Thompson:

But I can see three significant contextual differences between 2013 and 2007, and I think it’s those differences that likely provide the best hint as to what to expect in upcoming versions of iOS.

So what has changed since 2007?

I’d also add that the hardware is significantly different — in particular, we now have a (comparatively) huge amount of RAM on these devices, a major difference from the original iPhone’s hardware that influenced a lot about iOS’ design and architecture.

In this packed issue: mountain life, mountain rescues, red-light cameras, dynamic parking meters, improv fundamentals as life lessons, and Phish’s economics.

When asked about “Windows Blue”, emphasis mine:

Windows Blue is a codename for an update that will be available later this year, building on the bold vision set forward with Windows 8 to deliver the next generation of tablets and PCs. It will deliver the latest new innovations across an increasingly broad array of form factors of all sizes, display, battery life and performance, while creating new opportunities for our ecosystem. It will provide more options for businesses, and give consumers more options for work and play. The Windows Blue update is also an opportunity for us to respond to the customer feedback that we’ve been closely listening to since the launch of Windows 8 and Windows RT. From a company-wide perspective, Windows Blue is part of a broader effort to advance our devices and services for Microsoft.

This has to be some sort of record. How much more valueless, corporate-speak nonsense can be crammed into that response? Even from someone whose title is Chief Marketing Officer, this is an impressive work of obfuscated art in response to a simple question.

The implication (with those few scraps of meaning in the middle) is clear, though: there’s likely to be some backtracking and hedging on Windows 8’s “bold vision”, which a lot of customers really don’t like. Microsoft has always been the kind of company to give customers everything they ask for (even when it’s not “good”), and its customers are accustomed to that treatment. I wrote back in 2011:

One of the reasons Metro is interesting to people like me who usually ignore Microsoft is that it’s full of very un-Microsoft-like decisions, generally for the better.

The question isn’t whether Metro will be good: it probably will be. And that’s a huge accomplishment for Microsoft that they should be commended for.

But how will their customers react?

Will Metro be meaningfully adopted by PC users? Or will it be a layer that most users disable immediately or use briefly and then forget about, like Mac OS X’s Dashboard, in which case they’ll deride the Metro-only tablets as “useless” and keep using Windows like they always have?

I think we’ll have our answer “later this year”.

Chris Higgins, three-time contributor:

Regardless, this is a fascinating time for The Magazine: it is still young enough that new contributors can enter the field and quickly become part of the repeat contributors’ list. But it’s mature enough that we know what it is, and we can observe some encouraging trends.

Thanks, Chris. We should have you pitch more.

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Thanks to Developer Garden for sponsoring Marco.org this week.

Harrison Weber at TNW:

Adobe has shared with us that Creative Suite 6 will still be available for purchase, but it will not be updated beyond addressing bugs and OS compatibility. There will be no Creative Suite 7.

Instead, Adobe is pointing all of its energy towards Creative Cloud, eliminating the familiar retail box in the process. …

According to our sources, the company had long searched for ways to stabilize its revenue. Previously, it would receive bursts of income every two years with the latest Creative Suite release. Convincing users to upgrade was a daunting task that left an impact on product decisions.

At first, I thought this was a blatant price increase. But as I run the numbers in different common scenarios (owning just Photoshop, owning Creative Suite, upgrading every version, upgrading every few versions, etc.), it actually looks like most people will end up paying less this way — and without the huge initial expenditure of buying your first copy.

What concerns me most is innovation: without that “daunting” task of convincing everyone to give them more money every two years, there may be strong temptation for Adobe to rest on its laurels.

On why coffee is so central to our culture

“I think the answer is we all need a little help, and the coffee’s a little help with everything — social, energy, don’t know what to do next, don’t know how to start my day, don’t know how to get through this afternoon, don’t know how to stay alert. We want to do a lot of stuff; we’re not in great shape. We didn’t get a good night’s sleep. We’re a little depressed. Coffee solves all these problems in one delightful little cup.”

I don’t agree with most of the article, but I do agree with this.