Gifting iBooks is Great (but let me keep the receipt)

You can now gift anything in Apple's App, iTunes, and iBooks stores to another user, as long as they're in the same geographical region (sadly the world of international licensing has a long way to go). 

If it’s digital books your family and friends love to read, Apple has a gift for them and for you. After long being the company’s sole online store without gifting options, the iBookstore now allows you to send ebooks to your friends and family.

It's a great and necessary convenience, but whenever I've given a digital download as a gift I've wondered whether the person I'm sending it to already owns that particular album, movie or app. While it would be great to get confirmation from Apple that they didn't have it (or that they'd added it to a wishlist)  I can only begin to imagine the privacy implications. A safer option would be for Apple to let me include the digital receipt, and to allow the recipient to exchange it for something else (prior or downloading).

Would that cause problems with the way way Apple recompenses publishers? Do they credit the sale when I buy the gift, or when it's downloaded?

The New Mac Pro goes on sale Tomorrow

It's no exaggeration to call this computer "long-awaited". 

CUPERTINO, California―December 18, 2013―Apple® today announced the all-new Mac Pro® will be available to order starting Thursday, December 19. Redesigned from the inside out, the all-new Mac Pro features the latest Intel Xeon processors, dual workstation-class GPUs, PCIe-based flash storage and ultra-fast ECC memory.

What's Wrong With Newspapers, c. 1965

Plus ça change.

“Many papers have had the same old-guard ownership and management for decades. These men are complacent, see no serious fault with their papers. They live in the past; in theory, they agree that to thrive a daily must present more and better local news but they hire no extra reporters. They still run columnists who are not even scanned by the present generation. And when questioned about their newspapers, they go off the record, as if publishing were the most sacred of cows.”

Explosion in Video Ad Viewing "manufactured"

Up 205% apparently, though few are seen by real human beings:

Perhaps surprisingly, Timothy doesn’t blame bad guys using bots for this surge in video views, although they play a part. Rather, he sees a huge spike in autoplay video running below the fold where people can’t see it. “This is a huge priority, and nobody knows what to do about it,” Timothy said, who also noted that the number of video ad networks has jumped from 50 in 2010 to 150 today, further muddling the supply chain. “We want to shine a light on it.”

I don't blame the advertisers for getting worked up over this—they're paying for bogus ad impressions—but I think they're totally wrong in thinking that the answer lies in getting the ads into the visitor's line of sight. An auto-playing video ad is the quickest way to get me to leave a page and not come back, and I know I'm not alone. Fix the "below the fold" problem and watch your potential readers abandon your site completely.

Silicon Valley's Architectural Arms Race is On

How Apple's spaceship campus has sparked the tech community's desire to leave an architectural legacy: 

Jobs was presenting the designs for a new headquarters building that Apple proposed to build, and that the City Council would have to approve. It was a structure unlike any other that his company, or any other in the world, had ever built: a glass building in the shape of a huge ring, 1,521 feet in diameter (or nearly five football fields), and its circumference would curve for nearly a mile. It was designed by Sir Norman Foster, the British-born architect known for the elegance of his work and for the uncompromising nature of his sleek, modern aesthetic—close to Jobs’s own. In a community that you could almost say has prided itself on its indifference to architecture, Apple, which had already changed the nature of consumer products, seemed now to want to try to do nothing less than change Silicon Valley’s view of what buildings should be.

[…] Gehry’s Facebook building is intended in some ways to be the antithesis of Foster’s for Apple. It will be set lower into the ground and will be covered entirely by roof gardens: a building that will blend into the landscape rather than hover over it like an alien spacecraft. (From the minute the design became public, people have been calling the Apple building the “spaceship.”) But Facebook’s project is not exactly what you would call modest: underneath those gardens will be what might be the largest office in the world, a single room so gargantuan that it will accommodate up to 10,000 workers.

The Song that Helped Change the World

A fascinating tale. My own awareness of the evils of apartheid began in 1980 with Peter Gabriel's "Biko", but "Nelson Mandela" was transformative for a whole generation of young British people who found a political voice during the mid-eighties.

If any protest song can be said to have had a tangible effect on its subject matter, it is "Nelson Mandela" [released as "Free Nelson Mandela" in America]. It didn't exactly spring Mandela from jail single-handed, but it raised awareness of his plight like nothing else and helped to make apartheid one of the defining causes of the 1980s, something the man himself acknowledged after his release in 1990. And Dammers went further by founding the lobby group Artists Against Apartheid. In its broad outline it is an uplifting tale, but the full story is a turbulent affair, involving mental illness, creative paralysis, crippling debt, and a damaging musical row during which Dammers found himself on the opposing side to two black South African musicians who had been fighting apartheid decades before he paid that life-changing visit to Alexandra Palace: Hugh Masekela and Miriam Makeba.

The World's Best Street Foods

I ate Takoyaki balls in Hong Kong, and they might just be my favorite snack food ever. Their inclusion on this list makes me want to try the rest too. 

A ball of crisp, puffy wheat batter encases a sweet, tender chunk of octopus. The mixture is poured onto a specially designed hotplate with shallow indentations, like ping-pong balls hewn in half. A few spring onions might be thrown on top, then the whole thing cooks until golden. Once done, it’s dusted with aonori (green seaweed powder), sprinkled with katsuobushi (bonito flakes) or doused in mayonnaise or takoyaki sauce, similar to a thick Worcestershire sauce. The shell is firm and chewy, bursting open to reveal a scalding hot, creamy and not-quite-set mass of batter. The fat chunk of octopus is the final treat, something to chew on while you attack the next.

Books for Children (or anyone who ever was one)

Perhaps the best "best of" list I've seen this season. Some of these are new to me, and they're all beautiful. 

"It is an error … to think of children as a special kind of creature, almost a different race, rather than as normal, if immature, members of a particular family, and of the human family at large," J. R. R. Tolkien wrote in his superb meditation on fantasy and why there's no such thing as writing "for children," intimating that books able to captivate children's imagination aren't "children's books" but simply really good books.

Beyoncé Broke the Music Business

Paul Cantor reminds us that, only a few years ago, we were told that paying for actual music was over:

Beyonce has completely turned that logic upside down. With this release, she has bypassed the gatekeepers, done away with the traditional promotional cycle and appealed directly to her fans. And by making it a more comprehensive experience, she’s made the album itself— not a concert, not an HBO documentary that she shot on her Macbook— the priority.

She’s saying that in a world where nobody wants to pay for music anymore, she wants you to buy this. Beyonce`is $15.99 on iTunes.

Siam Paragon Bangkok is the World's Most Instagrammed Place

It's an impressive mall, that's for sure, but there are far more beautiful spots to photograph in Bangkok if you ask me.

Over the past few years, shopping has propelled Bangkok, Thailand to being the top tourist destination in the world. And that fact is plain to see on social media: In 2013, more photos were posted on Instagram geotagged from inside a giant shopping mall in Bangkok than any other place in the world. (Last year, it came in second, behind Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi airport.)

What Will Disney's Culture Empire Conquer Next?

Pixar, Muppets, Marvel, Star Wars, Indiana Jones. Whatever next?

It’s the latest gigantic pop culture acquisition for Disney, which has spent the last decade stockpiling many of the world’s most beloved franchises. First, Disney spent more than $100 million to purchase the Muppets in 2004. Two years later, the company shelled out $7.4 billion for Pixar, home of Toy Story, Monsters Inc., andCars. Marvel Entertainment came next (in 2009, for $4 billion) and then in October 2012, Disney snapped up George Lucas’ company Lucasfilm—and all rights to a little franchise called Star Wars—for $4.06 billion.

Through with Assigning Essays

Rebecca Schumann has had enough of grading essays, and with good reason:

Mom, friends, educators, students: We don’t have to assign papers, and we should stop. We need to admit that the required-course college essay is a failure. The baccalaureate is the new high-school diploma: abjectly necessary for any decent job in the cosmos. As such, students (and their parents) view college as professional training, an unpleasant necessity en route to that all-important “piece of paper.” Today’s vocationally minded students view World Lit 101 as forced labor, an utter waste of their time that deserves neither engagement nor effort. So you know what else is a waste of time? Grading these students’ effing papers. It’s time to declare unconditional defeat.

I'm particularly sympathetic to her call for more oral exams. Over on the Visual Communication course I teach we moved to student presentations for most things years ago and we've refined the process ever since. There's nothing like looking a student right in the eye and asking questions when it comes to working out what and how much they've learned.

Pencil and Paper

Very keen to try one of these out. In short, if you like the Paper app, you'll like Pencil. If not, then not so much.

Pencil uses Bluetooth to tell an iPad which tip is touching its screen. If neither the nib sensor or eraser sensor are sending a signal, Paper assumes input is coming from a user's finger and initiates a "blend" mode that simulates smudging colors together. When Pencil is powered on and connected, the app enables its palm rejection technology, which allows users to rest their hand on the screen while drawing.

Neat. 

British Library Releases 1 Million Images

A tremendous gift to the Commons, with more to come. Thanks @priddy for the heads-up on this.

We have released over a million images onto Flickr Commons for anyone to use, remix and repurpose. These images were taken from the pages of 17th, 18th and 19th century books digitised by Microsoft who then generously gifted the scanned images to us, allowing us to release them back into the Public Domain. The images themselves cover a startling mix of subjects: There are maps, geological diagrams, beautiful illustrations, comical satire, illuminated and decorative letters, colourful illustrations, landscapes, wall-paintings and so much more that even we are not aware of.

Forget Gaming, This is Why I Want Gesture Recognition in iOS

I've written before about Leap Motion, and how it's still not entirely clear whether gesture recognition is ready for mainstream computing, but this is a neat idea:

As any chef can attest, swiping, scrolling, or clicking through a recipe with fingers covered in dough can be a messy, insurmountable feat – not to mention potentially damaging to your devices. Reaching into Allthecooks Recipes with Leap Motion, however, keeps your device batter-free.

Fancy Minority Report style cookery aside, I'm not sure I want my MacBook in the kitchen, and I've have thought the iPad would be a much better fit for this kind of thing. Who's thinking that this might well be how Apple is planning to utilise its recent purchase of PrimeSense?

Coming Next from Studio Ghibli's Arrietty Director

I adored Arrietty, so I can't wait for this.

Studio Ghibli スタジオジブリ's next film will be an adaptation of children's novel When Marnie was There 思い出のマーニー.

Written by Joan G. ROBINSON in 1981, Marnie tells the story of an adopted child who meets a mysterious girl who lives by the sea. The story has been transported from England to Japan for the Studio Ghibli adaptation.

How to Get a Mac Plus Working Online

Such a labour of love here, and probably beyond my own levels of patience and skill. In the early days of our Internet experiments I used to be the guy who knew how to get most LC-era Macs online, and my own Colour Classic was hooked up to the network, but I never got my Mac Plus surfing. This makes me want to try.

Sure, it was slow as hell, but it worked! Data loaded, pages rendered, and links were clickable. Even forms sort of worked.

Did I mention it was slow? It was slow. Soooo sloooow. Slow slow slow. Like, minutes to read and render a page slow.

Vertu: Selling Ugly To Rich Suckers Since 1998

Vertu started life in the late 1990s as an indulgence for Nokia's designers. Led by Frank Nuovo, the group set out to explore what a phone could look and feel like if its design was unconstrained by budgetary concerns. What if you could use all the best materials and most expensive manufacturing processes, what sort of phone would you end up with? Given free reign to experiment within the then-resplendent Nokia, Vertu gradually evolved into its own division, with a name, logo, and brand identity that grew to be synonymous with overt demonstrations of wealth.

As I scrolled through the manufacturing images on The Verge's profile of once-Nokia-owned luxury handset manufacturer Vertu, I was amazed by just how many of the awestruck captions could apply to Apple's current products. High-end materials, engineered to micro-scale precision, hand assembling of the smallest parts, rejection of imperfectly fitting elements? Have these people seen how the Mac Pro is being made? Or the iPhone 5/5s? Seems to me that Vertu has just not bothered working out how to scale anything, instead relying on fetishising the inefficiencies in their processes through ultra-premium pricing.

“The Hunger Games” is already here

Harsh words on US Immigration policy from Miles Kimball over on Quartz:

In the real world, exclusion is a form of cruelty that we take for granted. Keeping people out of a material paradise for no good reason turns utopia into dystopia. By keeping immigrants out, the United States—like the other rich nations of the world—plays the role of the Capitol in my twist on The Hunger Games. But all we need to do to change that is to honor once again the words on the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free …”

Important stuff, and a lesson of which we in the UK could do well to take note.

The Home Replicator isn't Coming Anytime Soon

From back in October, but nice to read a less breathless take on 3D printing in the MIT Technology Review:

As for everyone getting their own household replicator, Basiliere, Lipson, and other experts are skeptical. Even if printer prices fall drastically, making any finished product is going to require serious industrial machinery, with high-temperature lasers and powdered metals. Lipson envisions a 3-D printing ecosystem: some people might have printers at work—a car mechanic might have one for making certain parts, for instance, or a hospital for making implants—while other people might send designs to companies like Shapeways to be printed offsite. Some hobbyists might have small machines at home to tinker with, making bespoke Legos or other objects.

I've argued this for some time, somewhat unfashionably. Nevertheless, Josh Dzieza's closing paragraph is worth bearing in mind:

But Lipson also admits there could be surprises ahead. “It’s like having this conversation in the ’70s, trying to figure out how people are going to use computers,” he says. “It’s hard to imagine what business models will emerge.”