The problem with a larger iPhone

As Apple moved into a yearly pattern for launching its new products, the tech press has settled into a similar pattern, coming up with new rumors and speculations each year before the launch events. This year everybody is impatiently waiting for Apple to announce a larger iPhone, either a 4.7’ or a 5.5’ device (or both!), and there has been no shortage of alleged leaks, more informed reports and analysis as to why Apple needs this kind of product. It would fit another recent pattern of alternating new designs with better specs – the iPhone 4 followed by the 4S, 5 by 5S. While I’m perfectly satisfied with my current smartphone, I would certainly be more interested in upgrading to a larger screen, if only for the ability to watch videos more comfortably.

Foreign Policy: “How Putin is Reinventing Warfare”

This is a world where the old geo-political paradigms no longer hold. As the Kremlin faces down the West, it is indeed gambling that old alliances like the EU and NATO mean less in the 21st century than the new commercial ties it has established with nominally “Western” companies, such as BP, Exxon, Mercedes, and BASF. Meanwhile, many Western countries welcome corrupt financial flows from the post-Soviet space; it is part of their economic models, and not one many want disturbed. So far, the Kremlin’s gamble seems to be paying off, with financial considerations helping to curb sanctions. Part of the rationale for fast-tracking Russia’s inclusion into the global economy was that interconnection would be a check on aggression. But the Kremlin has figured out that this can be flipped: Interconnection also means that Russia can get away with aggression.

Peter Pomerantsev

The new cold war is exploiting globalization, the very thing that should have prevented further conflicts.

A similar line of thinking can be applied to possible conflicts between China and the U.S. over Taiwan:

We say explicitly, in Red Star over the Pacific and many other forums, that such a conflict is possible. US-China economic ties elevate the costs of armed conflict for both belligerents, but can’t rule it out entirely. Other interests supersede economics at times. Conducting strikes on the Chinese mainland could carry vast economic and political consequences for the United States. Knowing this—and knowing that Washington knows it—Beijing can hope to deter the United States from coming to the island’s defence. Should a conflict come to pass, Chinese leaders hope Washington will stand aside for the sake of national self-interest.

James R. Holmes

Nielsen Newswire: “Changing Channels: Americans View Just 17 Channels Despite Record Number to Choose From”

According to Nielsen’s forthcoming Advertising & Audiences Report, the average U.S. TV home now receives 189 TV channels—a record high and significant jump since 2008, when the average home received 129 channels. Despite this increase, however, consumers have consistently tuned in to an average of just 17 channels.

Remarkable piece of data, especially how the number of regularly watched channels has stayed constant over time; clearly people see no need to expand their viewing habits, so most channels are there just to justify the bills from cable operators. This is more-or-less how I use TV these days: despite having around 150 channels available, me and my family are regularly tuning in to 10-20 of them and many people I know have given up on TV altogether.

Twitter vs. Facebook for the Everyday-Man

One of the interesting side-effects of going to work by metro – as opposed to, say, driving there – are the conversations you sometimes get to overhear. This morning, two people were talking about Twitter and Facebook, and it went something like this: on Twitter there’s too much stuff going on, I prefer Facebook because people there are simple, just like us. You might say it just confirms that for most people Twitter is overwhelming, the main cause for the slow growth and bad user retention. But I say that’s precisely the most fascinating aspect of Twitter, the best reason to participate: to see how the world works outside of your narrow social circle, to meet new people, to discover ideas that would otherwise have no way of reaching you. In a way, using Twitter is like travelling to a foreign country and learning how they do things, while people sticking to Facebook are never leaving their hometown.

As a result of the RT, the more you use Twitter, the more your audience and sphere of interest expands in unexpected ways. Horizons widening

— Andreas (@aantonop) July 4, 2016

More design annoyances in iOS 7

Ever since iOS 7 was announced, there have been plenty designers complaining about their design choices, especially the removal of button shapes and choice of colors for highlighting. Apple started making some concessions with the major update to 7.1, but to me the new button shapes look horrible and I haven’t turned them on; besides I’m already accustomed to using the swipe gesture for going back. But there are other things that annoy me constantly in iOS…

For a while I kept switching weather apps to explore their designs. For a while I settled with Yahoo! Weather, but after Apple introduced similar ideas to their weather app I started using it more often. At some point I also removed Yahoo! Weather; the photo backgrounds were gorgeous, but the app was using up too much bandwidth to download them and the forecast is identical to the stock app. And here I discovered one of annoyances: the app displays time and hourly temperature for the next hours, but there is no label showing which value is the temperature and which the hour! During the winter with negative temperatures that was not an apparent issue, but in the spring you constantly see too strings of very similar or even identical numbers and that causes a constant mental effort to differentiate between unlabeled numbers on the screen. The update to iOS 7.1 hasn’t changed anything meaningful in the weather app, other than refreshing the icons and adding some shadows. Maybe this is not an issue for Americans using Fahrenheit, where the scale does not overlap with the time of day, but for the rest of the world it would be nice to have an easy way to tell them apart. There is plenty of screen space to add a simple degree indicator next to temperatures! Btw Yahoo! Weather did clearly separate hours (xx:00) from temperature (xx°).

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  Can you quickly tell if the top row is displaying temperature or hour?
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  Not much has changed in iOS 7.1, unfortunately

The New York Times: “What Does It Mean to Be Comfortable?”

Along with air-conditioning, globalization has also helped popularize something called Ashrae 55: a building code created by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, to determine the ideal temperature for large buildings. The standard, which has set thermostats across the globe, is hardly culture-free. It’s based on Fanger’s Comfort Equation, a mathematical model developed in Denmark and the United States in the 1960s and ‘70s, which seeks to make a very specific worker comfortable: a man wearing a full business suit.

Consider the impact on office workers in hotter countries, where a thobe or a dashiki might be perfectly acceptable business attire. They might start dressing differently, which makes them less comfortable outside and at home, which in turn makes them more likely to seek out air-conditioning. It also affects women. In spring, it’s socially expected that women will wear thinner blouses, skirts, open-toed shoes, Mazur-Stommen says. But the building temperature is set for men, who are assumed to be wearing long-sleeved shirts and closed-toed shoes year-round. If everyone just dressed appropriately for the weather, we wouldn’t have to heat or cool the building as much.

Maggie Koerth-Baker

The ambient temperature is a source of constant bickering in my office as well. It’s too hot for some, too cold for others and the rest want fresh air. While a more flexible dress code would certainly help, I think the solution lies in better design for office buildings and spaces, including moving away from the cheap ‘open space’ solution.

The new Flickr app is trying too hard to be Instagram

In their effort to regain the top spot among photo-sharing apps, Flickr has focused lately on redesigning the site and releasing improved mobile apps on iPhone and Android. The latest version has been released a couple of weeks ago with a long feature list – and, as much as I try, I keep coming to the conclusion that I liked the old app better! The new design is too flashy, the excessive use of iOS 7-styled animations, zooming and translucent layers is tiring and confusing. While implementing the annoying design innovations, the team left out another much more useful iOS 7 gesture, swipe-left-to-go-back. There are some good design touches, for example the introduction of the popular flick-to-dismiss gesture and the awesome reloading animation using Flickr’s two-circle-logo – you should check it out especially on profile pages: swipe down until the blue border around the profile pic becomes full circle, then release.

Speaking of profiles, if you see a small checkmark on the top right, don’t click it! That’s showing you are following that person and clicking the checkmark unfollows them – without confirmation or any other prompt! That’s probably the stupidest decision I ever saw in any app! Of course you can immediately re-follow the person clicking on what has now become the ‘follow’ button, but wouldn’t it make more sense to label the button or have an extra step so that doesn’t happen in the first place?