How a Macworld Cover is Born

I love doing my thing on the Web, but I’d be a liar if I told you there weren’t things I missed about being a magazine journalist. And one of the top three things I pine for is the fun (and challenge) of creating a cover every month. So I love, love, love this video which shows how my pals at Macworld put together the cover of their new issue. And as much hard work as it shows, it doesn’t capture everything involved in doing a cover, since it focuses on the photography and layout aspect of a process that also involves story ideas and wordsmithing, and sometimes multiple, significantly different mockups of different ideas.

Here’s Macworld’s story about the video.

(Side note: I may have implied that I don’t do magazine stuff anymore, but I lied–in fact, this very Macworld has a piece I wrote, on the war between Macs and Windows and why it doesn’t make anybody happier or healthier. It’s the first article I’ve written for the magazine after more than twenty years of reading it…and eventually sitting next to the people who make it.)

(Additional side note: If we’d been clever enough to do time-lapse photography of the complete PC World cover process when I was there, we’d have been required to include footage of me sweating for several weeks as I waited for newsstand sales reports to come in and tell us whether we had a hit or a flop on our hands.)

Tr.impending Doom

Tr.im, one of umpteen URL-shortening services used by Twitterfans and other people who needed to compress long URLs into as little space as possible, is now the first major player among those umpteen servers to call it quits–it’s being shuttered by parent company Nambu. The company says it couldn’t figure out how to make money with Tr.im, and couldn’t find anyone interested in taking it over–and that Bit.ly‘s stance as the default URL-shortener used by Twitter itself means that Tr.im would fail in the long run no matter what.

Tr.im was a worthy contender, but there are plenty of other perfectly good competitors out there, so its closure wouldn’t be a huge issue for new URLs that need to be shortened by Tr.im users. What’s worrisome is the status of existing Tr.immed URLs–of which there are scads all over the Web, and which people are continuing to create right now even though the service is closing. If Nambu shuts down the servers that forward the short URLs to the original long ones, the Tr.immed versions won’t work. The company doesn’t say what its long-term plans are for existing URLs, but it does A) guarantee that they’ll still work through the end of 2009; and B) say that running the servers is prohibitively expensive. I assume that’s a hint, at least, that Tr.immed URLs will likely stop working sometime next year. (Unless someone else steps in to save the service–which doesn’t seem unthinkable given the attention the shutdown is getting.)

If Tr.im does go away completely, it’s a wake-up call we all knew would come eventually, if we gave the matter any thought. Non-shortened URLs will work forever–as long as the page they’re in and the page they link to exists, they’re good. Shortened ones live and die at the discretion of the company that shortened them for you, assuming it doesn’t go out of business. And nearly everybody in the URL-shortening game is a very small company without a proven plan for economic sustainability.

All the information contained in millions of tweets with shortened URLs is tremendously valuable–but many of them simply don’t make sense if you can’t click through to the URL that’s been shortened. Sooner or later, Tr.im’s vanishing act is going to remove all the context from vast numbers of tweets, and the folks who suffer won’t be the people who shortened the URLs, but the ones who want to read those tweets.

I don’t have an inkling what Twitter’s long-term URL-shortening strategy is–hey, are there any clues in those stolen documents?–but I hope it intends to start squeezing down its own URLs. For one thing, I have more faith in Twitter being around for the long haul than I do in the viability of existing URL-shortening services. Also, if Twitter goes out of business, than all those tweets containing shortened URLs may disappear anyhow…

Dell Ditches Its Big Netbook

I swear I’m not a conspiracy theorist. But if I were, I’d be suspicious about the circumstances surrounding the death of Dell’s Mini 12 netbook, which the company is discontinuing. Along with Lenovo’s IdeaPad S12, it was one of the few netbooks on the market with a 12-inch screen, so its absence will be felt.

The company says that “Larger notebooks require a little more horsepower to be really useful,” but like Mike Arrington, I’m left flummoxed by that–there’s no reason why some folks might not be happy with a low-cost, basic-specs laptop that happened to have a larger screen than most netbooks. And there’s no technical reason not to build one, which is presumably why Dell built the Mini 12 in the first place.

The system packed an Intel CPU and ran Windows XP (or Ubuntu), but both Intel and Microsoft have decidedly conflicted feelings about netbooks–especially ones with 12-inch screens. And now Dell’s lost interest in large-screen netbooks, too. Perhaps the Mini 12 just didn’t sell particularly well–although Dell didn’t say it wasn’t popular, just that it was a bad idea. That’s sort of the party line of the whole industry.

In the end, there are really no such thing as netbooks–there are just notebooks in various sizes with different specs at different price points. Maybe Dell will be able to configure a 12-inch notebook with better specs than the Mini 12 and bring it in at a price point close to the Mini (which started at $429). If not, it’s telling consumers who want a fairly roomy screen but who don’t need a lot of processing power that they can’t get both in one machine. Anymore.

What’s Next for Roku? Five Suggestions.

[A NOTE FROM HARRY: I'm tickled to announce that we'll be republishing some of Dave Zatz's posts from his blog Zatz Not Funny here on Technologizer. Dave's a frequent commenter here, but I was a fan of his blog--which focuses on digital media--long before there was a Technologizer. Welcome, Dave!]

I love my little Roku box. The Roku Digital Media Player ($99, Amazon), which began life as the Roku Netflix Player, streams Netflix content (free for subscribers) and Amazon video on demand (VOD). Standard def was decent, but both are now available in HD (720p). Sure, it’s not Blu-ray but it’s good enough for many. Perhaps, most. And the mighty quick, dead simple interface is a joy to use, providing a better experience than TiVo’s equivalent Netflix and Amazon apps. We know Roku’s got several new partner services lined up this year, including video podcasts by MediaFly and Blip.tv webisodes. Plus, it looks like YouTube may also be on tap. At $99 the Roku’s in impulse purchase territory–it’s hard to go wrong. Having said that, as an owner and a guy who follows this space, I’ve got a few suggestions for the Roku team (and their partners). Enable a few of these, and I’ll pick up a box for every room.

Continue reading this story…

Yahoo Was a Search Company. The Original One.

Do you remember the first time you searched the Web? I do. In vivid detail. It was in late October or early November of 1994, in a conference room at PC World. My friend Pete Loshin showed me a new site that he explained could find information on the Internet. I performed this query as a test, and was amazed by the results. Which probably amounted to all of ten or fifteen sites–but hey, we’re talking 1994.

The search site was, of course, Yahoo–the site that introduced the world to the idea of finding stuff on the Web, and prospered by doing so. So I’m puzzled (along with others) by new Yahoo CEO Carol Bartz’s statement to the New York Times that Yahoo has “never been a search company.”

Okay, I’m not completely surprised. Yahoo stopped being focused entirely on search pretty early on. It tended to outsource aspects of search to competitors such as AltaVista and, later, Google–and then it had its lunch eaten by Google. After a period of trying to build its own world-class search engine, it’s now decided to outsource the whole shebang to Microsoft for the next decade. Yahoo’s future, clearly, is not about search–and I guess it’s convenient to maintain that its past wasn’t, either.

But I can’t believe I’m the only person who became entranced by the early Web in part because early Yahoo was so amazing who’s saddened to see the company keep its own roots at arm’s length, as it were. Here’s the Yahoo I remember–except this version is from 1996, so the one I visited in 1994 would have been even cruder.

RadioShack’s 14-Foot Laptop: The Technologizer Review

Earlier this week, I was worried about RadioShack’s apparent plan to rebrand itself as THE SHACK but intrigued by its announcement of Netogether, an event that involved giant laptops in New York and Times Square broadcasting live video between each other. I headed to San Francisco’s E \mbarcadero today to check out the proceedings–and particular, to evaluate the humongous notebook computer. After the jump, everything you ever wanted to know about it–or at least as much as I could figure out–in handy FAQ form.

Continue reading this story…

Wave vs. the Web

Anil Dash has a good post up about Google Wave in which he expresses concerns about its wild ambition that are in some ways a developer-focused corollary to my concerns that it may be the first Google project that suffers from Microsoftian bloat.

Anil:

And people aren’t looking for a replacement for email, or instant messaging, or blogs, or wikis. Those tools all work great for their intended purposes, and whatever technology augments them will likely offer a different combination of persistence and immediacy than those systems. Right now, Wave evokes all of them without being its own distinctive thing. Which means it’s most useful in providing reference implementations of particular new features.

Like Anil, I’ll be delighted if Wave proves that my skepticism was misplaced. Right now, though, it does feel like a mishmosh of multiple interesting ideas, implemented on an epic scale. And most new things that have caught on on the Web (including Web sites themselves) started out simple, even if they eventually grew powerful and complex….

Want Xbox Games On Demand? It’ll Cost You

Come Tuesday, Microsoft will begin selling major Xbox 360 games for download through its Xbox Live service, but from the prices we’ve seen so far, it’s not a sound investment.

Endsights got a hold of the pricing for nine of the 24 games that will be available initially. Using the online retailer Newegg as a comparison (because of its consistent pricing and free shipping), it’s clear that in some cases you’ll pay $10 or even $15 more to download the game than you would to order a boxed copy over the Internet.

A chart, and some more thoughts on Microsoft’s bold venture away from retail, after the jump.

Continue reading this story…

Should Browsers Block Ads by Default?

[UPDATE: There's a great conversation spurred by this post going on over at Louis Gray's FriendFeed.]

Windows IT Pro’s Orin Thomas has a piece up with the title In five years will block Internet advertisements by default. He isn’t quite that extreme in the story itself, but he does say that he thinks the popularity of the Firefox add-in Adblock Plus will inevitably lead to most users blocking ads.

Putting aside for the moment the question of what that would do to the Web economy (including, er, ad-subsidized sites like Technologizer), I don’t think Thomas’s scenario will happen in the sweeping form he describes. For one thing, ad blockers have been around for a long time, and if their inevitable domination of the Web is in progress, it’s happening really slowly. For another, every major purveyor of Web browsers except Opera is either a major advertiser or a major seller of ads, or both–even Mozilla makes millions from the Google ads its default home-page search displays. (I’d be very surprised but not utterly disbelieving if Google were to build ad-blocking into Chrome–but if it turns it on by default, I’ll eat my MacBook.)

Of course, as with everything on the Web, it’s ultimately consumers who call the shots–if enough folks use ad-blockers, the Web will have to adjust, one way or another. (I continue, incidentally, to have no problem whatsoever with the fact that a meaningful minority of Technologizer readers block ads–I don’t need everybody to see the ads as long as a critical mass of folks do.)

What say you?

5Words for Friday, August 7th 2009

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Twitter’s lingering, Failwhale-free outage.

Yahoo: We’re not about search.

Spurned iPhone developers go rogue.

Will work for Apple freebies.

More OSes for Asus netbooks.

$2,000,000 buys pretty impressive speakers.

Is Bing benefiting from pharmacy fraud?

Who doesn’t like e-books? Consumers!

5Words for Thursday, August 6th 2009

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Rhapsody (which I like) downsizes.

Microsoft now owns Office.com domain.

Laptop Magazine rates customer service.

Opera’s working on Android version.

Studios vs. $1 DVD rentals.

Iowans can text 911 messages.

A steering wheel for iPhone.

Microsoft’s Windows 7 upgrade megachart.

Apple pulls sex-offender app.

Bill Gates’ Macworld surprise revisited.

Denials of Service: Scary? Annoying? Neither?

Turns out it wasn’t just Twitter that someone tried to bring down via Distributed Denial of Service today. Cnet’s Elinor Mills is reporting that a Facebook executive says that a pro-Georgian activist with accounts on multiple social media sites was targeted, and that Facebook, Blogger, YouTube, and other sites were also under attack. Everybody else who used the sites was apparently just caught in the crossfire.

Hence today’s T-Poll:

Settled: Activision’s War on Brütal Legend

Cooler heads prevailed today, as mega game publisher Activision and settled a lawsuit that could’ve halted one of this year’s most promising games, the AP reports.

In June, Activision sued game developer Double Fine to stop the release of Brütal Legend, a metal-inspired action-adventure game starring the voice of Jack Black and directed by Tim Schafer, designer of The Secret of Monkey Island and Grim Fandango. Activision filed the lawsuit in Los Angeles on June 4, just as Brütal Legend was receiving accolades down the road at E3.

At issue was the $15 million Activision claims it invested in the game before merging with World of Warcraft maker Blizzard Entertainment and subsequently dropping the project. After the merger, Electronic Arts took over as publisher, but Activision said that it still held rights to the game and that Double Fine didn’t deliver it on time.

Before the lawsuit, EA expressed doubt that there’d be a court battle. “That would be like a husband abandoning his family and then suing after his wife meets a better looking guy,” the company told Variety in a statement.

Activision did sue, but when it came time for the publisher to argue today why the game shouldn’t be released, Activision instead told the court that the lawsuit was settled. Attorneys didn’t return the AP’s calls, so I don’t think we’ll ever learn the settlement details.

This is great news. I’m no metal fan, but I still appreciated Brütal Legend’s wry humor during the lengthy playable demo at E3. Combine that with its 3D/cartoon art style, puzzle-solving, driving and button-mashing, and Brütal Legend at least looks like a break from the usual generic shooters and beat-em-ups. I’m looking forward to playing it in October.

More on the iPhone/Ninjawords Situation

I didn’t write at length about the latest iPhone App Store controversy, which involved Apple’s handling of a dictionary called Ninjawords and its alleged insistence that the app be both censored and restricted to users over 17. But I did mention it in yesterday’s T-Poll, with a link to John Gruber’s coverage at Daring Fireball. Now Gruber has followed up with an interesting post based on an e-mail sent to him by Apple marketing honcho Phil Schiller. There’s still plenty of room for criticism of Apple’s handling of Ninjawords, which seems at odds with its treatment of earlier dictionary apps. But Schiller says that the company didn’t demand both the removal of common swear words and the 17-only restriction.

Schiller closed his discussion of the matter with these thoughts:

Apple’s goals remain aligned with customers and developers — to create an innovative applications platform on the iPhone and iPod touch and to assist many developers in making as much great software as possible for the iPhone App Store. While we may not always be perfect in our execution of that goal, our efforts are always made with the best intentions, and if we err we intend to learn and quickly improve.

As Gruber says, this may be the first public acknowledgment by an Apple executive that its handling of the App Store is less than ideal. That’s encouraging in itself–especially if Apple does indeed learn quickly from its mistakes. As I’ve said innumerable times in my posts squawking about specific incidents, I remain a long-term App Store optimist…

We Need Coffee Shops That Cater to Laptop Users

It’s always dangerous to assume that anything presented in a newspaper article as a social trend is, in fact, a social trend. But I’m still a bit stressed over a Wall Street Journal story that says that there’s a growing backlash among coffee-shop proprietors over laptop users doing their computing on the premises.

A few years ago, notebook-toting workers and students were seen as an attractive clientele, which is why both national chains and neighborhood joints set up Wi-fi hotspots and installed extra power outlets near seating.  Now–at least in some restaurants in New York, according to the Journal–they’re seen as freeloaders who hog tables during busy times without buying enough to eat and drink. Laptop bans are going into effect, and some places are going so far as to padlock power outlets. (One chain with a zero-tolerance policy for computer users is, appropriately, called Café Grumpy.)

I take this all personally. Technologizer doesn’t have an office–not even in my home. I do my work wherever I have my laptop, an Internet connection, and my phone. Which, at various times, is in coffee shops, hotel lobbies, and public parks; on the subway; and in my car (not while driving). In fact, I’m writing this from the comfy corner booth of the Westlake Coffee Shop, near my house.

I try to be a good citizen. When I’m working from a coffee shop, I buy food and beverage–although I confess I’ve been known to nurse one Starbucks chai for hours, or even leave the empty cup sitting on my table in hopes that people would think I’d recently purchased it. I’m sensitive to busy times, and try to take off if a line’s forming for seating.

But I don’t want to hang out where I’m not wanted, and if a restaurant institutes a ban on laptop use–even if it’s only during certain hours–my instinct is to not do business with it, period. It’s not computer use itself that’s the problem. So why not just institute a minimum bill amount and/or a limit on the duration of visits if it’s absolutely necessary? Or charge enough for Wi-Fi that the joint makes a profit even if someone doesn’t consume any coffee?

Better yet, why not look at laptop users as an opportunity rather a threat? Maybe there’s a market for a sort of hybrid of Starbucks and Kinkos, with power at every seat, services like faxing and photocopying, and recharging stations for your BlackBerry or iPhone. And a promise that you’ll never, but never, be harassed for pulling out your computer and getting some work done.

Twitter Goes Down, Down, Down

When Twitter is having reliability problems, the site is usually able to at least summon up a cheery FailWhale by way of apology. This morning, however, the nation’s  hottest social networing site has been the victim of a massive and effective Distributed Denial of Service attack. The problems apparently started around 6am PT this morning, and continue on–I’m only able to get in sporadically at the moment.

The site is hiccuping back to life, though, which is good, since it lets Twitter fans tweet about the unavailability of Twitter:

Here’s hoping that the trouble ends soon, and that we learn what happened–and that there aren’t too many Twitterhaters out there who are openly or silently gleeful this morning…