Author Archive | Harry McCracken

I Am Rich…and Missing!

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 6, 2008 at 3:23 pm

Armin Heinrich’s I Am Rich iPhone application, which put a pretty red jewel onto your iPhone screen for $999.99, is no longer available on Apple’s App Store. No word on whether Apple or Heinrich removed it, but it ignited a firestorm and the consensus in the blogosphere seemed to be that it made both Apple and Heinrich look bad, so its departure is logical enough.

For what it’s worth, Technologizer visitors seem to have healthy senses of humor, or at least mischievous ones: Of the nearly one thousand people who have participated in my little poll so far, the majority think that I Am Rich was a hoot and didn’t want Apple to yank it. Here are full results to date:

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SFO’s Bizarre Laptop Theft Story

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 5, 2008 at 7:42 pm

Here’s yet another airport security tale that would be perversely funny if our safety wasn’t at stake: A laptop containing personal information on 33,000 travelers who are members of the Clear program for expedited security-line service went missing at San Francisco’s SFO airport last week. The latest word is that it’s mysteriously reappeared in the same locked office that it vanished from.

I’m not sure if that sounds more like a high-tech Harry Houdini trick or the plot of a novel that Agatha Christie would write if she were still with us; I do know that it’s pretty dang unsettling on multiple levels.

Clear members go through extensive screening (and pay a $128 fee) in order to skip normal airport security procedures; if this were a movie, the laptop would have ended up in the hands of some terrorist organization, which would use it to steal those travelers’ identities and send armies of fanatics onto the nation’s planes. But a spokeswoman for Verified Identity Pass, the company behind Clear, told the San Francisco Chronicle that there’s no reason to panic: The laptop contained info such as names, addresses, and birthdates, not biometric stuff like fingerprints. While it wasn’t encrypted as TSA regulations mandate–oops!–it was protected with two levels of passwords. And a preliminary inspection indicates that the data wasn’t compromised.

Then again, the TSA has told Clear that it can’t register any new members until it gets its act together, but the enrollment page on Clear’s Website merely states that they’re “currently updating our software and are unable to process enrollments at this time.” I’m not sure if Clear is skirting around the truth or what, but if that’s a reference to what’s going on, it borders on a bald-faced lie. Which is not something you want to hear from a company that’s involved with airport security.

And the privacy page at the Clear site refers to “a comprehensive information security program to ensure the privacy of Clear applicants and members as well as the integrity of our systems” that’s impossible to reconcile with a laptop full of unencrypted data apparently sneaking out of an office and then sneaking back in.

I travel enough that when I’ve walked by Clear kiosks at airports, I’ve sometimes considered joining up. The main reason I haven’t is that among the airports I use most, the ones that Clear first tended to be the ones with the fastest security in the first place. (I rarely wait more than about three minutes at the United terminal at JFK, but if Clear served the nightmarish McCarran airport in Las Vegas I’d probably be a member today.)

But in the back of my mind, I think, I’ve always been uneasy about the idea of a background check and money overriding airport security practices…and yes, I feel that way even though I know just how lame many of those practices are.

So I never signed up. And I’m glad that I’m following this story as a bystander, rather than as someone whose personal information information might have been sitting on the amazing disappearing laptop…

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The First $1000 iPhone Application

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 5, 2008 at 4:16 pm

iPhone developer Armin Heinrich has released an application for the iPhone with two noteworthy characteristics:

1) Its primary function is to display a handsome glowing red jewel on your iPhone’s screen:

2) It sells on Apple’s App Store for $999.99, thereby explaining its name: I Am Rich:

(Okay, it does have one other feature: If you touch the “i” in the lower right-hand corner, you get “a secret mantra…[which] may help you to stay rich, healthy, and successful.” Unless Heinrich decides to hand out reviewer’s copies of I Am Rich, I may never learn what that mantra is.)

Heinrich, incidentally, also sells an iPhone calculator app which, at $4.99, most likely appeals to a wider, less well-heeled audience.

Apple’s policy for approving or rejecting iPhone apps has been a bit fuzzy: It keeps approving and unapproving Nullriver’s NetShare tethering utility, and pulled the seemingly innocuous Box Office movie info app. It seems possible that whatever person or automated system put I Am Rich on the App Store was asleep at the proverbial wheel. But if I it stays up–and I have to confess that the jokester in me kinda-sorta hopes it does–one thing’s clear: Practical jokes are acceptable.

At first, all this reminded me of the days when lots of wiseacres put stuff on eBay ranging from babies to kidneys to pieces of space station Mir to their own souls. The auctions sometimes got bids in the thousands, tens of thousands, or millions of dollars; eBay tended to look askance at such hijinks, and shut down the sales as quickly as it could. But those auctions differed from Heinrich’s offering in at least two crucial ways: The items in question were usually illegal or impossible to sell, and  “bids” were clearly pranks that eBay would never have enforced.

Heinrich’s app. on the other hand, is real and seemingly clearly explained, and the App Store presumably automatically charges your credit card once you agree to buy it. Wonder if anyone who isn’t rich has been silly and/or bold enough to make the purchase?

(Via Daring Fireball’s John Gruber on Twitter.)

Further thought: Other than me, most of the people who are blogging about this seem to think it’s an obnoxious travesty, and possibly insulting to iPhone developers who are trying to sell real apps. The non-jokester in me see the point. Betcha it gets pulled down–if nothing else, the hassle of dealing with anyone who “accidentally” buys it isn’t worth the pain for Apple…and neither is the distraction from all the useful, worth-the-money iPhone apps out there.

Further further thought @ 8:19pm: Hey, let’s conduct a poll!

Further further thought @ 4:26pm on 8/6: I Am Rich is now missing from the App Store. Big surprise!

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One Possible Future for the Browser

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 4, 2008 at 11:32 pm

Where is the Web going? Jesse James Garrett–the influential founder of Web design firm Adaptive Path–is in as good a position as anyone to provide smart answers to that question. And he’s just delivered some in the form of a next-generation browser interface called Aurora.

Don’t get too excited–Aurora is pretty much just a pie-in-the-sky idea at the moment, which Garrett and Adaptive Path have come up with in collaboration with Mozilla Labs, the research arm of the organization behind Firefox. It’s not the next version of Firefox, or anything else that’s going to arrive any time soon in any form. As Mike Arrington explains over at TechCrunch, Adaptive Path is releasing Aurora to “inspire and engage” the community of Web developers. Maybe folks will find it compelling enough to turn Aurora, or parts of it, into reality. Or maybe not.

In any event, it’s fun to look at what Aurora involves in its current theoretical state. Adaptive Path is releasing a series of videos about the interface, starting with one that went live tonight. Here’s that video–like most videos produced by technology companies to show how something that doesn’t exist yet might work in the real world, it has a slightly cheesy, Epcot Centerish vibe. But it does a reasonably good job of conveying Aurora’s basics…

A few quick thoughts:

One of the features described I liked most is one of the simplest. All the Aurora browser’s tools disappear until you need them, opening up more room for the Web page you’re on. Why can’t Firefox and IE and Safari do this…like now? In fact, why can’t all applications work this way? (I know that many of ’em have a full-screen mode, but it’s always optional, not the default way of doing things.)

Aurora looks like an OS/application interface, not a mere browser one. It takes over the screen, includes data-wrangling features, and even lets the user create charts–as if it could be, at least in part, a replacement for Firefox, Windows, and Excel. Which kind of makes sense, since so much of what operating systems and applications have traditionally done for us is migrating into the browser and onto the Internet.

Parts of Aurora look like a certain OS I know. Namely Apple’s Leopard–you could tell me that some of the functionality in the video is the next generation of the OS X Dock and Exposé and I’d believe you. Again, it’s interesting to see a future browser that would take as many cues from operating systems as from current browsers, which have changed remarkably little in basic concepts since Netscape Navigator 1.0.

Parts of Aurora look confusing. Or maybe it’s just the video that’s confusing.  “The placement of objects in the spatial view left to right and top to bottom is largely automatic,” says the video’s narration. “The browser analyzes the content of everything that flows through it, noting semantic similarities between objects and placing them near one another…strong associations between objects are noted as clusters.” I only sort of understand what it’s talking about. Aurora would only be a successful, of course, if users found it completely intuitive and didn’t need to think about this stuff. (Real people never use words like “semantic” when discussing the data in their lives; Web geeks can’t discuss data without doing so.)

I’m not even going to hazard a guess as to whether Aurora will ever amount to anything, and based on the first video, at least, I think it’s most interesting as a conversation starter. The Adaptive Path site has more info on the project, and will link to the rest of the Aurora videos as they’re released.

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The Big DVR in the Sky: Good News For You and Me?

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 4, 2008 at 1:03 pm

Here’s a major development in a tech legal tussle I wasn’t even following: The U.S. Court of Appeals has ruled that it’s okay for Comcast to offer a digital video recorder service in which the DVRing is all done at its facilities and delivered over the cable system–rather than via a box with a hard drive inside it in the consumer’s living room, which is how DVRs have worked since the dawn of TiVo and ReplayTV.

Media companies had sued to prevent this form of networked digital recording, fearing that it would make DVRs more pervasive, and therefore increase the odds that TV watchers will skip the ads that pay for their content.

Over at Barrons, Eric Savitz has a good post on the implications of today’s ruling. It’s obviously good news for Comcast and bad news for the media companies who had hoped to prevent it from offering this technology. Eric says it’s also a bummer for DirecTV and Dish Network, since there’s no way to deliver networked DVR functionality via satellite. I imagine that TiVo isn’t thrilled with the ruling, either–anything that helps make DVRs provded by cable companies more popular presumably hurts the sales of the box that’s still synonymous with “DVR.”

Mostly, though, I’m wondering: Should consumers be pleased with this ruling?

One benefit seems to be obvious: If Comcast can put the DVR at its end of the network, it should be able to let its customes sign up for DVR service without having to swap a non-DVR cable box for a new one. It should also allow folks with multiple cable boxes in their homes to get access to their recorded TV from any TV set.

I’m not enough of a cable-TV technology guru to know whether a cable box will be required at all to get access to a networked DVR. I’d like to think that a TV set with a CableCard would be up to the task, but I assume that it will require the elusive piece of technology known as the two-way CableCard.

If any of this happens, it would be pleasant but far from earthshaking. But centralizing the DVR would also open up the possibility of letting people get access to their recorded TV from any PC or phone with an Internet connection–in other words, providing the functionality of Sling Media’s wonderful SlingBox without requiring the SlingBox. You might even be able to get at your shows from any TV with Comcast service.

That would be neat. I’m not holding my breath that we’ll see it anytime soon, though–and even when it does show up, I suspect it might be in a form that’s nowhere near as usable and lovable as the TiVo/SlingBox combo I’ve been using for awhile to watch my favorite programs anywhere at any time. (I haven’t used Comcast’s current DVR box, but as far as  can tell, you can divvy its users up into two groups: Those who find it adequate, and those who can’t stand it.)

Of course, as a Court of Appeals ruling, this decision is subject to further change. It may be a long while before Comcast or any other cable company gets to put DVRs in the cloud. But to answer the question I asked a few paragraphs ago, I hope that they do–I can’t see any way that such a technology would be anything but a happy development for consumers. (Unless you take the “If consumers skip past all commercials, advertising, and therefore advertising-supported TV, will go away” scenario into account, which you probably should–but that’s a subject for another post…)

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Goners! 10 Websites That Didn’t Deserve to Die

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 3, 2008 at 9:28 pm

The World Wide Web is such a young medium that many of the best sites from its earliest days are still very much still with us, such as Yahoo (founded in 1994), Amazon.com (1994), CNET (1994), eBay (1995). and Salon.com (1995). It’s a little as if I Love Lucy, The Honeymooners, The Milton Berle Show, The Ed Sullivan Show, and Huntley/Brinkley were all on the air in 2008.

But for every site that’s been lucky enough to have a long and happy existence, there have been countless ones whose lives were cut short. Sometimes their deaths were huge stories; sometimes they quietly fizzled away. And even though many of their untimely passings were self-inflicted, it’s still worth celebrating the fact that they existed at all.

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An “iPhone Nano?” Maybe, But Surely Not This One

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 3, 2008 at 7:23 pm

There are Apple rumors that ring true. There are ones that sound like they might be true. And then there are the ones that have a whiff of fantasy about them. I’d put Simon Fluendy’s report in the UK’s Daily Mail of an iPhone Nano scheduled for Christmas release in that last category.

It’s not that a simpler and cheaper iPhone is unthinkable. Actually, it would be unthinkable if one doesn’t show up eventually, and I have no reason to think that Steve Jobs and company aren’t preparing one for the holidays. (I do kinda wonder if they might want to give the current, highly profitable iPhone a bit more time as the only iPhone before they introduce a more downscale version, but who knows?)

The thing about the Mail’s report is that it’s skimpy and skimpily sourced, with the info coming from “an industry source” and “one expert.” It says that Britain’s O2 will sell the phones for “up to £150,” and there’s nothing obviously unlikely about that, I guess. But it also describes the phone as supposedly having “a touch wheel on the back and display on the front so that numbers would be dialled from behind.”

That sounds just plain weird and nonsensical; how could such a design be anything but bizarrely unusable? How would you dial numbers with a touch wheel at all?

I can’t imagine that any company would release such a phone, and particularly not Apple. And one lesson with Apple rumors is that the ones that involve alleged products which incorporate features from existing products (like the touch wheel) in ways that sound improbably clunky never pan out.

(I’m reminded of many of the rumors about the iPhone before it actually appeared–many of them involved a phone that looked and worked a lot like an iPod…but when the iPhone arrived, it had little in common with an iPod from a hardware standpoint. Apple was far more imaginative than most of the people who speculated on what an iPhone might be, and far more committed to stretching the definition of what an iPod could be.)

Designing and manufacturing a more basic, inexpensive iPhone that makes sense won’t be easy–especially since the current model delivers so much power at the relatively low price of $199. An “iPhone Nano” would probably have to be significantly cheaper to find a market, and it would be interesting to see if it could incorporate multi-touch and other features that–today at least–make an iPhone and iPhone. Of, if it didn’t have much in common with today’s iPhones, whether consumers would accept it as one.

Of course, the evolution of the iPod from one model to an array of versions with widely differing features and price points shows that Apple can turn one product into a product line, and be wildly successful at doing it. So I repeat: The company will do the same thing with the iPhone. But if it does it in the way the Mail is reporting, I’ll be amazed.

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