This page about Firefox claims:

Location-Aware Browsing is always opt-in in Firefox. No location information is ever sent without your permission. [emphasis mine, of course]

That's so not Scottish, it's crap.

In case you think I'm overstating, or screwed something up, here's my full Firefox history (full disclosure: I've erased about 12 pages between "Internet for people, not profit" and the Yahoo search for AAA that'd tell you what bank I use):

I can tell you, I haven't opted in to giving out my location everywhere in those pages.

And when we check about:config, it's turned on anyhow.

Explain that, Mr. Mozilla Privacy is Job 1.

(In other news, AAA still uses WebObjects.)

EDIT: Run the EFF's Panopticlick page now. I always kinda wondered about this (if you get all my browser metadata, you'll kinda know who I am, won't you?), but it's scary to see it in practice.

Even worse is learning about this canvas fingerprinting, which is a much more specifically identifying source of metadata that I had no clue existed. /sigh

They know exactly who you are.

Labels: fail, firefox, geolocation, privacy

Labels: iphone, macbook, mea culpa

From MacRumors:

Lightning-equipped EarPods and wireless EarPods are two rumors that have been bandied about, but a new report from Japanese site Mac Otakara suggests Apple may ship the iPhone 7 with standard 3.5mm headphones and a 3.5mm jack to Lightning adapter to allow them to connect to the new devices.

If that's the case, I think we've really walked back the boldness of removing the 3.5mm jack.

If third parties "should" (in AppleThink) make Lightning headphones, so should Apple, right? And if Apple thinks an adapter is a quality solution, even the implicit preferred solution, well, they've got a design problem. Adapters are not cool.

So we're back to a design issue?

When's the last time you thought Apple had a design problem? Complain all you want about thinness, at least it's an ethos, dude.

That is, when's the last time you heard Apple say, "Don't do as I do. Do as I say do" when it came to hardware?

Labels: apple, hardware, iphone, music

I've been listening to podcasts recently via Overcast's web player. It's good, but not great. An excellent MVP, but, unsurprisingly, not as good as the iPhone client.

No "Smart Speed", and as far as I can tell, 99.44% sure there's no Voice Boost either. It also syncs with my phone poorly. Poorly might be a little too strong, but not by much. I need something like Apple's Handoff, where I can listen to a podcast in the browser, grab my phone to jump in the car, and have Bluetooth pick right up where I left off. That's not working.

So the web client, though good, isn't great. But is it worth improving?

I've got lots of reactions there, including the comment Gruber gave me that, "a fair number of listeners listen right from the web page." The web is more popular for podcast listening than I'd expected.

But the main thing I think about is Marco & David Smith's comments about figuring out what the user is using before you bother coding new features.

Here's a quote from _David:

Being able to make my decisions based on numbers... makes me more honest with myself, because it's so easy to trick yourself into thinking something's more important than it actually is. As an example of this... [Pedometer++], my most sort of popular app, has an Apple Watch component, which is great, and as part of the Apple Watch component, it has a complication, that you can install...

In my analytics, it tells me how many people have installed the complication, and I started getting the numbers back, and the reality is that a very small percentage of my users use the complication, which was different in my mind than what I had originally expected. I use it. I love it. It's the part of the Watch app that is most useful to me. But it turns out a lot of my customers don't use it. There are some. But it's very very helpful for me to kind of guide how much time and energy I should put into making that awesome, because I had a number to base on it. You know, if it's a few percent of people are using it, maybe it's not as important as I thought it was, and so [keeping track of usage analytics] helps me to be honest. [emphasis mine - mfn]

Let's do what all the cool sites are doing, and emphasize one of those quotes by repeating it, but making it LARGER!!

[T]he reality is that a very small percentage of my users use the complication, which was different in my mind than what I had originally expected. I use it. I love it. It's the part of the Watch app that is most useful to me. But it turns out a lot of my customers don't use it.

Sans a business case, it's a vanity project

But can we really determine what's useful by what's being used now? In David's case, I bet so. If we use Spolsky's rule of thumb that each barrier to entry loses you half your customers, well...

• All app users
  • App users than own an Apple Watch. -- 50%
    • All Watch owners that install the app on the watch -- 25%
      • All that installed the app that install the complication -- 12.5%

And, of course, the second bullet is much much less than 50%. No, no a Watch complication is probably not the best place to spend your time, unless Watch users are really your target audience. Then tell me your business plan. It's probably not ads, which make are Pedometer++'s main source of income, as I understand it.

That is, _David doesn't have, as far as I know, a way to monetize Watch users specifically. So why is he spending time there? Because he's building something useful. That's not a business case. Time to move on, unless you're doing a vanity project, which, honestly, it sounds like he was.

(And that's okay -- One, pretty much every project an indie picks has a little vanity in it. Otherwise, why do it and not something just as useful but a little more boring? Second, building something you'll use is an important part of most any service. If you can't dogfood it, nobody else is going to eat it either. You just need to make sure it's not dogfood for one.)

Overcast online: Is there a business case?

Which brings us back to Overcast online. If the web interface isn't getting much use, why not? Is it because people don't use web interfaces to listen to podcasts? Gruber and Snell say that's not the case. Would people listen in another web page, one away from those two guys' sites? Urmmmm... probably not many, but more than I would've thought at first. That is, what we've learned is that podcasting away from your phone isn't uncommon.

Could you do Smart Speed on the web? Probably not, practically speaking. Probably not without playing a file you're modifying on the fly on your own server, or, worse, forcing some wacky browser install. The first is an unwarranted expense, and the second is a horrible interface. Nobody's installing that.

That is, I'm pretty sure Overcast.fm is just a player, streaming the audio file from wherever the file lives. The web page is just a middleperson. It's a very thin client.

But you know what the web client doesn't have that it could add much more easily than Smart Speed and Voice Boost?

• Playlists (I just get a big dump of podcast subs in an alphabetical list on Overcast.fm)
• Persistent settings (like what speed multiplier I use on each podcast -- the iOS app keeps track podcast by podcast)
• Recommendations
• Great syncing

If you gave me a full[er] client, would I listen on the web more? Yes. Yes, I would. And do you what else? The web client is more visual than the app on my phone. I'm not using my car's Bluetooth radio's buttons or my headphone clicker to pause. I'm looking at the screen I pictured, above, as I mouse over to it to click.

And do you know what you could put there? That's right. If not ads, then at least a donate button.

That sounds like a business case. It might be worth a couple of weeks of development.

Labels: analytics, business, coding, features, indie

Labels: apple fail

From The Verge on the recent changes to the iOS App Store:

Instead, [Schiller] says, the changes [to the iOS App Store] are a sign of the times and the success of the store, which he calls "the best place ever created for distributing software." [emph, as almost always, mine -mfn]

Just a passing note to say that Schiller and Trump seem to share the rhetorical bluster of P.T. Barnum.

(Note also that today's Wikipedia says, "Barnum served two terms in the Connecticut legislature in 1865 as a Republican for Fairfield." Oh boy.)

Labels: apple, business, sales

Labels: hats of money, noteToSelf, printer, toner

I've been meaning to create a video comparing the pros and cons of using a Lenovo Y700-14 as a business laptop, having had mine for about a month, but I keep not getting a Round Tuit.

Here's a review, in brief:

This Lenovo Y700-14 is a great budget business laptop, though flawed in several predictable ways. First, a warning: It grossly underperforms without an SSD, but that's any laptop at this point. You have to add an SSD to call this a usable laptop. Otherwise, you might as well throw its i7-6700HQ in the trash.

Pros:

• Insanely cheap.
  • $700 for the laptop
  • $150 to DIY-add both 16 gigs of RAM (24 total!) and a 128 gig SSD
• Exceptionally powerful.
  • i7-6700HQ puts in squarely in 15" MacBook performance range.
• Has an m.2 slot to add your SSD.
  • Keep your 1 TB spinning platter for backup
  • Forces you to reinstall Win10, removing all that Lenovo cruft.
• Good screen resolution -- 1920x1080
• Excellent cooling.
  • Designed to cool the quad-core, versus T460p's kludge
• Red keyboard backlight is less distracting than white light (imo).
• Nice 14" size. Larger than my T430 with extended battery, but not exceptionally so.
• The speakers are great.
  • Bigger deal than I'd think.
  • Used to bring external speakers for T430. No longer an issue.

Cons:

I'm mostly comparing this to three years' use of my T430, but I bet most of this applies to the T460p I was considering as well.

• Battery is a joke. 2-3 hours max with VMware running.
• Keyboard is not good at all.
• Trackpad is another joke. Mushy, hard to click, non-dedicated buttons.
  • :^P <#####
  • I have found some workarounds, but it's still subpar.
• Not dockable. I've done a 180 here. Plugable's USB 3 Universal Laptop Docking Station is great, especially after the Win10 Anniversary update.
  • Really could've used a USB-C port here.
• No TrackPoint.
• Only three USB ports.
• No always-on USB port for charging Turns out the ports do stay on (only when plugged in?)
• No fingerprint sensor (these are useful if signing in in public)
• Build quality is okay, but it's quickly obvious this isn't as rigid as a ThinkPad.
  • The grill in the back where hot air comes out is exceptionally plastic-y, for instance.
• Screen is not particularly bright.
• Only one video out port (I have a USB-to-HDMI, but that's a pain. See "not dockable", above)
• Does get hot on your lap.
• Not made with upgrading in mind -- back is not as easy to open as it could be.

There you go. Exceptionally fast for a hundreds less than other laptops, but serious convenience drawbacks. No good battery, keyboard, or trackpad. Good, but not great, screen. No dockability, which one USB-C port would've fixed in a flash.

One quick add: There's no screw to hold in your SSD in the m.2 slot, which seemed cheap to me. But then I thought, "Well, if the screws that hold the case on have the same threads and will work here, I'll let it go." It worked. I'm down one screw on the case/bottom, and the screw head doesn't seem quite wide enough to hold the SSD in there (YMMV, I don't encourage doing this, and do so at your own risk!), but it's worked for weeks months so far.

Gaming:

Okay, so if that's how the gaming laptop stacks up as a business laptop, how does it do gaming? I've run 3DMark, and need to add it here, but it wasn't great. Seems it was in the bottom 25% for gaming laptops or something similar.

The quick answer is that the Y700 is not a gaming laptop. If you're worried about comparing benchmarks with your buds to see who wins, this ain't the one. If you want to play the latest games in decent detail and framerate, this isn't your box. As most reviews of the Y700-14" point out, the AMD Radeon R9 M375 Lenovo uses here is grossly underpowered, and really hamstrings an otherwise excellent portable gamer.

The Y700 is, however, a pretty good laptop for playing games. If you don't mind turning down resolutions, it's no slouch. That is, having a decent dedicated card means that games are playable. I have the quad-core tower in my office whose multi-core cpubenchmark score is 40%+ faster than the Y700 processor, and it only has integrated video. The Y700 runs rings around it, unsurprisingly. I've been playing a decent amount of Elite: Dangerous on mine, and it handles it all very well. I won't swear the Y700's AMD Radeon R9 M375 2GB is better than the T460p's NVIDIA GeForce 940MX 2GB, but I remember being underwhelmed with the T430's discrete card (which I added to have easy dual video out).

Bottom line:

You get much more than you pay for with the Y700, but be warned before you sell out to make it your prime programming laptop.

Labels: hardware, lenovo, review