Hey Siri, Call Google
WWDC ’26 biggest winners were Google, Liquid Glass haters, iPhone 11 owners, and foldable-iPhone speculation enjoyers.
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2019 in Review
Looking back on a year of Material Design work, conference talks, family travel, and life with a new puppy named Johnny Cash.
Google Photos’ unguessable URLs
The Verge’s Russell Brandom on what, at first blush, looked like a security hole in Google Photos: when you right-click an image, you get URLs that appear to be fully public and accessible by anyone. It’s not as big a deal as it seems:…
Ben Thompson on Apple’s Privacy Stance
Ben Thompson makes a good point in today’s Stratechery Daily Update (paywalled) about Tim Cook’s privacy stance, and his comments about Google’s business model that I previously and half-jokingly described as “throwing shade”. Thompson…
“Why Nobody Can Copy Apple”
From Charlie Kindel: I assert there’s something else that makes Apple is unique amongst its (asymmetric) competitors (e.g. Google, MS, Samsung): It only focuses on one customer: The Consumer. In my experience, the behaviors and culture of…
Google Kills Free Version of Google Apps
If nothing else, my blog post on configuring multiple Google Apps domains on a single account just got a lot more useful.
Google Chrome for iOS
Those are four words I never thought I'd use in the same sentence, unless that sentence went on to say "will never happen". Announced today at Google I/O, Chrome is — like nearly every other third-party browser for iOS — just a wrapper…
Two Domains, One Google Apps
Since almost the beginning, Google Apps has worked like this: Every account has one domain name (let's call it yourdomain.com) that users use to log into their mail/calendars/etc, which Google calls the primary domain name. You set this…
Google+ and cognitive overhead
Are you tired of hearing about it yet? I'm getting there. There's more chatter about Google+ right now than there is on Google+, and most of what's on Google+ is conversations about Google+. I'm sure Google didn't set out to build the…
On Grouponzi
M.G. Siegler on why calling Groupon a ponzi scheme misses the point of why they're chasing such an aggressive growth strategy: If you look at the actual breakdown, most of the money is being spent internationally. In the U.S., they’re…
Google Apps Dropping IE7 Support on Aug 1
This is big: For web applications to spring even farther ahead of traditional software, our teams need to make use of new capabilities available in modern browsers. … For this reason, soon Google Apps will only support modern browsers.…
NYT Announces Expensive, Confusing, Easily Avoided Paywall
You get 20 articles a month, unless you're following a link from Google, social media like Facebook or Twitter, or from blogs, in which case you can view the linked article for free. If you want to view more than 20 articles a month, you…
All 4 Major U.S. Networks Now Blocking Google TV
What if a huge internet company developed a software platform for TVs, got some huge device makers involved to make and sell the hardware with a big, splashy holiday-time launch, but forgot to check with the content providers to make sure…
The Most Popular Phone in the World
Gizmodo profiles the Nokia 1100, the 7-year-old model used by more than 250,000,000 people in (mostly) developing nations. It's easy for us here in the first world to mock Nokia for being (so far) a non-participant in the smartphone…
This Guy Has An Analog Meter for His Google Reader Unread Count
Based on Arduino (of course). It polls for updates once a minute, so he can see the needle steadily drop as he marks items read.
Google’s Creep Executive Officer
John Gruber speculates that if Google has become creepy in the last year or two, that may be attributable to the creepiness of CEO Eric Schmidt. Where by "creepy", he means "amoral" and "willing to sacrifice privacy for mobile or ad…
Paul Graham: “What Happened to Yahoo”
I didn't leave out a question mark or anything; Graham's not asking what happened to Yahoo, a company whose brightest talents have all left and who's best chance for long-term survival is as a unit of Microsoft. He's telling us it's…
Meditations in a 4.0-mergency
All of my biggest iPhone OS feature wishes were, let's face it, pretty boring: Multiple Exchange accounts (or: wanting Google to ActiveSync my calendars without getting cockblocked by work meetings) Unified e-mail inbox And, no kidding,…
‘Tea Parties’ Making it Harder to Find Tea Parties
The conservative Tea Party movement so dominates the Google rankings, it's becoming harder and harder to find information pertaining to actual tea, y'know, the stuff you drink. From the Tribune: "I certainly can see and have seen some…
Google Admits Buzz Wasn’t User Tested Prior To Launch
News flash: Googlers and Gmail users have different ideas of how social software should behave! Says Todd Johnson, Google's product manager for Buzz: We've been testing Buzz internally at Google for a while. Of course, getting feedback…
Stupid Search Tricks, No. 2: “Cancel Google”
Remember those people who left a lot of angry comments on a ReadWriteWeb post that happened to be the first Google result for the phrase “Facebook login?” Well, today's search fail is even better: a blog post that happens to be the top…
Google Responds To Criticism, Makes Buzz Easier To Kill
Someone in Mountain View has seen that post about the woman auto-followed by her ex one too many times. Google has announced the following changes to Buzz: Buzz is now opt-in, and users who've never turned it on are now given a prominent…
‘Facebook login’
Web designers' worst nightmare come true: Fascinating. ReadWriteWeb has a weblog post that ranks highly in Google’s search results for “Facebook login”. The comments on the post are filled with complaints from confused people who think…
Woman Auto-Followed by Abusive Husband on Google Buzz
This could be a thing. She writes: I use my private Gmail account to email my boyfriend and my mother. There’s a BIG drop-off between them and my other “most frequent” contacts. You know who my third most frequent contact is? My abusive…
What Google Chrome could still learn from Safari
Chrome (or Chromium) has been my default browser for about two weeks now. (I was using Chromium nightlies, with bookmark syncing and Extensions, until a few days ago when those features trickled down to dev channel builds of reg'lar old…