By Dan Moren

November 28, 2014 8:22 AM PT

Star Wars: The Force Awakens trailer

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Okay, I’ve only watched it twice so far. But I’d suspect more viewings are in the offing.

A few general words, first: I’ve been trying to avoid spoilers about Episode VII. Hell, I’ve been considering not visiting my customary movie news sites for the next year or so, just to head off accidents like the Phantom Menace soundtrack debacle. So I don’t have any particular information about the plot of this movie, who the characters are (aside from the original trilogy members we know are returning), or anything else.

But I’ll say this: It’s a weird experience, watching something that seems both old and new. Every shot brings more questions: Wait, there are still stormtroopers? TIE Fighters? X-Wing pilots with Rebel Alliance insignia? Are we back on Tatooine? And yet there are so many new, unrecognizable things: a rolling droid, an unfamiliar-looking landspeeder, worlds that we haven’t seen before.

But if I had to encapsulate it all, there’s a moment right towards the end of the trailer—I won’t spoil it—but as the iconic music blares, something familiar makes an appearance. And I got goosebumps. Not just to see its return after so long, but because J.J. Abrams seemed to have plucked the scene directly from our collective imaginations. It just fits. It’s Star Wars.

Look, I know we’ve been burned before. I was a freshman in college when The Phantom Menace trailer arrived, and we watched it innumerable times over the next months. But despite the ultimate let down of those movies, I will never not be excited about the potential for more great stories in this universe that I dearly love.

Later, there will be time to break it down frame-by-frame, obsess over the minor details, and speculate on the whos, whys, and wherefores. But for now, I’ll sit back and revel in the pure atavistic delight of it all: after so many long years and so much disappointment, Star Wars is coming back to the big screen.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Jason Snell

November 28, 2014 7:58 AM PT

Gift Guide: Marvel Unlimited

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

If you or someone you know loves, loves, loves Marvel comics—and especially if we’re talking about someone who doesn’t buy many or any comics the week they’re released—I highly recommend the Marvel Unlimited service.

It’s like Netflix for Marvel comics. (And only Marvel comics—I wish other publishers would offer a service like this, but they don’t!) For $10 per month or $69 annually, you get access to more than 15,000 comics in Marvel’s library. Read as many as you want.

To read the comics, you’ve got to be on the Internet—though you can offload 12 at a time onto any device, so even if you’re out of range or on an airplane, you can have access to the equivalent of two trade paperbacks worth of comics.

The selection on Marvel Unlimited is pretty great. There are classic runs from all of the comics you’d expect—Fantastic Four, Amazing Spider-Man, Uncanny X-Men—plus newer books. In fact, Marvel seems to be posting most of their comics with a six-to-nine month lag. I buy a handful of brand-new Marvel comics on Comixology every month, but most of their stuff just doesn’t appeal enough for me to pay $3 or $4 per issue. Once that stuff hits Marvel Unlimited, though, I’m all over it.

The economics of a service like Marvel Unlimited are pretty simple: If you read enough comics in a year to make it worth $69, it’s a service worth getting. I’ve had it for two years now, and have no regrets.

Recently I spent a weekend catching up on last year’s Infinity event, written by Jonathan Hickman. (It was surprisingly good!) Marvel Unlimited provided a suggested reading order for the entire event, which was a huge help. All told, there were 22 comics in the main sequence of the event. Most of those comics are now for sale on Comixology for $2, meaning in a weekend I read $44 worth of comics. It adds up quickly.

And not having to weigh whether a particular storyline or plot synopsis is worth several dollars opens you up to exploration. I’ve read numerous excellent runs of comics that I never would have bought, based on stray Twitter recommendations. (Brubaker and Fraction’s Immortal Iron Fist and Mark Waid’s Daredevil, to name two.)

When the service launched, it only worked in web browsers and was Flash based. When the iOS app arrived, it was usable but really ugly. It’s come a long way since then. The app is more stable, does a better job of pre-loading issues as you start to read them, and there’s even a Smart Panel mode that—while not as good as Comixology’s Guided View—still does a decent job of guiding you from panel to panel if you prefer to read that way.

And when you get to the end of an issue, it prompts you to immediately jump to the next issue. (Unfortunately, it doesn’t offer you the next issue in an event, which would’ve been nice when I was reading Infinity.)

Marvel Unlimited isn’t perfect. The app still has a few bugs—the inability to zoom properly on two-page spreads when in portrait orientation bugs the crap out of me, and it still crashes a little too often. The catalog of comics is still missing some classic issues (only the first eight issues of John Byrne’s Alpha Flight, really?), though in the past couple of years they’ve filled in many of the holes—all the Uncanny X-Men issues I missed are now there.

If you’ve got a comic fan who likes Marvel on your gift list, or you want to do yourself a solid, I highly recommend Marvel Unlimited. I wish Marvel’s distinguished competition offered a service like this—it might actually get me back into DC comics for the first time since I was a teenager.

By Dan Moren

November 27, 2014 8:08 AM PT

Wish List: Siri integration with Apple TV

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

As I noted in my review of the Fire TV Stick last week, I watch a lot of television. Probably too much. Who can say? But as much as I like TV, navigating my manifold smart TV accoutrements is hardly a pleasure.

The Apple TV, with its dinky little aluminum remote, is no exception, as you learn after the seventeenth time you’ve angrily entered your iTunes or Netflix or Hulu account information, one slow, painstaking letter at a time. Yes, you can use the Remote app on iOS to get a virtual keyboard instead, but that’s a pain of its own; you have to find your phone, unlock it, launch the app, connect to your Apple TV, and then enter the information. More often than not, I just suffer through using the remote, because it’s actually faster. (Inertia: the most powerful force in the universe.)

But I long for some sort of voice-based way to direct my Apple TV. We don’t have to be talking Microsoft Kinect or Amazon Echo with their always-listening creepiness. I’m thinking Apple could just harness Siri on my iPhone or iPad and make the intelligent assistant aware that I have an Apple TV.

“Siri,” I might say to my phone, “show me the latest episode of The Flash on my Apple TV.” And up would pop my list of options for watching the newest installment of Barry Allen’s escapades, whether that meant Hulu Plus, the iTunes Store, or so on. It’d be even more useful for movies, so I could watch something that’s available for free on Netflix or HBO Go instead of shelling out money to rent or buy it on iTunes. Yes, that might take some money out of Apple’s pocket, but it’d also be known as the helpful company, the friendly company. The company with a heart. (To paraphrase one of my favorite movies of the season.)

This kind of integration is directly in Apple’s wheelhouse. The company’s great strength, as their executives constantly delight in telling us, is that it makes its own hardware, software, and services, and it can have them all work together in seamless harmony. This, then, seems like the perfect place to exploit those connections and simplify the experience of using set-top boxes.

Plus, it will make the TV-watching experience that much lazier—especially once we can all control our Apple TVs using Siri on our Apple Watches. We may never leave the couch again.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Glenn Fleishman

November 27, 2014 6:56 AM PT

Web apps, native apps, and app ecosystems

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

[Glenn Fleishman writes regularly for the Economist, Boing Boing, and Macworld, and tweets incessantly—oh why won’t he stop?—at @glennf.]

A recent spate of articles caused yet another dustup about the future of the Web (an open publishing medium based on standards that ostensibly works anywhere) versus native apps, which are programmed according to standards for distinct platforms and may (Google) or may not (Apple) be freely distributed without oversight and review.

The Wall Street Journal‘s Chris Mims started it off with “The Web Is Dying; Apps Are Killing It“; Zach Steward wrote a rejoinder at Quartz, “The web is alive and well“; and John Gruber dissected and rejected Mims’ narrative at Daring Fireball, “Native Apps Are Part of the Web.”

I believe there were a couple of missed points among these articles, although I generally favor Gruber’s broader view of the Web’s position within apps. He notes that apps “are alternatives to websites that run in web browsers. They’re just better clients.” Most apps are just thin layers on top of modern Web standards with the added benefit of a potentially superior user-interface experience, because the operating system takes care of more details with greater consistency, and allows a complicated but more reliable adaptation to multiple sizes of devices, whether it’s iOS, Windows Phone, or Android.

A Web browser on mobile and desktop devices isn’t a stable target: creating a responsive site that works well most of the time on most browsers is doable, but difficult; an app imposes more requirements and limitations, but it’s easier to test and ensure results that more likely conform to your design requirements. (Even with Android’s hundreds of screen sizes, this appears to be true, and now iOS designers are dealing with similar issues having many, not hundreds, of screen dimensions.)

But beyond interface flexibility, why put the huge development dollars and/or sweat of one’s brow into a native app, which is necessarily limited to a specific environment and requires frequent updating to meet the ongoing operating system changes imposed by the platform’s owner? The Web changes, too, but more slowly; browser updates don’t typically break features in most Web apps, but offer more improvements to take advantage of.

Some apps need lower-level access to the OS to be effective. Could Marco Arment have programmed The Magazine‘s initial app as a responsive Web site? Almost certainly yes. I’ve seen slick Web-only publications that have most of the spit and polish of Marco’s first app. The most important parts of The Magazine‘s app aren’t in the user interface part, as I’ll explain in a moment.

Could Marco have created Overcast as a Web app? Almost certainly not. For Apps that interact with audio and video, and most games of any sophistication, being able to delve deep and tune performance, latency, and interaction are key.

But most apps don’t offer audio, video, or game elements that need native code. There are so many examples of how browsers that comprehensively support HTML5 and CSS3’s features, and have highly optimized JavaScript, can accomplish a surprisingly large amount of what native apps do. So why bother?

I’d argue that it boils down to several app ecosystem features, rather than native code advantages. When there’s a genuine choice between building a Web app or native app, and when audience and revenue are important, the ecosystem makes the difference.

Continue reading “Web apps, native apps, and app ecosystems”…

By Chip Sudderth

November 26, 2014 7:05 AM PT

How Apple can boost my iPad productivity

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

[Chip Sudderth works in public school district communications and produces two podcasts: Two-minute Time Lord for Doctor Who fans and The Audio Guide to Babylon 5 with Erika Ensign and Shannon Sudderth.]

Jason’s November 19 review of the iPad Air 2 points out that iPad software fails to take full advantage of the phenomenal hardware in order to make the iPad a true productivity tool:

Every time I try to use a professional tool with my iPad I end up getting frustrated at how much slower the touch interactions are than just using an old-fashioned keyboard and mouse on my Mac.

Perhaps, in some very specific circumstances, touch interactions aren’t the most efficient way to interact with software. Apple might be able to unlock huge iPad productivity gains for some users through a software update that would certainly be controversial, but it’s one that I would welcome as someone who gets serious work done on my iPad Air.

Apple could add support for external pointing devices on iOS.

Continue reading “How Apple can boost my iPad productivity”…

By Jason Snell

November 25, 2014 4:12 PM PT

Attack of the 50-foot Save Sheet

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

This morning I tried to save a file in BBEdit, only to discover that I couldn’t see half of the save sheet—it was so large, it went off the bottom of the screen.

It turns out—and thanks to Jon Gotow of St. Clair Software, maker of the excellent Default Folder X, for the answer to this—that there’s a bug in Yosemite that causes a sheet to grow taller by 22 pixels every time you use it.

Once that sheet’s off the bottom of the screen, you can no longer grab the bottom of the sheet to make it shorter… so you’re hosed. And so was I, until Gotow gave me these Terminal commands:

 defaults delete -app BBEdit NSNavPanelExpandedSizeForOpenMode
 defaults delete -app BBEdit NSNavPanelExpandedSizeForSaveMode

…where you use the name of the affected app instead of “BBEdit” in the above example.

If you’re using Chrome, you need to target its bundle identifier:

 defaults delete com.google.Chrome NSNavPanelExpandedSizeForOpenMode
 defaults delete com.google.Chrome NSNavPanelExpandedSizeForSaveMode

According to Gotow, what happened is that Apple changed the file dialogs so that the title bar is now considered to be part of the window—and changed the math everywhere except in save sheets.

Hopefully Apple will fix this in a future Yosemite update. In the meantime, if you use an app that saves files via the sheet style, you might want to remind yourself to shrink its height a bit every so often.

[Update: Daniel Ericsson points out that if you hold down the shift key and drag inward on the edge of the save sheet, the sheet will get shorter—even if there’s no room for the sheet to actually get narrower!]

[Update x2: A new beta of Default Folder X now fixes this bug. It’s free for a 30 day trial, if this bug is biting you, and it’s a cool add-on!]

By Glenn Fleishman

November 25, 2014 10:28 AM PT

The crashing price of storage

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

[Glenn Fleishman writes regularly for the Economist, Boing Boing, and Macworld, and tweets incessantly—oh why won’t he stop?—at @glennf.]

It’s tricky to discount the future, except when it comes to technology. In nearly every way, the march of computing power, memory, hard disk storage, screen quality and the like is toward ever more, ever cheaper. In general, the price of food, shelter, and energy increase over time in absolute terms, while the price of things that contain electronics decrease in real terms. (The big exception is bandwidth in America because of a severe market failure that preserves false scarcity.)

So I’m cagey about getting locked into a price for anything when I know it will, nearly invariably, cost less and be better if I wait. This is why I haven’t upgraded my aging-but-still-reasonably-functional mid-2011 MacBook Air, which has 4 GB of RAM and can’t be expanded to more, because I know a Retina version is coming if I only wait long enough, likely only costing slightly more than today’s Air.

But when I spotted an offer from Code 42, makers of CrashPlan, for a pre-Black Friday sale (now since expired), I leapt at it. This sale for existing subscribers took about half off the price of its unlimited storage family plan, which is usually $150 for one year or $290 for two. The reason I paid says a lot about the current dynamic in the world of computer storage.

Continue reading “The crashing price of storage”…

By Jason Snell

November 24, 2014 9:20 AM PT

Podcasts swirling, whirling, and moving

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Today Moisés Chiullan announced that Brett Terpstra’s Systematic podcast and Christina Warren and Brett Terpstra’s podcast Overtired are moving from 5by5 to ESN.fm.

There’s been a lot of podcast movement lately, which isn’t really surprising given how young this medium (or whatever) is. Not everyone finds podcast networks valuable, but they can helpfully group shows of similar sensibilities together, provide exposure for new shows that might otherwise be missed, and offer a technical or financial infrastructure that can be convenient for people who have something to say but don’t want to build a podcasting business¹.

And sometimes after a while, those hosts or shows are ready to spread their wings, creatively or technically. Plenty of talented hosts have left 5by5, but you know what? My pals Merlin Mann and Andy Ihnatko are still there, and the indefatigable Dan Benjamin’s producing new audio and video shows all the time.

Since we moved Clockwise from IDG (with the blessing of some nice folks in IDG management) to Stephen Hackett and Myke Hurley’s new Relay FM network, the audience of that show has more than doubled. Being on Relay helped expose the show to a great audience of tech-podcast listeners, and has also helped us grow Upgrade rapidly.

I should mention that as of the most recent episode of The Incomparable, I’m no longer posting episodes to the 5by5 network. We started the show in 2010 and quickly Dan started recruiting me. A little more than a year later, we joined 5by5, and it helped expose my odd little pop-culture show to a much wider audience².

As time wore on, I decided I wanted to build something on my own, and launched spin-off shows on The Incomparable Network. That project also allowed me to add show metadata that 5by5 simply couldn’t or wouldn’t offer, like a page of all our Star Wars episodes or an index of show topics.

At that point the clock was ticking. I began posting the show to both networks. After a communication failure at 5by5 forced me to abandon a live episode just as it was starting, we set up our own live-stream system that we could control. And most recently, I gave Dan notice that we were changing ad-sales teams. The relationship was at an end. It was time to make it official.

I’m a believer in the medium—it’s one of the ways I expect to support myself and my family now that I’m on my own. But these are the early days. Things are changing rapidly. There are always new podcasts and new networks. (And yes, it’s worth reminding ourselves that this is not the only new-media opportunity out there.)

This reminds me of nothing more than the early days of the web. The younger people out there might not remember, but that period was like the wild west. Things changed every day. Podcasting’s going through something similar.

Anyway, thanks to everyone out there who has listened to some of my podcasts. And best of luck to Brett and Christina on their new adventures with Moisés at ESN.

By Dan Moren

November 21, 2014 2:44 PM PT

Amazon Fire TV Stick review

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

It’s come to my attention that I may have a problem. And that problem is: not enough HDMI ports.

Right now, connected to my TV are an Apple TV, an Xbox 360, a Mac mini, and an Amazon Fire TV. If you’re wondering, the answer is yes: I do find myself saying a little prayer every time I plug something else into the power strip back there.

I also had a Chromecast up until I left it in a hotel room last month. My new TV, purchased in August, has all those handy smart TV features. And yet, for some inconceivable reason, I still ordered an Amazon Fire TV Stick when they were announced a few weeks back. (It didn’t hurt that it was on sale for $20 for Amazon Prime members like myself.)

Basically, I buy video-streaming devices with slightly less devotion than Scott McNulty buys Kindles.

Continue reading “Amazon Fire TV Stick review”…