The New SimCity

I played SimCity 2000 to death as a kid. I remember spending one glorious summer continually building city after city. Meticulously layout out every detail from the terrain to the transportation and zoning. That endearing jazz music always playing in the background. Having to quit playing because dinner was ready. Call it a waste of time if you want, but that summer I learned more about city planning and design that I could ever learn in a semester of school. And I couldn’t have had more fun doing it.

Recently at a Game Developers Conference presentation, Maxis announced that a new SimCity is in the works. While details are sketchy at best, Scientific American has provided the answer to my most-pressing concern:

Many critics have complained in the past that rigid zoning standards in previous versions forced them into a “California” model of urban development — sprawling suburbs revolving around a central commercial district — which in turn forces residents to make long, traffic-clogged commutes. The game’s architects say they are working with an unidentified “green” developer to integrate cutting-edge sustainable design principles into the new game, ensuring that, if players want to build a net-energy-neutral city, it will be possible to do so. Public transportation, bike-only streets and energy-efficient building codes will all be at players’ disposal, they say.

The SimCity I grew up playing was fantastic in almost every way, but it was stuck in a suburban model of development, as if that was the only way to build a city. Later in life, I learned that this is perhaps the worst way to build a city. It is unsustainable, keeping us separated from other people and in our cars longer, not to mention the environmental factors. Public transportation never mattered in previous versions of SimCity. There were no mixed-use zoning options. Nothing to quell car-dependency. I can’t wait to experiment with these new options when the game is released next year. Perhaps it will cultivate a new generation of city planners who design cities for human beings instead of cars.

Pixelated Imagery

Lukas Mathis gets up close and personal with the new iPad’s screen:

It’s easy to conceptually understand the idea of quadrupling the pixel count, but once you actually see what this means, it’s frankly pretty astonishing. The iPad 2’s pixels look gargantuan next to the diminutive pixels from the third-gen iPad.

(Via Shawn Blanc.)

Unified Search

There’s no getting around it, Safari in Mountain Lion has a unified search/address bar just like Google Chrome. I would expect this to carry over to iOS in its next release as well. It’s a welcome addition, especially on the iPhone given its small screen real estate. I like the simplicity, but I’m afraid we’ll lose the ability to see and understand real URLs.

On Product Names

I don’t know why there has been such hubbub about the new iPad’s name. I posted on the matter initially and thought that was the end of it. Easy. Done. But people seem to be bringing it up again and again, so I believe it warrants another post.

Firstly, the name of the new iPad is “iPad”, not “The new iPad”. It’s amazing to me how many journalists (who get paid much more than yours truly) are getting this simple fact wrong. There is a difference between the name of something and its marketing copy. When you see “The new iPad”, you’re seeing ad copy. You’re seeing a clarification that is more elegant in a header than “iPad (3rd generation)” or “iPad (early 2012)”.

Secondly, I like Dan Moren’s take on the reason behind the change:

Constantly reinventing a nomenclature is unsustainable. Is every iPad between now and 2022 going to have a different number, letter, or some combination appended? Is Apple going to eventually reach the iPad 13GS+ Extreme? I’d argue that’s exactly what the company doesn’t want.

The problem with the previous iPad (and iPhone) naming scheme is, over time, things start to get ridiculous: the “iPad 13GS+ Extreme” moniker is not so far fetched for a 2022 iPad. When Apple released the first iMac in 1998, it was called “iMac”. Simple. No inscrutable numbers or any other monikers to remember. Today it’s still called “iMac”. The difference is, when Apple says “The new iMac” in some ad copy, a bunch of journalists and bloggers don’t jump all over it, moaning and complaining about how stupid the name is.

Instagram For Android

Instagram the now-ubiquitous photo sharing application that iPhone users have been enjoying for the past sixteen months, is now due for an Android version. Welcome to 2010, Android users.

Just Now?!

Some scattered thoughts and questions from Wednesday’s Apple event:

• This is the first major Apple event since Steve Jobs’s death, and it is clear that Tim Cook is Apple’s new spokesman.
• While Tim is a good speaker, he does lack that ineffable sparkle and twinkle that Steve always brought to the table. (Of course, who wouldn’t?)
• A very, very large amount of Apple’s revenue comes from their post-PC devices: over three quarters of it.
• Apple likes to put up the iPod Touch right alongside the iPhone and iPad and pretend it’s not really their underprivileged, hampered cousin.
• Siri has different voices in different languages, but why are some male and some female?
• Why would Apple even mention Siri while artificially leaving it out of the new iPad’s feature set?
• The 25 billionth app was downloaded in China. Expect a greater and greater percentage of Apple’s customer base to be from China.
• Apple TV has a cool, new 1080p interface, but it was unclear whether buying the new box was necessary to get it. If so, why?
• Speaking of 1080p, movies and TV shows from iTunes now support 1080p. My reaction: just now?!
• Seriously, just now?! It’s 2012.
• Based on surveys, iPad users’ favorite activities are email, browsing the web, reading books, and playing games.
• It seems, if the iPad does something well, people choose to do that thing on an iPad instead of on a different device.
• The Retina Display in the new iPad also has greater color saturation: is this just for luminosity? How does this affect color accuracy?
• The new iPad can record 1080p video: just now?!
• A new built-in dictation button right on the software keyboard should make it easy to incorporate dictation into your existing workflow.
• The new iPad has 4G LTE capability. In the menu bar, it is displayed as “LTE”, not “4G”. Phil Schiller avoided using the term “4G” by itself in the presentation.
• The new A5X chip should help, but I question the new iPad’s ability to drive games smoothly at its new native resolution. I expect frame rates to suffer.
• Apple now has two complete suites of apps on iOS: iWork and iLife. Meanwhile, these two suites stagnate a bit on the Mac.
• iPhoto looked great in the presentation, but I can’t install it on my original iPad. While Apple says it is because it doesn’t have a camera, I suspect it is really because of its paltry 256 MB RAM.
• Between the easy, intuitive, and fun multitouch editing features, brushes, and graphic effects, iPhoto for iOS goes well beyond what it can do on a Mac.
• Many will be tempted to abandon iPhoto on their Mac, but then realize their iPad doesn’t have enough storage.
• At the end of the presentation, Tim Cook made a point to say that we should expect to see a lot more innovation from Apple in 2012. I don’t recall seeing anything like this in an Apple event before. Were they worried about unmet expectations, or just excited about planned announcements later in the year?

Imagine What You Would Pay

An eye-opening piece by Ezra Klein on the way healthcare prices are set in the US:

It is not like buying a television, where you can easily comparison shop and walk out of the store, and even forgo the purchase if it’s too expensive. And imagine what you would pay for a television if the salesmen at Best Buy knew that you couldn’t leave without making a purchase.

The worst thing we can do is not look at the benefits in other countries and cry out for reform.

Just "iPad"

Seen most-clearly on Apple’s iPad comparison page, it seems as if the iPad naming scheme, thankfully, has gone away. Instead of “iPad 2S” or “iPad 3”, it’s just “iPad”. When there is a comparison between this iPad and the iPad 2, it’s simply “The new iPad”. After the incoherent imposition of “4S” onto the last iPhone, this is a breath of fresh air. I expect the next iPhone to adopt this format as well.

Reducing Paper Clutter

One of the most beautiful things about computers is their ability to help us reduce clutter. Paper clutter comes to us in many forms: mail, manuals, books, magazines, newspapers, advertisements, pamphlets, business cards. How do you keep track of all that stuff? Most people let it accumulate into piles, or shut it into drawers. The life of a piece of paper clutter is the life of a needle in a haystack: difficult to find when you actually need it. The best way to bring order to this chaos is digitization:

• A single hard drive can store a lifetime’s worth of paper clutter.
• Hard drives take up a tiny amount of space compared to filing cabinets.
• Unlimited backups—exact copies—can be made of digital data.
• Data can be backed-up to a separate hard drive and stored off-sight.
• Alternatively, data can be backed-up to the cloud.
• Digital data is searchable: think Google for you data.

Unclutterer has a great, if somewhat dated, four-part series on handling paper clutter:

• Scanning documents to reduce paper clutter
• Organizing digitally scanned data
• Paper file organization systems
• Use a good shredder to eliminate unnecessary paper

The three most important tools: a good scanner, a good shredder, and good software for organizing scanned documents. My software of choice is Yep, which makes it easy to tag, organize, and search through large amounts of PDF documents. You can even use Yep to scan, bypassing the ugly, utilitarian software that comes with even the best scanners. So make that two important tools: Yep and a good shredder.

It is important to remember to keep everything backed-up, however. Since hard drives can fail at any moment, avoid shredding a scanned document until it has been backed-up at least once. After I scan a document, I write the date at the top. Then I place it in a “to be shredded” bin. After at least one night has passed (I do nightly backups), it is ready to be shredded. When it comes to ridding your life of clutter, shredding can be very therapeutic.

An additional tool not mentioned in the Unclutterer posts is a spam filter. We have this for our email, but what about our snail mail? The majority of documents I shred are never scanned-in. They are things like unwanted, unsolicited credit card offers. Using a service like SlotGuard can keep most of this from ever reaching your door, which is a big deal because of the danger of identity theft. But aside from privacy concerns, it is nice to keep away all of those coupons, phone books, and catalogs. While recycling is good, not wasting the paper in the first place is better.

The New Oil

Patrick Moorhead on our personal data:

I consider data, and the control and manipulation of it, to be the new oil. Like crude deposits buried deep under the surface of the earth, the growing sea of personal data represents a vein glory of new opportunities for businesses to reap massive financial gains. It also represents a new way for individuals to look at their value in the digital world – with data being an asset just like a house or a car.

Unfortunately, people don’t see the value of their data yet, and just give it to companies like Google and Facebook for free.

WebKit's Dominance

WebKit’s dominance damaging the web? To the contrary, I would argue that WebKit’s dominance is one of the best things to ever happen to the web. What web designers need is standards. If standards are more easily had by the dominance of a single browser engine than so be it. The alternative is fragmentation, which causes everyone to have to drag their feet.

While I say this now, Internet Explorer once dominated browser marketshare and went on to become a horrible, horrible browser. The worst. The same could arguably happen with WebKit, but WebKit isn’t a browser per se. It is an open source engine that multiple companies use. The likelihood of similar stagnation is small, I think. But bear in mind I’m mostly thinking about this issue pragmatically.

Nobody Will Ever Notice

Patrick McKenzie on learning a new programming language:

In the real world, picking up a new language takes a few weeks of effort and after 6 to 12 months nobody will ever notice you haven’t been doing that one for your entire career.

I have found this to be true, assuming you know at least one language already. I taught myself Javascript only after a situation came up where I needed it. Didn’t skip a beat. I’ve stopped short of putting every possible language on my résumé, however. Not that it isn’t tempting.