The Colony Drop Twitter account just passed along this little gem from Tumblr (transcription below):
It reads:
what is emojis? those emoticons? why are they classist?
Emojis are emoticons that can only be typed by iPhones and read by iPhones and iPod Touches. They cannot be typed or read by computers or non-smart phones. The emoji is inherently classist because it excludes people who do not own expensive Apple products. Most people cannot afford iPhones and iPod Touches… when you type an emoji, you type a symbol that only financially advantaged people can read. That is classism.
Wow. That is a lot of stupid packed into one paragraph. The first sentence alone has at least four factual errors (emoji are not emoticons per se, the plural of emoji is just “emoji”, they can be entered by devices other than iPhones, they can be read by many devices), and it doesn’t get better after that (the poster has clearly never heard of Unicode or the free-with-contract iPhone 3GS).
Obviously, it was beyond the poster’s ability to look up the Emoji entry on Wikipedia.
I’d love to quote Colony Drop’s witty comment from their tweet but, alas, WordPress can’t handle Unicode emoji!
So now CocoaConf Alt isn’t happening. A story at Loop Insight lays the blame more clearly at Apple’s feet for pressuring the Intercontinental hotel, which apparently has some contractural relationship with Apple during WWDC (it’s not said what… possibly housing Apple employees or off-site partner meetings?), and that this contract forbids the hotel from hosting a “competing” event.
I’ve spoken at nearly all the CocoaConf conferences, and I have no reason to doubt Dave’s version of these events. Indeed, while some commenters would like to portray this as a spat solely between the Intercontinental and CocoaConf – and leave Apple out of it – that position doesn’t square with the facts. If the Intercontinental knew they were contracturally prohibited from hosting CocoaConf Alt, they wouldn’t have signed a contract with CocoaConf in the first place, right? Daniel Jalkut makes the best case for letting Apple off the hook, suggesting that someone at either the Intercontiental or Apple got a trigger finger and killed the event when they didn’t necessarily need to. That the Intercontinental realized it was in a conflict-of-interest scenario after the fact is possible, but it’s no more plausible than the idea that Apple doesn’t like anyone riding on their coattails and sent the hotel management a nastygram.
For what it’s worth, that latter scenario is the one that rings true to me. (Or, to haul out a tag I haven’t used in a while, nefarious skullduggery!).
And a week late, I’m finally writing my follow-up post to CocoaConf San Jose. Not that anybody’s missing anything, I think, because I’ve been doing the same two hour-long sessions for the CocoaConf Spring 2013 tour: “Core Audio in iOS 6″ and “Mobile Movies with HTTP Live Streaming”. I’ve tweaked each repeatedly, although this time the only one with slides new enough to post to Slideshare is the Core Audio one, since I added some slides at the end to do an overview of Audiobus.
I’d hoped to get a full-blown Audiobus demo ready in time for the conference, but client work took priority, and in the midst of an 11-hour flight delay in Denver, I didn’t have the tools or the stamina to pull it off.
Actually, I’m thinking I may work on digging into Audiobus enough to get a whole one-hour talk on it ready for CocoaConf’s Fall tour. Doing so would also help me deal with the fact that some of the Fall conferences will likely fall inside the iOS 7 / OS X 10.9 NDA period, leaving us unable to talk about the new hotness from Cupertino. Audiobus is an interesting new topic that would not be encumbered by the Cupertino cone of silence.
MacWorld ran a story last week to remind readers that A $5 App Isn’t Expensive, and imploring readers to stop being such cheapskates for the sake of the App Store economy.
Earth to MacWorld: It’s already too late. The market has spoken, and it refuses to pay for apps, even when the toxic side-effects of that are manifest.
MacWorld’s piece comes in part as a response to Michael Jurewitz’s five-part series on app pricing, posted on the eve of his return to Apple (and, presumably, a lot more circumspection about his future blogging). Jury sees the app pricing race to the bottom as a self-inflicted wound and urges developers to charge what their apps are worth.
Great advice… for anyone still around to take it.
Read the rest of this entry…
Author and speaker Daniel Steinberg always keeps his talks fresh, revising them and making changes every time he gives them. CocoaConf DC 2013 was at least the third time I’d heard his keynote “A Pocketful of Patterns” (whose framing device is based, in part, on my own skepticism about design patterns), but he caught my attention with this little pattern, showing a problem and a good solution:
What do you hate about most Cocoa Podcasts? They tend to be way too long, rambly, unfocused, self-indulgent. Therefore, if I were to produce a podcast it would be focused on the audience.
OSEG, so true. So I tweeted it right then and there:
Take a look at the tweet details and you’ll see a long trail of reactions, including those from Cocoa podcasters Saul Mora of NSBrief and Wolf Rentzsch and Andrew Pontious of Edge Cases.
So what’s the beef that Daniel and I have? Actually, it starts back at CocoaConf Chicago, and a flippant question I asked as the moderator of “Reverse Q&A”, where we take a panel of speakers and have them ask questions of the audience instead of the usual way around. Shifting topics with a segue, I asked “what’s the deal with all these developer podcasts anyways? why do we have so many?”
And the answer I got back was: “it’s easier than blogging.”
