Apple Watch review spawns nasty war on Twitter

The Verge review of the Apple Watch spawns Twitter fight

The Verge had one of the first reviews of the Apple Watch, and it caught the attention of many people including Jean-Louis Gassee. Gassee wrote his own take on reviews of the Apple Watch, and it spawned an ugly Twitter battle between himself and the editor-in-chief of The Verge, Nilay Patel.

Jean-Louis Gassee at Monday Note on reviews of the Apple Watch:

As the first wave of Apple Watch reviews shows, waiting for impressions to settle down isn’t part of the Product Review genre. The psychoactive toxicity of Apple product launches that I made fun of two weeks ago is in full display as reviewers climb to the rooftops in a race for income-producing pageviews.

Or we have the (presumably) unintended humor of a reviewer who felt “ridiculous” wearing the Milanese Loop on his left wrist:

Image credit: Monday Note

These initial reviews say more about the Product Review genre than they do about the Apple Watch. As the word genre implies, there are rules. One is that you have to provide quotable fragments that support your view — think of how movie posters and trailers quote reviews. Second, write what you want but remember you still need to eat in this town. In the case of tech reviewers, “lunch” is being among the select few invited to do the next “under embargo” product review — you don’t want to go hungry. Third, you have to be “fair and balanced”: You must provide at least a hint of negativity, no matter what, so you won’t be perceived as having “sold out.” Lastly, you have to write quickly, steamroll annoying counter-narrative trifles, and use strong words.

More at Monday Note

It was the image of The Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel wearing the spiked bracelet that set off the war on Twitter:

More at Imgur

The Twitter drama caught the attention of Apple redditors and they sounded off on the ugly affair:

Bust_A_Nut: “Patel really is being quite childish about this. He has literally made a career out of criticizing the work of other people, the least he can do is tolerate a bit of light criticism himself.”

Traditionaltrout: “Not only that, but Gassée wasn’t even the one who wrote and posted the skit on Patel’s picture/original comment. A much younger guy than him – Matt Richman. That Patel couldn’t even figure out that he was attacking the wrong guy still hasn’t occurred to him. Sad.”

Anothergaijin: “…really sad because I thought the Apple Watch review they did on the Verge was incredible well done – very high production values.”

R3vanchist_: “I read his review and thought it was pretty professional, and appreciated the honest criticism amongst all the hype. But this changes it all for me. His responses here remind me of middle/high school level drama.

I’ve lost a lot of respect for him. This was nowhere near the professional, adult response I would expect from someone in his position.”

Cloud_strife_7: “Oh the irony, the critic doesn’t like being criticised. He’s acting pretty childish and like the twitter responder said, he’s going to regret this soon.”

More at Reddit

Browser extensions: Safari vs. Chrome and Firefox

Safari is the go-to browser for OS X users, but one redditor thinks that it’s lagging behind Firefox and Chrome when it comes to useful browser extensions. Does Safari really need more extensions?

Pdmcmahon asked his question in the OS X subreddit:

As a user of multiple Macs and an iPhone, the integration for iCloud bookmarks, iCloud Keychain, and iCloud Tabs is perfect for what I need. However, Apple’s Safari Extensions page is horrible, and they don’t have anywhere close to the number of awesome extensions which have been written for Chrome or Firefox.

More at Reddit

His fellow OS X redditors shared their thoughts about Safari and extensions:

Rogue203: “I’ve tried the other browsers, often for the extensions, but I eventually end up back with Safari. While it has its problems, I find it more stable and less of a resource pig than the others.

EDIT: I should mention that I rarely find extensions to be a major change to my experience. I’m curious what extensions really drive people to bloat their browsers footprint.”

Captain_Alaska: “It should be noted that their are a lot more extensions available for Safari that aren’t on the Apple webpage…

I’ve used Chrome on my PC for a better part of 4 years and accumulated a decent amount of extensions that I can’t live without, and I’ve been able to find the same extensions (or alternative) for almost all of them.”

Tcn33: “True, but at least it isn’t the horrid resource pig that Chrome is. Every time there’s a Chrome update I think “hey, maybe this will be the one that quits sucking so much CPU and memory.” Nope.”

NoShftShck16: “There is a reason for it. Chrome will use a crap ton of RAM if you allow it, if you kill its ability to run as a background process it is much lighter. However, since it uses as much as it can its performance is much higher than Firefox, in my experience. I do love Firefox but Chrome is my go to for the same reason OP loves Safari.

I wish I could go back to Firefox but Chrome is far superior in everything but resource management. 16GB in both my laptop and desktop has remedied that issue though.”

OkToBeTakei: “What makes me the most sad is that Safari and Chrome share a very very similar extension API. Porting extensions from Chrome to Safari, in most instances, isn’t particularly difficult. Sure, there are some that are dependent on stuff in Chrome that would have to be rewritten entirely for Safari, but, by-and-large, most could be very easily ported.

Unfortunately, I’m not that kind of developer, and don’t really know how :(“

More at Reddit

Migrating from Aperture to Photos for OS X

The latest version of OS X comes with the new Photos app, and some users are wondering how to move their photos from Aperture over to Photos.

Fraser Speirs shares his story in a detailed blog post.:

I have enjoyed photography for many years, particularly since the transition to digital. I’ve been shooting exclusively digitally since I got my first digital camera in 2002 and the result is rather a large body of digital pictures.

This is the story of migrating from a system that involved Aperture and a bunch of jury-rigged hacks to Apple’s new Photos for OS X.

So, at the end of this era, I had: About 31,000 photographs in Aperture, totalling over 300GB. The Aperture library residing on my Mac’s internal SSD storage taking up 38GB. All master images referenced on a 3TB external hard drive. About 6,000 photographs in iCloud Photo Library, totalling around 6-7GB of iCloud storage space. A folder of unknown number of other photographs of around 40GB in size from the time between early iOS 7 betas and iOS 8 shipping.

So, how to get all of this into iCloud Photo Library and back down to my iPhone and iPad?

More at Fraser Speir’s blog

Sarah Guarino at 9to5Mac also has a short guide on how to move your iPhoto or Aperture library over to Photos in OS X Yosemite:

Apple’s latest app Photos is now available for free as part of OS X 10.10.3 for Mac. The new app is the future of photo management from Apple with support for iCloud Photo Library, burst photos, slow-mo and time lapse videos, and more. Here’s how to migrate your photo library to the new Photos app from iPhoto or Aperture, both of which will no longer receive support for software updates going forward.

After pressing Get Started in the blue box as seen above, you have two different options. If you are brand new to photo organizing on a Mac and have never used iPhoto or Aperture before, (or if you don’t want to migrate your iPhoto or Aperture library to Photos), you have the option to import pictures from your digital camera or SD card, drag files directly into Photos, import pictures from the File menu or turn on iCloud Photo Library under preferences.

More at 9to5Mac

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