Parents consider lawsuit after daughter loses valedictorian spot – latimes.com

: “Regardless, the family has already written a letter to the California Department of Education and spoken with district officials about what they perceive to be an ‘injustice.’ The parents allege that because Elisha was not in the school’s magnet program, she could not take AP classes as a freshman.

They also take umbrage with district policy that does not consider students’ final semester grades in the valedictorian GPA calculation.

‘They’re robbing the students of the credit,’ Nelson said. ‘If you know in your heart you did your best, what else can you do? It’s based on the system that you’re ranked lower, not based on achievement.’

(Via. latimes.com)

This kid is on her way to Stanford and the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab. Probably as good a time as any to learn that life isn’t fair.

As someone who went to prep school and spent a lot of time with a lot of kids who cared way too much about their grades, I can assure you, the best time for this kid to learn to relax and accept the fact that she’s already won the game of life is right now. Not ten years from now, when no one asks her anymore what her meaningless GPA was.

Seriously. Kid. No one cares. Your parents are too clueless to tell you this, so I will. You did well. You got yourself to the next step way ahead of the game. Pat yourself on the back and screw the school who didn’t give you the top slot. Next time there’s a vote for raising property taxes, send a letter to the school and tell them to suck it.

A whole lifetime of people treating you unfairly awaits. Be thankful you’re smart enough to get the better of them most of the time.

Developers at WWDC not worried about iPhone, iPad screen size changes:

Analyst Gene Munster of Piper Jaffray polled 100 developers at WWDC 2012 in San Francisco, Calif., and asked them how difficult it would be to adjust their applications to two new screen sizes, presuming Apple were to make an iPhone with a larger screen, as well as a smaller “iPad mini.”

Developers were asked to indicate, on a scale of one to 10, how difficult it might be for them to change their applications for the new screen sizes. On average, developers at WWDC said the difficulty would be just a 3.4 out of 10, suggesting they don’t see it as a major issue.

(Via www.appleinsider.com)

Ask yourself this question: How many attendees at WWDC are programmers, and how many are designers, specifically graphic designers?

The reason WWDC attendees as a group aren’t concerned about varying screen sizes is that they won’t necessarily be doing the bulk of the work if these different sizes happen. They’ll need to make changes, obviously, and I don’t want to assume that it’ll be super easy for anyone. Every app will be unique in the level of effort involved. But the lion’s share of the hours involved in accommodating different screen sizes will probably fall on the graphics teams and the UI staff, a demographic that is very under-represented in this sample.

That’s not to say that the graphic artists will be too concerned, either. But I have a feeling many of us are not looking forward to maintaining and chopping several more sizes of graphics for every app. Or worse yet, trying to find the best way to make use of the extra space or deal with the lack of space in our layouts. It’s a lot of work and time to get all those assets just right. And every extra set of variables make your app that much less profitable for you.

So if you’re not at least a little concerned, you’re doing it wrong.

At WWDC, context matters for hardware announcements | Macworld:

If Apple has a similar kind of update in the works for one its Mac products, then, it seems unlikely that such an announcement would get any stage time at WWDC—not when there’s Mountain Lion and a likely update to iOS to discuss. Besides, Apple could hold off on announcing a modest-but-welcome update to one of its Mac products for a week or two after WWDC and be guaranteed coverage from an Apple-hungry press corps. Tacking on a laptop with a processor bump to whatever else Apple has planned for WWDC doesn’t really fit with the company’s way of doing things.

Which is not to say Apple won’t have any hardware to unveil at WWDC. It’s just that if the company does, you can bet it’s going to feature something that appeals to the multitude of developers on hand.

(Via www.macworld.com)

Phillip Michaels for Macworld, outlining a very similar argument to mine from the other day. I’m not sure I agree that Retina Macs would warrant any special attention for developers, though. I mean, what’s there to talk about, beyond making @2x versions of everything? Can’t see Retina requiring a lot of developer talks to train developers to implement. But who knows?

To me, Retina Macs are an inevitability, and maybe even press worthy, but not a big deal to developers. If you are a designer of Mac apps, you should already be working on your Retina graphics. Maybe there’s more to it than I think, though.

The chart at the end of the above linked article is telling. Notice every single Mac in the current lineup was announced via Press Release.

Now that these iOS 6 banners are making their way around the Internet, I’m reminded of why I’ve been skeptical that Apple would release new Macs during the WWDC keynote next week. I’m particularly skeptical that they’d release updates to almost the entire lineup, as many have predicted.

Apple only does about 4 of these live press keynotes a year. They like to make them count. And by that, I don’t mean that they like to jam pack them with 50 different announcements that generate tons of stories about various topics. Quite the opposite. In recent years especially, Apple has focused these events on just a handful of new products, so that there’s only one or two clear stories for the press to write about. Tons of stories either way, but since no one but a nerd like me is going to read them all, it’s best to have 10 stories about iOS 6, say, than one story about the Mac Pro, one about the iMac, one about the MacBook Air, etc.

Releasing new Macs, unless there’s some really important new hardware feature that they all have in common, doesn’t make for a good press day, in other words. It mucks up the focus and squanders the opportunity to control what the press writes. If you’ve got one shot at making the local evening news, you don’t give the editors ten different options. You want to make sure they’re all talking about the same thing all over the world.

I’m not saying there definitely won’t be any new hardware; I’m just saying that if you listen to all the hoopla surrounding the Keynote this year, you’d be expecting new Mac Pros, new iMacs, new MacBook Pros, new MacBook Airs (with retina screens), a new MacBook line that’s neither a Pro nor an Air, a new Apple Television set, and the announcement of the next iPhone that won’t ship until later this year. And that’s before you start talking about Mountain Lion and iOS.

Does anyone think it would be a good idea to announce all that at once? How long is this keynote going to be? Six hours? And what’s Apple going to do for the rest of the year, go to Maui?

And if you’re David Pogue, which one of those things makes your column next week?

If I had to bet, I’d say that 90% of the Keynote on Monday (after the customary update on market share, the Retail stores, etc.) will be devoted to Mountain Lion and iOS 6, and particularly how both of those relate to iCloud. And maybe, since it’s WWDC, and there are an awful lot of TBA sessions, some new area where developers can start writing apps, such as the AppleTV.

The demo of the new Maps feature in iOS 6 alone is going to take at least 20 minutes.

(I can totally see the live blogs and my Twitter stream, after we’re 40 minutes in, and Craig Federighi is still demoing Notification Center. “WE’VE SEEN ALL THIS BEFORE!!!!” “WHERE’S THE GOOD STUFF??!!” etc.)

Hardware just seems like a distraction. Even to spend two minutes putting up a slide saying, “hey, we’re updating all these Macs today” detracts from the more important story of where Apple is taking its two OS platforms this year. Save that for a press release.

I had guessed that Apple would have updated the Mac line THIS week, ahead of WWDC, as they have in the past, just to get that out of the way. Perhaps they’ll do it the week after this time around. I don’t know. Maybe all those Mac updates will be trickled down over the coming months.

Unless there really is a common link between all those updated Macs and whatever Apple really wants the story to be. I never put it past Cupertino to surprise me. But to me, if there isn’t that common thread, it would be a mistake to announce so much at once.

Ping: What went wrong | Macworld: “And therein lies Ping’s primary defect. Though dressed in social garb, at its heart, it’s a crude advertising vehicle. And one—undoubtedly to the great disappointment of some at Apple—that too many people saw through.”

(Via Macworld.)

Another great article from Christopher Breen. I’d add that another of Ping’s shortcomings is that you can’t simply post links to interesting articles, stories, pictures, etc. Artists could post whatever they wanted, but regular users like you and me had to start every conversation with a link to a song in iTunes. Talk about “marketing smell.” That limitation was just plain stupid.

Part of me thinks that any social network that tries to limit people to just talking about music is doomed to fail, anyway. I mean, I love music more than the average person, but I don’t always want to share only music. Sometimes, I want to share stories about music, apps that help you make music, books on the subject of music, pictures of my favorite bands, etc. The reason Facebook works so well is that you can literally share anything about anything. Sure, this leads to a lot more noise than signal, but it also encourages participation. I have a hard enough time finding things that I find post-worthy on a social network without the network itself telling me what I can and can’t post.

I know the current trend is towards more targeted social networks, but that’s simply a reaction to Facebook’s monopoly. I have to think that most of those mini networks will either be acquired by Facebook or die from lack of participation eventually. A small, targeted audience can’t live on advertising as easily as Facebook. You’ll never have a big enough audience to pay the bills.