Snell-o-vision

Jason Snell thought he’d buy a year of iTunes Match and then cancel, but he’s having second thoughts.

Jason Snell remembers Steve Jobs, his life, and what he meant to all of us.

Steve Jobs stepping away from Apple as CEO is a big deal, Jason Snell says. But the former Apple CEO has crafted the company in his own image.

Jason Snell went to the space shuttle launch last week. Here are his notes on the experience.

Jason Snell says something about Apple’s WWDC 2011 keynote reminded him of mobster movies. No, nobody got whacked. (Except MobileMe.) But Apple did settle old scores and move aggressively…

Is the Mac OS is going to become more like iOS (and vice versa)? Yes, perhaps, but it’s not time for a panic attack.

In an article I just posted, I wrote this:

(And you can only make these upgrades when you order the product; none of these features is upgradable after the fact, either by you or your local Apple Genius.)

I got a note on Twitter from a follower:

@jsnell “none of these features is upgradable after the fact” - I think you want ARE instead of is. #corrections

On first blush it does seem wrong, because the singular form “is” follows immediately after a plural, “features.” However, such constructions are surprisingly common in this zany language I use to ply my trade.

The solution to many vexing grammatical problems is to simplify the sentence, sort of like reducing an algebraic equation before solving for x. So that phrase becomes “Not one is upgradable.” (Oh, and by the way, both “upgradable” and “upgradeable” are valid.) Well, that scans. One (singular) is.

Except, wait, do I really mean none as a singular? When I’m really talking about the cluster of options for the MacBook Air, each one of which is individually upgradeable?

So I did what I always do when I’m confused. I throw myself on the mercy of the copy edit department. My charming and kind assistant managing editor, Sally Zahner, consulted with PC World’s Steven Gray and then replied:

In most cases you can justify using either “None is” or “None are,” but the trend is toward making the verb plural. When deciding whether to make the verb singular or plural, you need to decide what the speaker’s intent is—that is, whether the subject is plural or singular in the speaker’s mind. And in most cases it’s plural. So in your example below, you’re really saying: “All of the features are incapable of being upgraded”—or some such. You could also say, “Not one of the features is upgradable.” But the fact that you’re referring to all the features as a group suggests that you are really thinking of them as plural.

But of course this is pretty subjective, which is why I can never remember this fuzzy reasoning. But I agree that the trend is toward using the plural (which is why you second-guessed yourself, I suspect), and that’s what we tend to do on the copydesk. But it wouldn’t be strictly wrong to say, “None of the features is upgradable.” In fact, you’d make the stuffy, old-school grammar police happy.

Some days it’s fun working with words.

(By the way, I’m not changing it. But it’ll probably be rephrased in the print edition.)

We track a lot of stories at Macworld in a given day. Some we decide aren’t worth covering. Some we toss into a heap for our Remainders column. Some get written up if there’s time, or tossed on the heap. Some are must-writes.

We also get a lot of press releases and news tips every day. And we have a stable of writers, on staff and off.

What we are lacking right now is a good way to track all this stuff.

I am trying to harness the power of the LazyTwitter to see if someone can point us in the right direction, ideally at something that is currently available as a product that could be used for our purposes without much, if any modification. We aren’t interested in building this ourselves or having you build it for us. Note: We use a home-built CMS, and we aren’t going to change that anytime soon. Suggestions for using another CMS to do this will not be helpful. It also needs to be a web-based interface, because we have a lot of different contributors interacting with the same data and a desktop app just isn’t gonna work.

Anyway, here’s what we’re looking for.

• Each story idea/possibility would be a discrete item, with several metadata fields.

• Metadata fields we know we need: Priority [Ignore, TBD, Remainders, Could Write, Must Write], Author [nobody, name of person who says they are writing it], staging URL

• Ability to forward e-mails to an account somewhere and have them automatically sucked into the system and added as a new, TBD-priority item, so that we can stop using e-mail forwards as a way of throwing articles into the pool

• Ability to display active stories/issues based on various search criteria, for example, what am I writing, what needs to be assigned, what needs to be triaged, what needs to be edited and posted.

Basically, stories would come in - via e-mail or entered by a human - and then triaged. Writers would be able to “dibs” a story by entering their name in the writer field. They’d write it up in our CMS and then mark the story as written and ready for editing, possibly just by pasting in a staging link. Then an editor would read it over, push it live and mark it complete.

To me this sounds sort of like a modified version of a bug tracker, but most bug trackers strike me as being overkill for a small editorial management task like ours.

In any event, if you have any suggestions for services/tools I should look at, I would love to hear them. jsnell at macworld.com or @jsnell me on Twitter.

Headline writers will focus on the Apple-Adobe squabble over Flash when reporting on the App Store guidelines Apple released Thursday. But Jason Snell says there’s more to the story — namely that…

Macworld’s September 2010 issue features a cover shot of an iPhone 4 taken and processed with another iPhone 4.

Jason Snell checks in from Comic-Con International, where comic book retailers are facing the same issues from the digital revolution that music sellers had to deal with a decade ago.

Jason Snell argues that with Apple’s lack of openness being its biggest vulnerability, it’s time for the company to mute criticism by allowing any third-party app to be installed on iPhone OS…

(Actual e-mail from Gizmodo’s Brian Lam via a public affidavit. Please note we don’t actually know the context of this e-mail, particularly what communications from Apple preceded it or followed it.)

From: brian lam <blam@brianlam.net>
Date: April 19, 2010 04:08:07 PM PDT
To: Steve Jobs <sjobs@apple.com>
Subject: Let’s see if this goes through.

Hey Steve, this email chain is off record on my side.

I understand the position you’re in, and I want to help, but it conflicts with my own responsibilities to give the phone back without any confirmation that its real, from apple, officially.

Something like that — from you or apple legal — is a big story, that would make up for giving the phone back right away. If the phone disappears without a story to explain why it went away, and the proof it went to apple, it hurts our business. And our reputation. People will say this is a coordinated leak, etc.

I get that it would hurt sales to say this is the next iphone. I have no interest in hurting sales. That does nothing to help Gizmodo or me.

Maybe Apple can say it’s a lost phone, but not one that you’ve confirmed for production — that it is merely a test unit of sorts. Otherwise, it just falls to apple legal, which serves the same purpose of confirmation. I don’t want that either.

Gizmodo lives and dies like many small companies do. We don’t have access, or when we do, we get it taken away. When we get a chance to break a story, we have to go with it, or we perish. I know you like walt and pogue, and like working with them, but I think Gizmodo has more in common with old Apple than those guys do. So I hope you understand where I’m coming from.

Right now, we have nothing to lose. The thing is, Apple PR has been cold to us lately. It affected my ability to do my job right at iPad launch. So we had to go outside and find our stories like this one, very aggressively.

I want to get this phone back to you ASAP. And I want to not hurt your sales when the products themselves deserve love. But I have to get this story of the missing prototype out, and how it was returned to apple, with some acknowledgement it is Apple’s.

And I want to work closer with Apple, too. I’m not asking for more access — we can do our jobs with or without it — but again, this is the only way we can survive while being cut out of things. That’s my position on things.

B

Jason Snell talks about what Macworld’s plans for the iPad are — digital editions via Zinio, the web site, and a forthcoming iPad app.

Jason Snell takes a look at some of the less noticeable numbers that tell the story of Apple’s latest remarkable financial performance.