If Daring Fireball were still handing out Jackass of the Week awards, this piece by Joe Nocera in the New York Times might qualify. Which is a shame, because it’s by someone I usually respect as an insightful commentator, even if I don’t always agree with his conclusions.

Nocera contends the quality of the new Maps app is indicative of Apple’s focus on protecting market position at the expense of innovation:

you can see it in the decision to replace Google’s map application. Once an ally, Google is now a rival, and the thought of allowing Google to promote its maps on Apple’s platform had become anathema. More to the point, Apple wants to force its customers to use its own products, even when they are not as good as those from rivals. Once companies start acting that way, they become vulnerable to newer, nimbler competitors that are trying to create something new, instead of milking the old.

Yes, the quality of the maps program that ships with iPhone 5 and that you get when you upgrade anything to iOS 6 is not as good as the maps program that shipped previously. But that’s a single data point, and honestly, that’s a sign that they are innovating, which seems to be Nocera’s biggest concern that they’ll stop doing.

And if one thinks this is the first time in Apple history they’ve killed off something good (or even great) and replaced with something not as usable at the time it rolled out but that had the potential to become greater, one clearly missed the rollout of Mac OS X, the killing of the amazing Apple ][ line in favor of the non-expandable non-color Macintosh, replacing a mature AppleWorks with an iWork “suite” consisting of two programs, replacing ADB with the then-relatively-unknown-and-unsupported USB, and the list goes on. Even the Retina display was a liability not an asset for users of many third party programs at the time it launched.

The fact that Apple’s maps program isn’t as good as the program it replaced isn’t a sign that Apple has stagnated. It’s a sign that they’re continuing their innovative tendencies.

So a 915 word op-ed piece hinges on a grand total of two observations: Apple filed a patent lawsuit and the new Maps aren’t as good as the old ones. Oh, and Steve is dead, and he was obviously the source of all Apple innovation.

Mountain Lion: First Impressions from a habitual late adopter

I’m not an early adopter. I’m not a big fan of change. I still have a computer running Panther, if that says anything about my rate of technological uptake. I’m still using a cell phone that just has 12 keys on the front plus a power button and a send button.

But Wednesday morning as soon as I saw the notification in the App Store that it was available, for some crazy reason, I took the plunge and upgraded to Mountain Lion. I’ve never been a first day user of an operating system before. Why did I do it? Well, mostly because I knew there would be questions on Ask Different and I thought it would be fun to be able to answer them.

It occurs to me that since I’ve never done this whole “day one” thing before, perhaps I should write a blog entry about it. I’m clearly no John Siracusa, but here goes.

more »

Last Tuesday was Super Tuesday in the United States, an odd part of the even odder ritual whereby Americans rather indirectly select who will be their President. How much a particular person’s preferences count toward the final results depends a lot on their party affiliation and the specifics of the timing and structure their state party’s primary or caucus.

But here on Ask Different, your vote always counts. You can vote up to 40 times every day. And the more people vote, the better the site works.
 You don’t need to be an expert in all things Apple to make the site a better place by voting.

It’s about the questions

If you find a question useful and clear, and think it shows enough research effort to be not completely obvious, you can vote that question up. See a question you’ve wondered about? Vote it up. See a question whose answer could help someone you know, or someone you can imagine? Vote it up. See a question you think explains someone’s problem clearly? Vote it up.

You don’t have to know the answer to vote for a question. Anyone with 15 reputation points and a sense of what questions you find interesting or helpful can vote for questions. If you think

• “I’d be interested in seeing an answer to that question,” or

• “I can answer that question,” or

• “That could be helpful to someone I know,” or

• “Someone put a lot of thought into that question,”

you should click the little up arrow next to the question. Reward the asker, promote the question, and help the community improve.

Voting for questions helps us identify the most useful questions, and it also rewards users who ask useful questions. It also helps the site, because the more users have lots of reputation points, the more smoothly the site can operate, and the more the community can run itself without moderator intervention. Ask Different has more visitors but less voting than many Stack Exchange sites, and we’d like to change that.

And the answers, too

Now answers are a bit more complicated. You just need curiosity, not knowledge about content to usefully vote on questions. But there is a little bit of a bar to vote well on answers: you need to be able to judge whether an answer is a good one. It doesn’t help the site if wrong answers get voted up.

If an answer looks like it would actually help you, or someone you know, or someone you can imagine, go ahead and give it a vote.

If you voted for a question, and the original poster accepted an answer, signifying that the answer solved the OP’s problem, please consider voting for the answer; you thought it was a good question, reward the person who put work into answering it.

Any time you have the expertise to know an answer is right, vote it up to help correct answers stand out.

Just vote

All in all, the site works best when we go out and vote, vote, vote. There’s even badges for using all up all your votes. So go out there, find what you think is interesting or helpful, and give it an upvote.

And come back later for my next blog installment on Advanced topics in voting: downvotes. But don’t wait for that to start voting for whatever you find interesting or helpful.