TightWind is written by Kyle Baxter. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Daniel Jalkut thinks WWDC has run its course:

Instead of a week each year when a developer must enter a lottery for a chance at talking directly with a knowledgable Apple engineer in the labs, beef up the existing Developer Technical Support process and workflow so that vexing issues can be driven to the point of resolution, and so that the fruits of those discoveries can be shared with others. For every “lifesaving” tip a developer has received in the WWDC labs, how many others continue to struggle in anguish because the effort was never made to codify that wisdom in the form of a developer technote or other reference material? It doesn’t make sense … it’s a bug, if you will … that so many Apple developers feel that their only opportunity to solve a problem is by meeting in person with an Apple engineer at WWDC.

I agree. Apple needs to re-think how they achieve WWDC’s goals, and Daniel has some excellent ideas for how to do it.

Circles is a new iOS memory by Built By Snowman. Beautiful app, and beautifully simple, too. They’re donating a portion of all revenue to an Alzheimer’s charity as well, which is just terrific. Check it out.

Benedict Evans points out that the smartphone market is mostly tapped out:

Growth for any given manufacturer necessarily becomes a matter of taking sales away from other smartphone manufacturers, not featurephone manufacturers (i.e. Nokia). Moreover, Moore’s Law is at work, driving down prices; you can now get a 4.5″ dual core Android phone from Huawei for just $200, and one from a generic Chinese manufacturer for $120-$150. 

This is clearly a challenge for any handset OEM, but especially for one at the high end. There are fewer and fewer new high-end buyers coming into the market and the ones you sold to in the past may increasingly be tempted by ever improving cheaper phones. So a high-end phone maker risks losing sales if it stays at the high-end, or losing margin if it makes cheaper phones, or both. 

This transition is the biggest threat to Apple’s future because the iPhone is responsible for so much of the company’s earnings.

A study finds that showing the doctors the price for tests they order results in a significant reduction in expenses:

When doctors saw this information, they ordered 9.1 percent fewer tests for their patients. That, a new paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association finds, saved the hospital just about $400,000.

“Our study offers evidence that presenting providers with associated test fees as they order is a simple and unobtrusive way to alter behavior,” the study authors, lead by Johns Hopkins professor Leonard Feldman, write. “Unlike the process in previous studies, no extra steps were added to the ordering process and no large-scale educational efforts accompanied this exportable intervention.”

Breaking news! Prices work as a signaling and rationing mechanism! (But I thought medical care was something too important to leave up to the market?)

The obvious next question here is this: if showing doctors how much things costs reduces the number of tests they order, wouldn’t showing patients the true costs have the same result?

Yes. The answer is yes.

Thanks to the people behind Filepicker.io for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed.

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Nest will now automatically tune your thermostat schedule or adjust the temperature for peak usage periods to save money and use energy more efficiently:

Traditionally, Fadell explained, people turn on their air conditioners and leave them on all day, when it gets very hot. regardless of whether they’re home or not. That uses a huge amount of energy, and can force utility companies to power up special plants that often run on coal, or to buy power from third parties at very expensive rates.

But with Rush Hour Rewards, Nest owners can be part of the solution, Fadell argued. The idea is that the system builds a personal profile based on residents’ lifestyles, and then runs the air conditioner in a much more efficient manner, while still maintaining comfort, Fadell said.

They say that during peak periods, they can reduce power usage by up to 40 percent while only allowing the home’s temperature to rise by 3 percent. Incredible.

They’re reducing energy efficiency while saving money for owners. That’s a much better approach because owners will be more likely to actually use the service, and it should therefore be more effective. I love this company.

Dan Frakes points out a trend in iOS app design—the floating button:

In Facebook’s case (left), it’s a pill-shaped “New Stories” button that shows up at the top of the screen when there are new News Feed items to load. In Foursquare’s app (right), it’s a big, round “Check In” button at the bottom of the home screen.

Alexis Madrigal on the missing Sunil Tripathi being incorrectly named as the suspect for the Boston bombing:

The next step in this information flow is the trickiest one. Here’s what I know. At 2:42am, Greg Hughes, who had been following the Tripathi speculation, tweeted, “This is the Internet’s test of ‘be right, not first’ with the reporting of this story. So far, people are doing a great job. #Watertown” Then, at 2:43am, he tweeted, “BPD has identified the names: Suspect 1: Mike Mulugeta. Suspect 2: Sunil Tripathi.”

The only problem is that there is no mention of Sunil Tripathi in the audio preceding Hughes’ tweet. I’ve listened to it a dozen times and there’s nothing there even remotely resembling Tripathi’s name. I’ve embedded the audio from 2:35 to 2:45 am for your own inspection. Multiple groups of people have been crowdsourcing logs of the police scanner chatter and none of them have found a reference to Tripathi, either. It’s just not there.

The web is incredibly powerful and empowering. It can also be incredibly dangerous. Let this be a lesson to all of us (that we should have all learned after Wayne Chiang was falsely accused for the Virginia Tech shooting in 2007) what it can do when we spread information that isn’t verified: it could lead to innocent people being harmed.

Janko Roettgers notes that Pandora users are slightly more likely to report that owning music is important to them, and then argues:

The company didn’t make any data available about people who pay for a streaming subscription, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see significantly lower interest in music ownership amongst users who pay for unlimited access.

That’s why it’s smart for Apple to invest in iRadio. The goal is not to kill Pandora, but to actually bring that type of radio service to more users, and keep them from switching to a full-blown access model. In other words: It’s not about Pandora, and all about Spotify.

I’m skeptical that the data Roettgers is using, which comes from the NPD Group, means much of anything in this case; while streaming service users may have much lower interest in owning music, I doubt that Pandora users would report higher interest because they use Pandora. Instead, it may be self-selecting—people who care less about owning music (or care more about selection) might choose streaming services, whereas everyone else will use non-random access services like Pandora and purchase songs and albums they really like.

That said, this sort of service could help compete with Spotify, Rdio et al., but not because it will provide similar functionality to them. Rather, it could make iTunes more useful. iTunes’ Genius auto genre and playlist-making features are actually incredibly good, so using it across iTunes’ entire library of music could be terrific. Embedding that in iTunes, iPhone and iPad would be great, and would give people more reason to stay on the iTunes platform.

What it won’t do, though, is convince people who highly value unlimited access to replace Spotify or Rdio with iTunes or to stick with iTunes over those services. They’re simply not substitutes.

Ken Segall wrote an excellent analysis of Ron Johnson’s tenure at JC Penny:

In my opinion, there is one very simple reason. I don’t mean to minimize it, because it’s a horrific miscalculation, and I can understand why Ron would be dismissed because of it:

Ron failed because he changed the prices long before he could visibly change the stores.

He did a basic cleanup of the selling environment (eliminated junk and switched to whole-number pricing). Then, before he could widen the appeal of jcp, he took away the one thing traditional customers were hanging onto: sales and coupons.

Sounds right to me: when sales drop 25 percent and you put in a $552m net loss in the fourth quarter, it’s hard to recover.

In his last episode of the Talk Show with Michael Lopp at the Úll Conference, John Gruber compared Johnson’s taking over of JC Penny to Jobs’s return to Apple in 1997, saying that Jobs received a lot of time to work. He’s right, but the comparison is flawed; Apple made a profit in the first quarter of 1998 of $47 million after dramatically reducing operating expenses. That quarter certainly wasn’t a success, but they turned a small profit after losing $120 million in the year-ago quarter. JC Penny, on the other hand, has seen a scary erosion in sales and income.

Jobs wasn’t given carte blanche to do whatever he wanted without consequences; rather, he stabilized the company’s position while making serious changes. Segall is arguing that Johnson failed to do that. His plan may have been sound, but he further destabilized the company before he could make his vision a reality.

I use Instapaper a lot—basically everyday—to keep track of things I need to read and things to post. On my Mac, I just use Instapaper in the browser to make posts, but I’ve hoped for a decent Instapaper client for a while.

ReadKit looks like it fits the bill. It’s simple, supports Instapaper, Pocket, Pinboard and Delicious, but it’s also relatively well-featured. Managing folders in Instapaper through the iOS versions and on the web has always been a bit of a pain, but it’s much easier to do on a Mac—and should be much more useful for me as a result.

Here’s Federico Viticci’s review from January.

If you have similar needs, I’d recommend giving it a look.

Thanks to Ben Brooks for pointing it out.

Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, prisoner at Guantanamo Bay:

I’ve been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity.

I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial.

We are committing a terrible injustice against many people at Guantanamo. Yes, many of them are not innocent—but they should be tried, not left to rot away in a prison.

Burkhard Bilger has a wonderful profile of the Mars Curiosity mission:

She wasn’t wrong, exactly, just off by a few decades. All nine of Curiosity’s principal investigators were middle-aged men. Lined up behind the lectern in polo shirts or jacket and tie, they could have been spliced seamlessly into an old Apollo newsreel. But elsewhere in the hierarchy lay a horde of engineers who’d come to J.P.L. from all over the world since the moon landings. Miguel San Martín, the chief engineer for Curiosity’s guidance, navigation, and control systems, grew up in Buenos Aires and Patagonia, listening to shortwave broadcasts about the Viking missions. Vandi Tompkins, the lone woman among the sixteen rover drivers, came from a small town in India. Their work bore witness to the undimmed romance of space, and to the wonders that an epic government program can still accomplish. Curiosity had taken ten years to build and cost two and a half billion dollars. And within forty-eight hours it would crash or land.

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There were a lot of true heroes in yesterday’s attack on the Boston marathon—police, paramedics, doctors, runners and spectators who rushed to help rather than run for their safety. One of them is Carlos Arredondo, who helped apply tourniquets to a man with severe leg injuries from the blast and deliver him to an ambulance.

These people saved lives yesterday. In the midst of unthinkable horror, they did what they could. Absolutely amazing.