Stunning Images of Destroyed Syrian City

Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images Syrian government forces patrolled the Khalidiya neighborhood of Homs on Sunday.

In 1982, after President Hafez al-Assad’s forces leveled whole sections of Syria’s fourth-largest city, Hama, to suppress a revolt, the first foreign journalists allowed to view the rubble were shocked by the scale of the destruction.

Three decades later, as another President Assad struggles to defeat a much broader insurgency, reporters have again been left searching for words as images emerge of vast tracts of ruins where, until recently, the vibrant residential neighborhood of Khalidiya stood in the country’s third-largest city, Homs.

“almost complete destruction” BBC’s @ramiruhayem tells @BBCNewshour about #Syria govt capture Khalidiya #Homs ..what is left of it

â€" lyse doucet (@bbclysedoucet) 28 Jul 13

Sam Skaine/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images What an Agence France-Presse journalist found in the Homs neighborhood of Khalidiya on Tuesday.

Reuters, via Shaam News Network An image provided to news organizations by a Syrian opposition news agency, said to show the ruined Khalidiya neighborhood of Homs on Friday, as government forces regained control.

The extent of the damage brought to mind the words of a United States Army officer who told the Associated Press correspondent Peter Arnett, as they surveyed the ruined Vietnamese city of Ben Tre, pulverized by American bombardment in 1968: “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.”

As a colleague who visited Homs this month reported, at the center of Khalidiya is the silver-domed mosque of Khalid bin al-Waleed â€" named for an early Islamic warrior particularly revered by the Sunni Muslims who make up the backbone of the rebellion â€" which is now “pockmarked and perforated.”

Sam Skaine/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images A soldier loyal to President Bashar al-Assad outside the Khalid bin al-Waleed mosque in Homs on Monday.

Sam Skaine/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images Ruins around the historic Khalid bin al-Waleed mosque in Homs on Monday.

When Syrians first took to the streets in 2011, Homs was known as “the capital of the revolution.” Video posted online by Syrian activists throughout the spring and summer of that year showed protest after protest in the neighborhood around the mosque, as demonstrators chanted for the downfall of President Bashar al-Assad and security forces struggled to contain them.

Video of a protest on May 13, 2011, in the Khalidiya district of Homs showed demonstrators chanting, “The people want the fall of the regime,” as the security forces fired at them.

Video of protesters in Khalidiya, Homs, on Aug. 10, 2011.

In video of the protests, the mosque’s distinctive silver domes, a point of pride and wonder before the uprising, were frequently visible in the background â€" particularly in one clip recorded in July 2011 after the security forces opened fire at the funeral of a demonstrator.

Video posted online by Syrian activists on July 20, 2011, said to have been recorded during an attack by the security forces on a funeral in the Khalidiya district of Homs a day earlier.

In the past two years, as the uprising devolved into an armed conflict and rebel-held Khalidiya came under heavy bombardment by government forces, activists trained their cameras on the mosque.

Video posted on YouTube in March by Syrian opposition activists showed shelling at the Khalid bin al-Waleed mosque in Homs.

Over the weekend, as government forces closed in on the area, opposition activists continued to record shells landing around the familiar domes.

Video of shelling near the Khalid bin al-Waleed mosque in Homs, recorded on Friday, according to opposition activists.

Just hours after a final video of government shelling in the area was recorded on Saturday by an opposition activist, a reporter for state television accompanied Syrian Army troops as they took control of the mosque.

Video of a news report on Saturday from Syrian state television, showing a reporter inside the Khalid bin al-Waleed mosque in Homs.

The capture of the mosque was greeted as a major propaganda victory by supporters of the Syrian government, who gleefully shared images of government troops in and around the famous domes.

Image from the Khalid Ibn Al Walid Mosque in Khalidiya #Homs back in the hands of the #SAA http://t.co/iLm63wAkO1

â€" G (@SyrianLionesss) 27 Jul 13

Filming among the ruins, a crew from the Iranian government’s Arabic-language news channel Al-Alam reported on Monday that government forces had taken control of all of Khalidiya.

A report from Al-Alam, Iran’s Arabic-language news channel, on Syrian forces taking control of the Homs neighborhood of Khalidiya.

In an English-language news bulletin broadcast Tuesday night, Syrian state television hailed the offensive and claimed that government forces were consolidating their gains in the city.

An English-language news bulletin from Syrian state television broadcast on Tuesday.

Today’s Scuttlebot: The Android State and Turning 2-D Into 3-D

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A Shifting Workplace Experience

Compared with offices of the past, the modern workplace is paradoxically both more informal and more relentless. Doors have been replaced by cubicles, formal desks with tables, and long-planned meetings with ad hoc collaboration. Work and home have blended, to the general benefit of work: more and more of us are available at all times, on smartphones and tablets, for e-mail and instant messaging.

The look and function of office productivity software, including icons like scissors and clipboards, have been slower to change. As mobility and collaboration become standards of work, however, the design and function of things like document creation and sharing are changing too.

For decades, adjusting fonts and type sizes was used persuade clients and co-workers in office documents. And people e-mailed one another attachments of work they had created alone. But now, an emphasis is placed on fast turnaround, effective presentation on small screens, and the use of pictures and graphics as much as words.

A big part of mobility is cloud computing, which allows all kinds of documents to be stored in remote data centers and used anywhere. Google recently made Google Docs, its word processing software, part of Drive, its online storage service. Microsoft’s storage service, called Skydrive, is still separate from its mobile version of Word, but it is possible to use the service on most new smartphones.

But several start-ups have also emerged, trying to radically rethink the way we work, in some cases from a mobile-first point of view.

Crocdoc

Box, a newer online storage service, recently bought a company called Crocdoc, which uses an advanced Web programming language to make all sorts of documents and photo displays look good no matter the device.

Crocdoc can also be used as a collaboration and editing tool. In this image, several users are editing a document in the social media service Yammer, which is owned by Microsoft. Crocdoc allows the users to see Microsoft Office documents, and once opened, users can make edits, as well as add comments and highlights.

Evernote

Evernote, another online storage company, allows users to write, edit and share notes together, instead of e-mailing multiple versions of a Word document to one another.

Some of Evernote’s features still borrow from images of old-fashioned work in their design, like making text bold or italic in a document. But it also offers more modern features, like letting users strike-through text, add images or audio and even search through a document’s metadata to find its version history.

Quip

In Quip, a new word-processing start-up, pictures and tables are referenced by touching the “@” key on a pop-up screen keyboard, a nod to Twitter’s way of linking people together.

Quip also gives a lot of screen real estate to the person who owns the device and other people. Instant messaging, photos of other people where they edited, and annotations can occupy a big chunk of the screen, or be removed to just work on a document. It is a more collaborative world, and the look is meant to encourage others to jump in when they see someone else is online.

Not everything changes, however. You may be looking at a mobile phone in a coffee shop, or looking at a tablet in a conference room, but for some reason Quip still calls the main screen “Desktop.” One thing about the future: It’s still full of the past.

A Shifting Workplace Experience

Compared with offices of the past, the modern workplace is paradoxically both more informal and more relentless. Doors have been replaced by cubicles, formal desks with tables, and long-planned meetings with ad hoc collaboration. Work and home have blended, to the general benefit of work: more and more of us are available at all times, on smartphones and tablets, for e-mail and instant messaging.

The look and function of office productivity software, including icons like scissors and clipboards, have been slower to change. As mobility and collaboration become standards of work, however, the design and function of things like document creation and sharing are changing too.

For decades, adjusting fonts and type sizes was used persuade clients and co-workers in office documents. And people e-mailed one another attachments of work they had created alone. But now, an emphasis is placed on fast turnaround, effective presentation on small screens, and the use of pictures and graphics as much as words.

A big part of mobility is cloud computing, which allows all kinds of documents to be stored in remote data centers and used anywhere. Google recently made Google Docs, its word processing software, part of Drive, its online storage service. Microsoft’s storage service, called Skydrive, is still separate from its mobile version of Word, but it is possible to use the service on most new smartphones.

But several start-ups have also emerged, trying to radically rethink the way we work, in some cases from a mobile-first point of view.

Crocdoc

Box, a newer online storage service, recently bought a company called Crocdoc, which uses an advanced Web programming language to make all sorts of documents and photo displays look good no matter the device.

Crocdoc can also be used as a collaboration and editing tool. In this image, several users are editing a document in the social media service Yammer, which is owned by Microsoft. Crocdoc allows the users to see Microsoft Office documents, and once opened, users can make edits, as well as add comments and highlights.

Evernote

Evernote, another online storage company, allows users to write, edit and share notes together, instead of e-mailing multiple versions of a Word document to one another.

Some of Evernote’s features still borrow from images of old-fashioned work in their design, like making text bold or italic in a document. But it also offers more modern features, like letting users strike-through text, add images or audio and even search through a document’s metadata to find its version history.

Quip

In Quip, a new word-processing start-up, pictures and tables are referenced by touching the “@” key on a pop-up screen keyboard, a nod to Twitter’s way of linking people together.

Quip also gives a lot of screen real estate to the person who owns the device and other people. Instant messaging, photos of other people where they edited, and annotations can occupy a big chunk of the screen, or be removed to just work on a document. It is a more collaborative world, and the look is meant to encourage others to jump in when they see someone else is online.

Not everything changes, however. You may be looking at a mobile phone in a coffee shop, or looking at a tablet in a conference room, but for some reason Quip still calls the main screen “Desktop.” One thing about the future: It’s still full of the past.

Apple Sued by Former Retail Workers for Unpaid Wages

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Governments, Led by U.S., Seek More Data About Twitter Users

The number of requests for Twitter user data from governments around the world continued to grow in the first half of 2013, the microblogging service said in its semiannual transparency report, released Wednesday.

Over all, Twitter said, it received 1,157 requests for data covering 1,697 users, and it turned over at least some data in 55 percent of the cases. The number of requests was up about 15 percent from the last six months of 2012, the company said.

Government agencies in the United States, where just 30 percent of Twitter’s active users reside, accounted for most of the demands, issuing 902 requests for data covering 1,319 users in the first six months of 2013. (Japan was second, with 87 requests covering 103 accounts.)

In a blog post accompanying the report, Twitter noted that the figures excluded any requests made by the United States government under national security laws, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Under law, those requests are secret. But recent leaks by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward J. Snowden have suggested that the government makes frequent and broad demands for information about the customers of Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Apple and other computer and telecommunications companies. The leaks set off a storm of controversy about the government’s practices, and Congress is now considering legislation to limit the surveillance and disclose more information about requests made.

“We have joined forces with industry peers and civil liberty groups to insist that the United States government allow for increased transparency into these secret orders,” Twitter said in its blog post. “We believe it’s important to be able to publish numbers of national security requests - including FISA disclosures - separately from non-secret requests. Unfortunately, we are still not able to include such metrics.”

Other companies, including Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, have chosen to disclose the number of government data requests in broad ranges that also include national security requests, but Twitter and Google have said that copying that approach would actually result in them disclosing less data to their users.

Is Google More Like Microsoft or Apple?

Is Google geekier than Microsoft?

My last Disruptions column explored Microsoft’s current predicament as it tries to transition from a company that prizes niche technical features in its products to one more like Apple, in which design and simplicity are paramount.

Microsoft’s current obsession with speeds and feeds led it to make the Microsoft Surface tablets, which came with too many options and were a head-scratcher to many consumers.

But some readers asked, isn’t Google just like Microsoft â€" or worse? Google is, after all, the company that has a secret laboratory, Google X, which builds things seemingly far removed from its core business â€" everything from cars that drive themselves to balloons that deliver the Internet to remote areas of the world. Not to mention the many people on Google’s campuses walking around with Google Glass.

But Google’s products don’t seem as convoluted and confusing as Microsoft’s products.

Ryan Block, a former editor at Engadget and a co-founder of Gdgt, a gadget Web site, believes that while Google products have their fair share of confusion, and while many of the people that work there are very tech-driven, the company seems to find a better balance between geek and design.

“Google grew up post-Microsoft and post-Apple and had a frame of reference for taking the best of both of those cultures,” he said. “So the end result is a company that has a product-driven culture and an engineer-driven culture.”

Microsoft sees it differently. While I was interviewing Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s vice president for corporate communications, he pointed to how Google names its products as an example of consumer confusion.

“We’re way better than Google: at least we don’t name our products jelly bean or coffee cake, where, from a consumer standpoint, that naming is completely opaque,” Mr. Shaw said, referring to the naming convention Google has used for its Android operating system. “When most people see Windows 8.1 and Windows 8, they know 8.1 has got to be newer.”

Mr. Shaw is right. Unless you’re an Android engineer, or a Google employee, it’s takes some digging to figure out what the latest Google operating system is called.

Google’s tech culture does enable its employees to play more. In addition to the Google X labs, the company fosters the famous 20 Percent Time, which enables engineers to spend one day a week working on projects that aren’t in their job descriptions.

“Google Now started as a 20 percent project with two folks on the Maps team, and since launching, has gone on to win several product design awards, including recognition from D&AD this year as well as winning Popular Science’s “Innovation of the Year” last year,” explained a Google spokesman said in an e-mail.

But these projects can have detriments on the company, too. Google takes the crown for most products killed within a single company: Google Buzz, the social network that preceded Google Plus; Google Reader, the RSS reader; Knol, which hoped to offer user-written articles on a range of topics; Dodgeball, the location-based service; and a very long list of other products. Google did not respond to a request for comment to this post.

While Google offers a wide range of products, some of them named after desserts and many of them short-lived, the company’s products are usually free of clutter and often relatively easy to use. Which means Google is neither Microsoft or Apple. It is somewhere right in the middle.

Is Google More Like Microsoft or Apple?

Is Google geekier than Microsoft?

My last Disruptions column explored Microsoft’s current predicament as it tries to transition from a company that prizes niche technical features in its products to one more like Apple, in which design and simplicity are paramount.

Microsoft’s current obsession with speeds and feeds led it to make the Microsoft Surface tablets, which came with too many options and were a head-scratcher to many consumers.

But some readers asked, isn’t Google just like Microsoft â€" or worse? Google is, after all, the company that has a secret laboratory, Google X, which builds things seemingly far removed from its core business â€" everything from cars that drive themselves to balloons that deliver the Internet to remote areas of the world. Not to mention the many people on Google’s campuses walking around with Google Glass.

But Google’s products don’t seem as convoluted and confusing as Microsoft’s products.

Ryan Block, a former editor at Engadget and a co-founder of Gdgt, a gadget Web site, believes that while Google products have their fair share of confusion, and while many of the people that work there are very tech-driven, the company seems to find a better balance between geek and design.

“Google grew up post-Microsoft and post-Apple and had a frame of reference for taking the best of both of those cultures,” he said. “So the end result is a company that has a product-driven culture and an engineer-driven culture.”

Microsoft sees it differently. While I was interviewing Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s vice president for corporate communications, he pointed to how Google names its products as an example of consumer confusion.

“We’re way better than Google: at least we don’t name our products jelly bean or coffee cake, where, from a consumer standpoint, that naming is completely opaque,” Mr. Shaw said, referring to the naming convention Google has used for its Android operating system. “When most people see Windows 8.1 and Windows 8, they know 8.1 has got to be newer.”

Mr. Shaw is right. Unless you’re an Android engineer, or a Google employee, it’s takes some digging to figure out what the latest Google operating system is called.

Google’s tech culture does enable its employees to play more. In addition to the Google X labs, the company fosters the famous 20 Percent Time, which enables engineers to spend one day a week working on projects that aren’t in their job descriptions.

“Google Now started as a 20 percent project with two folks on the Maps team, and since launching, has gone on to win several product design awards, including recognition from D&AD this year as well as winning Popular Science’s “Innovation of the Year” last year,” explained a Google spokesman said in an e-mail.

But these projects can have detriments on the company, too. Google takes the crown for most products killed within a single company: Google Buzz, the social network that preceded Google Plus; Google Reader, the RSS reader; Knol, which hoped to offer user-written articles on a range of topics; Dodgeball, the location-based service; and a very long list of other products. Google did not respond to a request for comment to this post.

While Google offers a wide range of products, some of them named after desserts and many of them short-lived, the company’s products are usually free of clutter and often relatively easy to use. Which means Google is neither Microsoft or Apple. It is somewhere right in the middle.

Today’s Scuttlebot: Emoji Tracking and Spoofing GPS

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OpenTable Begins Testing Mobile Payments

OpenTable, the world’s largest online reservation service, lets users book a restaurant reservation with its smartphone app or Web site. Now the company is getting ready to take the next step and let diners pay for the meal with its app, too.

The payment process, still in testing, will be straightforward, Matthew Roberts, chief executive of OpenTable, said in an interview. At the end of a meal, the diner would open the OpenTable app and pay the check with the tap of a button. The diner can review the check, adjust the tip and finish the payment.

“There’s no scanning, there’s no bar codes, there’s no geeky stuff,” Mr. Roberts said. He said that OpenTable would not take a cut of each transaction if a diner paid with the app. The restaurant would be charged the typical interchange fee for a credit card transaction. The simple transactions through the app are another way to attract people to use OpenTable, which charges restaurants for reservations made through the service as well as a monthly service charge for using its equipment.

OpenTable, which works with 28,000 restaurants around the world, in June paid $11 million in stock to acquire JustChalo, a mobile technology company working on a payments application for restaurants. JustChalo is still running a pilot program testing the payments system in 20 restaurants. By the end of the year, OpenTable will introduce its mobile payments system for San Francisco, where it is based, and expand from there, Mr. Roberts said.

OpenTable is being cautious with its release of mobile payments, because integrating technology into dining can be difficult. Paying with an app could decrease the amount of time a diner has to wait for a waiter to bring the check. But a waiter could easily think diners were skipping the check if they pay the tab with a phone, get up and leave. OpenTable is trying to solve problems like this before the feature goes live, Mr. Roberts said. One potential solution to avoid confusion is for the system to send a notification to the restaurant workers, letting them know the diner has paid.

“The last thing you want is a server to chase somebody out of the building,” he said.

Reaction to the Manning Verdict

As my colleague Charlie Savage reports, a military judge found Pfc. Bradley Manning, the former Army intelligence analyst who provided hundreds of thousands of secret documents to Wikileaks, not guilty of aiding the enemy but guilty of multiple counts of violating espionage act at the conclusion of his court-martial in Fort Meade, Md. on Tuesday.

Manning not guilty of aiding the enemy but convicted of multiple counts of violating espionage act

â€" Charlie Savage (@charlie_savage) 30 Jul 13

The Lede will be rounding up reaction to the verdict as it comes in.

Daily Report: PC Makers Struggle With World Gone Mobile

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Daily Report: Apps That Anticipate Your Needs

A range of start-ups and big companies like Google are working on what is known as predictive search â€" new tools that act as robotic personal assistants, anticipating what you need before you ask for it.

Glance at your phone in the morning, for instance, and see an alert that you need to leave early for your next meeting because of traffic, even though you never told your phone you had a meeting, or where it was, Claire Cain Miller reports.

How does the phone know? Because an application has read your e-mail, scanned your calendar, tracked your location, parsed traffic patterns and figured out that you need an extra half-hour to drive to the meeting.

The technology is the latest development in Web search, and one of the first that is tailored to mobile devices. It does not even require a person to enter a search query. Your context â€" location, time of day and digital activity â€" is the query, say the engineers who build these services.

Many technologists agree that these services will probably become mainstream, eventually incorporated in alarm clocks, refrigerators and bathroom mirrors. Already, an app called Google Now is an important part of Google’s Internet-connected glasses. As a Glass wearer walks through the airport, her hands full of luggage, it could show her an alert that her flight is delayed.

Google Now is “kind of blowing my mind right now,” said Danny Sullivan, a founding editor of Search Engine Land who has been studying search for two decades. “I mean, I’m pretty jaded, right? I’ve seen all types of things that were supposed to revolutionize search, but pretty much they haven’t. Google Now is doing that.”

Twitter Will Make It Easier to Report Abusive Posts

Twitter announced on Monday that it would add a button to report abusive tweets to all major versions of its software, making it easier for users to report offensive messages that have been posted on the site.

The company’s announcement follows an online petition campaign urging Twitter to make such changes. The petition began after a British social activist, Caroline Criado-Perez, complained publicly last week that she had been the target of a stream of nasty posts, including rape threats, for her work trying to get more women featured on British banknotes. (The police have arrested one suspected harasser, according to the BBC.)

In a blog post titled “We hear you,” Del Harvey, Twitter’s senior director for trust and safety, said it would be impossible for the company to monitor all of the 400 million tweets posted to the service every day. “That said, we are not blind to the reality that there will always be people using Twitter in ways that are abusive and may harm others,” Ms. Harvey wrote.

She noted that Twitter already had a system for reporting complaints of abuse or other violations of its terms of service. But that requires filling out a laborious form.

Three weeks ago, the microblogging service added a “Report tweet” button to the iPhone, iPad and mobile browser versions of its site to make it easier to report abusive or spam tweets or block users. Now, she said, the company will extend that function to the desktop Web and Android versions of Twitter.

A Twitter spokesman, Jim Prosser, declined to discuss Ms. Criado-Perez’s personal situation.But he said all complaints of abuse were reviewed by a person on Twitter’s trust and safety team.

“We’ll always provide some kind of resolution,” he said. If abuse is found, the service will contact the person who posted the item and ask for it to be removed, or in more extreme cases, temporarily suspend the account or shut it down.

Twitter also offers other suggestions to its users for dealing with abusive tweets, like blocking individual users or unfollowing offensive accounts. In cases of threats, the company recommends that users go to the police, which Ms. Criado-Perez did.

Twitter, which has worked to establish a reputation as a forum for anonymous free speech, has been reluctant to silence users who post items that are unpopular. “We hope the public understands the balances we’re trying to strike as we continue to work to make our systems and processes better,” Ms. Harvey wrote.

Video of the Pope’s ‘Gay Lobby’ Remarks

Video of a news conference given by Pope Francis on Monday, as he traveled back to the Vatican from Brazil.

During a news conference on his flight back to Rome from Brazil on Monday, Pope Francis was asked about his much-reported acknowledgement last month that there is “a gay lobby” inside the Vatican hierarchy.

“Quite a lot has been written about the gay lobby. I have yet to find someone who introduces himself at the Vatican with an identity card marked ‘gay,’” the pope joked. “But we must distinguish the fact that a person is gay from the fact of lobbying, because no lobbies are good.”

“If a person is gay,” he added, “and he searches for the Lord and has good will, who am I to judge?”

As my colleague Rachel Donadio explains, the pope’s remarks seemed startling to some observers since his predecessor, Benedict XVI, wrote in 2010 that men with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” should not become priests.

Twenty four years earlier, in his position as prefect of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the previous pope, who retired in February, worked to correct what he called “an overly benign interpretation” of “the homosexual condition itself,” which he insisted should not be considered “neutral, or even good.” The man known then as Cardinal Ratzinger wrote in 1986:

Although the particular inclination of the homosexual person is not a sin, it is a more or less strong tendency ordered toward an intrinsic moral evil; and thus the inclination itself must be seen as an objective disorder.

Therefore special concern and pastoral attention should be directed toward those who have this condition, lest they be led to believe that the living out of this orientation in homosexual activity is a morally acceptable option. It is not.

Protesters in Rio Keep Asking, ‘Who Threw the Molotov?’ and ‘Where Is Amarildo?’

Rio de Janeiro Military Police, via YouTube A police edit of video recorded during a protest in Rio de Janeiro on July 22 compared the T-shirts of a masked man who threw a Molotov cocktail and a man identified as an undercover officer.

Seeking to refute allegations that an undercover police officer had thrown a Molotov cocktail at a demonstration last week in Rio de Janeiro, sparking violent clashes, the city’s military police force released slow-motion video of the masked bomb-thrower, the newspaper O Globo reported Friday.

The police video, which included footage previously posted on YouTube and then mysteriously deleted from a government channel, showed the T-shirt of the man who hurled the explosive in more detail and close images of the tattooed wrist of an accomplice, who was seen lighting the fuse.

A police edit of video recorded during a demonstration last week in Rio de Janeiro.

By comparing their own footage of the bomb-thrower to video of undercover officers recorded by witnesses, the police hoped to undercut a theory put forward by video bloggers sympathetic to the protesters, who have suggested that police infiltrators threw the bomb just to give the authorities a pretext for shutting down the protest last Monday near the governor’s palace in Rio.

The authorities were offered a helping hand by Brazilian bloggers who discovered that the photographer Ana Carolina Fernandes had posted an image on Facebook that offered a clear view of the pattern on one undercover officer’s shirt.

A screenshot from the Facebook page of the Brazilian photographer Ana Carolina Fernandes shows man who was later identified as an undercover police officer wearing a T-shirt and jeans during a protest in Rio last week.

As a reader of The Lede in Brazil pointed out in a comment, one of the officers who infiltrated the demonstration by posing as a protester was wearing a familiar biker shirt, with the words “Last Stop Gasoline” printed on a red oval with a white star, above an image of a motorcycle and a woman in a bikini.

While the new version of the police video, and the Ms. Fernandes’s photograph, did appear to show that the bomb-thrower’s T-shirt was different from the one worn by the undercover officer, the same footage also seemed to prove that a protester who was arrested and charged with throwing the Molotov that night was not guilty.

As The Lede reported last week, a police spokeswoman in Rio said that a protester named Bruno Ferreira had been arrested and “accused of having thrown the Molotov cocktail that left two officers with burns on their bodies.” The police also claimed that Mr. Ferreira was in possession of more explosives when he was detained.

However, footage of Mr. Ferreira’s arrest, which was recorded from multiple angles by journalists and protesters, showed that he was not wearing a black T-shirt with a white design on it, but a green jacket with a zipper, and was not carrying anything at the time.

Yasuyoshi Chiba/Agence France-Presse â€" Getty Images A photograph of a protest in Rio de Janeiro on July 22 taken before clashes broke out, showed Bruno Ferreira, a protester who was arrested later, standing on a barricade with his arm raised.

After his arrest, two video bloggers released annotated edits of the footage of Mr. Ferreira at the protest that seem to offer convincing proof that he was standing right at the front of the crowd when the Molotov was thrown over the barricades between protesters and the police on Rua Pinheiro Machado, away from the spot further back where the bomb-thrower was located.

An annotated video edit of footage from a protest in Rio last week showing that a man who was arrested for throwing a Molotov cocktail was in a different location when the bomb was hurled at police officers.

A video blogger’s edit of footage showing the arrest of Bruno Ferreira, a Brazilian protester, last week in Rio.

While the first video blogger mistakenly asserted that the pattern on the bomb-thrower’s shirt was identical to the one worn by the undercover officer, the footage highlighted in the two edits does seem to suggest Mr. Ferreira was falsely arrested. (One of the bloggers also suggests that a black backpack worn by one of the undercover officers might have contained Molotov cocktails displayed for television cameras by the police later, but that remains conjecture.)

Since video evidence seems to clear both the undercover officer in the red-patterned shirt and Mr. Ferreira, that leaves the question of who did throw the Molotov unresolved. The police maintain that it was without doubt a protester, but protesters claim that there were other undercover officers in the crowd, one of whom might have thrown the bomb.

While conclusive proof has yet to emerge, there is evidence in another long video of the protest that shows most of the events unfold to suggest that there might have been at least one more undercover officer on the scene. At the 5-minute mark in this footage, just after the undercover officer in the black and red shirt tries and fails to tackle Mr. Ferreira, who is then shot with a stun gun and arrested, a bare-chested man in jeans can be seen speaking to him as if to a colleague.

Video recorded by a witness to the protest last week in Rio, showing the impact of an explosive and the arrest of a protester.

In the footage that surfaced last week, both of the other men identified as undercover officers were eventually seen stripping off their shirts and walking bare-chested as they retreated back across police lines.

Video recorded that night by Tamara Menezes, a journalist with the Brazilian magazine Istoé, did show riot police officers inspecting a backpack with Molotov cocktails they said they found near a newsstand.

Video shot by the Brazilian journalist Tamara Menezes last Monday in Rio showed riot police officers inspecting a backpack filled with Molotov cocktails.

But a map of the location where Ms. Menezes recorded her video shows that the backpack was discovered on a street about 600 yards away from the protest on on Rua Pinheiro Machado where the bomb was thrown and Mr. Ferreira was arrested.

View Rio protest in a larger map

While protesters in Rio would like to know who threw the Molotov last week, they do have a more pressing question for police that they have been asking at demonstration after demonstration: “Where is Amarildo?”

Observatório do Trabalho no Brasil, via Facebook In an image posted on Facebook, Amarildo de Souza’s daughter Milena held a sign asking where her father was. Her mother, Elisabeth, stood behind her near their home in Rocinha, one of Rio’s notorious favelas.

As Vincent Bevins explained in The Los Angeles Times on Friday, Amarildo is Amarildo de Souza, a bricklayer and father of six from one of Rio’s notorious slums, “who disappeared after, residents say, military police took him away from the Rocinha favela on July 14.” Although the man’s family insist he is not a criminal, they told the Brazilian media the police took him away unexpectedly that Sunday night, and said later that he had been released. “Yet no one has heard from him since,” Mr. Bevins reported.

The case has become a focus of protests and online activism since the disappearance. In a YouTube video recorded at the protest in Rio last Monday before the violence, protester after protester tried to draw the attention of Pope Francis to the case, asking, “Where is Amarildo?”

A YouTube video made to raise awareness of the case of man who went missing after he was detained by the police in Rocinha, one of Rio de Janeiro’s notorious slums.

After a series of protests demanding answers, Rio’s governor, Sérgio Cabral, who oversees the military police, met with Amarildo’s family late last week. After the meeting, the governor posted a message on Twitter promising to “mobilize the entire government to discover where Amarildo is and to identify those responsible for his disappearance.”

Vou mobilizar todo o governo para descobrir onde esta Amarildo e identificar os responsáveis pelo seu desaparecimento.

â€" Sérgio Cabral (@SergioCabralRJ) 24 Jul 13

As the journalist Kety Shapazian reported on Twitter, despite that promise, protesters were still demanding answers at a demonstration in Rio Sunday night.

Rio tonight: protesters ask where is Amarildo, who disappeared after the police arrested him in Rocinha favela (G1) http://t.co/N9c4bWfuND

â€" Kety Shapazian (@KetyDC) 29 Jul 13

Reporting was contributed by Taylor Barnes in Brazil.

Longtime Apple Leader Drops Out of Executive Team

Bob Mansfield, a longtime top executive at Apple, has switched to a role outside the executive team, the latest change in management at the company.

Over the weekend, several tech blogs noticed that Bob Mansfield, Apple’s former senior vice president of technologies, had disappeared from the company’s roster of executives published on its Web site. The company has confirmed that Mr. Mansfield is no longer part of the executive team, but will still work under Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive. The reasons for the change are unclear.

“Bob is no longer going to be on Apple’s executive team but will remain at Apple working on special projects reporting to Tim,” said Steve Dowling, an Apple spokesman. He provided no further details on the reasons for the switch.

At Apple, Mr. Mansfield was a star hardware engineer who was instrumental in leading the company’s Mac computers through a transition to chips made by Intel, away from Apple’s own PowerPC processors. When new products were introduced on stage at Apple’s media conferences, Mr. Mansfield frequently appeared on video talking about some of the major hardware changes.

Mr. Mansfield had previously announced his retirement in June 2012. But months later, amid a shakeup of Apple’s executive team, Mr. Mansfield rejoined the company to lead a group that would combine Apple’s wireless and semiconductor teams.

Though it is unclear what he will do in his new role, Mr. Mansfield has had strong interest in wearables, an Apple employee previously said. That suggests he could be focusing on the company’s so-called smartwatch.

A Day in the Life of My iPhone

Each morning at 7 a.m., I am awakened by the sound of a spaceship next to my bed. I reach my arm from under the covers, flail around blindly looking for my glasses, then grab my iPhone to silence my alarm. But it’s not any normal alarm clock; it’s an app, Walk Up!, which requires you to get up and walk around until the alarm stops its annoying blares.

Like most people I know, I haven’t used a real alarm clock in years. Apps have replaced almost everything that once served a single purpose in my life. Cash, travel, sleep and work â€" all revolve around a folder of applications on my phone.

People often ask me which apps I use on a daily basis, so here are a few of my go-to ones:

First, I check how well I have slept using an app that syncs with the Jawbone Up wristband. The app gives me a readout of how many times I woke up, or didn’t, throughout the night. Then I sift through the news on Twitter and my e-mail using the free Gmail app.

Because I live in San Francisco with its bizarre microclimates, I check the weather using a hyperlocal app, SF Climates. This app shows the forecasts for 17 of the city’s neighborhoods, which can vary in temperatures by as much as 30 degrees at any given time.

For my calendaring, I use two different apps. To create an appointment I have Fantastical, which is more like a personal assistant than a calendar. If you type “Lunch meeting on Thursday with Bob,” the app figures out what that means and sets up an appointment for noon on the next upcoming Thursday.

Another app, Donna, takes my calendar appointments and figures out when I need to leave to get to the meeting on time. It does this by looking at my current location and the location of the upcoming appointment, then checks the traffic and alerts me when it’s time to go. If I need to, Donna will also let me order an Uber or taxi from the app.

When I arrive at my meeting I no longer pay the parking meter with coins. Instead, I use the PayByPhone app. PayByPhone lets you pay for your parking spot by inputting a series of numbers on the side of the parking meter, then paying with a credit card. It’s clunky and slow, but it has a killer feature: It will alert you through text message when your meter is up and allow you to refill it remotely.

If I need to take a note during a meeting, I use Captio, a simple text-based app that sends an e-mail of the memo to my inbox. I also sometimes use SimpleNote, which syncs all my notes with my iPad and laptop computer. If I edit or add a new note, it updates across all of these devices.

For lunch, I use Foursquare’s “Explore” feature to search for new and interesting places in the neighborhood. The app looks for the restaurants that have been rated highly by my friends and then recommends the best of what’s nearby.

I try to avoid paying for things with cash â€" that’s so 2012 â€" so I often go to coffee shops and restaurants in San Francisco that use Square Wallet. This app allows me to walk into an establishment, order and then tell the person at the register to charge my phone â€" I don’t even need to take it out of my pocket.

If I go for a run after work â€" which is a rarity these days â€" I load up MapMyRun or RunKeeper, which uses the GPS in my phone to track my distance and pace. Cardiio can be used to track your heart rate before and after exercising, too. You hold the phone’s front-facing camera up to your face while Cardiio monitors your blood flow and gives you an accurate reading in seconds.

While exercising I use Rdio to listen to music. I also sometimes stream Pandora Web radio.

I keep track of my fitness routines and other habits using Lift, which encourages people to build better habits in their daily life by allowing their friends to give them props. Several friends use Lift to track meditation, reading habits, or how many times a day they have done a good deed.

For dinner, I make reservations on my phone using OpenTable’s app. If I don’t want to drive because I might be drinking, I’ll use a ride-sharing app, including Uber, Sidecar or Lyft. If I need to see around in the dark when I get home I use iHandy Torch Free, which makes a phone into a flashlight.

Before I go to bed, I’ll read a few articles I’ve saved throughout the day on Instapaper, or a few pages of a book using the Kindle app. I sometimes go to Digg’s new app, which has a built-in RSS reader. If I am going to watch TV instead, I use Apple’s Remote app to control my Apple TV. Remote allows you to navigate the interface and type from your phone onto the television.

Then, when it’s time to call it a day, I turn on my Jawbone Up, set my alarm to the spaceship sound, slip off my glasses and go to sleep.

Today’s Scuttlebot: Sizing Up Google

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A New Role for Amazon: An Engine for Jobs

American technology companies like Apple have been criticized for outsourcing manufacturing of their gadgets to China, rather than employing people to do the work in the United States. But one tech icon, Amazon, is seeking to call attention to the thousands of working-class jobs it’s creating in the United States.

On Monday, Amazon plans to announce it is creating more than 5,000 new full-time jobs in its United States warehouses to handle growing customer demand. The company currently employs more than 20,000 warehouse workers here, so the new positions represent a significant increase in its head count.

Amazon’s announcement is timed to coincide with a speech on middle-class jobs that President Obama is expected to give Tuesday at an Amazon warehouse in Chattanooga, Tenn.

The jobs will be in warehouses in 10 states, from Delaware to California.

For a tech company, Amazon is an unusual hybrid of white- and blue-collar jobs. It employs plenty of computer scientists, MBAs and all the usual types found at technology companies. But it also relies on tens of thousands of people to do the sweaty, physical work of picking, packing and delivering Amazon orders. Those are jobs Amazon can’t outsource to China (though the company, like nearly all electronics makers, does have its electronic device, the Kindle, made overseas).

How great those jobs are is a matter of some debate. The working conditions in an Amazon warehouse in Pennsylvania, including excessive heat, was the subject of an investigative article in 2011 by The Morning Call newspaper in Lehigh Valley. The company says it remedied the heat problem by installing air-conditioning in its facilities. Amazon has also resisted union organizing at its warehouses.

Amazon said median pay in its warehouses is 30 percent higher than retail pay in those same areas. That doesn’t include the stock grants full-time employees receive, which over the past five years have added an average of 9 percent to workers’ base pay annually.

The sheer numbers of people Amazon is hiring has obviously landed the company on the radar screen of politicians stumping for job growth. Since September 2008, around the start of the most recent recession, Amazon said it has added more than 40,000 jobs in the United States, including warehouse and white-collar jobs.

Just last week, Amazon reported that it has 97,000 full-time employees around the globe, an eye-popping 40 percent increase from a year ago. The additional 5,000 positions it plans to hire for will push its global head count above 100,000.

By contrast, Apple reported its head count was over 72,000 at the end of last September. Microsoft has over 99,000 employees. Hewlett-Packard has more than 300,000 employees; I.B.M. has over 400,000 workers.

But Amazon was founded in 1994, decades after those other companies. It has certainly gotten big, fast.

Today’s Scuttlebot: Commitment Issues on Twitter

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Disruptions: Microsoft’s Struggle to Make Things Simple for Consumers

In March 2006, a parody video asked, “What if Microsoft made the iPod?” The clip began with an image of the real packaging for an iPod, that familiar white box with a single picture of the music player. Then, bit by bit, it added what would happen if Microsoft got involved.

By the end of three minutes, the dainty music player had been renamed the The iPod Pro 2005 XP Human Ear Professional Edition with Subscription, and the stark box was sullied with stickers and jargon promoting almost every technical feature on the device. A design inspired by modernist architecture (think the Guggenheim Museum) was turned into a gaudy billboard (think a trinket store in Times Square).

In recent years, Microsoft has been trying to shed its reputation for trumpeting features over simplicity, but old habits are proving hard to break. Yes, Microsoft has released products like the Xbox and Windows Phone 7 that were intuitive to consumers and marketed with a fair amount of finesse. But far too often, the company has tried to create products for the modern consumer with a mind-set from the information technology back room.

And there are consequences for this disconnect beyond satirical videos. Microsoft said this month that it was taking a $900 million write-down for unsold inventory of the Surface RT tablet, which went on sale less than a year ago.

Just thinking about the Microsoft Surface tablets is a head-scratcher. The company offered two products, the Surface RT and the Surface Pro. One came with a pen. They both had USB ports, microSDXC card slots, HD video ports, flip-back stands, different screen resolutions and two types of Windows software.

If all that confused you, you are not alone. While the technologically savvy most likely lapped up those features, average consumers did not.

“Windows is a hammer, and everything looks like a nail” to Microsoft, said Ryan Block, a former editor at Engadget and a co-founder of Gdgt, a gadget Web site. “You can look at the Surface, which is the best example; they created this totally blown-out tablet based around Windows and Windows-like experiences that didn’t translate” for most people.

Microsoft enthusiasts and some pundits came to the company’s defense last week, saying that the Surface had failed because the iPad hit the market years earlier and had too much of a head start.

Maybe. But I have a different theory: the Surface failed because Microsoft confused consumers who didn’t want to think about RT or Pro or what version of Windows their new gadget would run.

“The people in Redmond have a fundamental misunderstanding of what users are looking for, which is not speeds and feeds,” said J. P. Gownder, a vice president and principal analyst at Forrester Research.

“Speeds and feeds” is an old trade magazine term for the technical specifications of a new PC. Fifteen years ago, that a computer was a little bit faster or had more memory than the last version was a very big deal. The string of numbers and jargon on the side of a computer’s box was a sort of runic code that made sense to I.T. managers or tech-savvy relatives coerced into helping the less sophisticated. It told them what to buy.

That is just not the case anymore. Consumers demand something that is easy to understand, and they got that in products like the iPad.

There is one flaw in the theory that Microsoft’s tablet did not catch on because the iPad was already popular: Microsoft was late to the game, but it was hardly late to the idea. The company helped popularize the term “tablet PC” when Bill Gates introduced one in 2000 at the annual Comdex computer show in Las Vegas.

But it was Apple, a decade later, that figured out how to simplify the tablet and sell it to mainstream customers.

Microsoft says one of the reasons the company does offer all of these features â€" and feels the need to explain its gigahertz and gigabytes â€" is that it has to market its products to small businesses and I.T. professionals, and they still obsess over bigger, better, faster.

That’s where technology culture runs into consumer culture, and the two clash.

Frank X. Shaw, Microsoft’s vice president for corporate communications, said Microsoft was trying to do something about that. He said Microsoft had made great strides to instill a more balanced culture of design, marketing and engineering, and executives there said a reorganization announced this month would inspire more consumer-friendly offerings.

Microsoft said it was dissolving its eight product divisions in favor of four new ones arranged around more specific themes. “To execute, we’ve got to move from multiple Microsofts to one Microsoft,” Steven A. Ballmer, the company’s chief executive, told my colleague Nick Wingfield in an interview.

“Are we an engineering-focused culture? Yes, we are, and that’s good. Most great technology companies, at their core, have a deep engineering bias,” Mr. Shaw said. “One of the goals is to make sure we have a more singular vision for what we’re offering to people.”

A few months after the satirical iPod video first drew attention online, Microsoft admitted that it had been responsible for the video. Turns out, it was meant to be circulated internally to show how the company needed to change its culture.

I asked Mr. Shaw about the iPod clip, and he said Microsoft had evolved from an insular technology culture to one that is more aware of customers’ needs.

“I think we’re significantly better,” he said, while acknowledging that the company still had work to do. “The question is, How do you mirror engineering with equally strong skills in design and marketing? If you’re overly strong in any of those areas, odd things can happen.”

He’s right. Odd things like Microsoft’s convoluted Surface tablets.

E-mail: bilton@nytimes.com

Video and Witness Accounts of Attack on Islamist Protesters in Cairo

As my colleagues Kareem Fahim and Mayy el Sheikh report from Cairo, the Egyptian police killed at least 65 people in an attack on an Islamist rally early Saturday.

While the interior minister claimed later that his officers “have never and will never shoot” one bullet at Egyptian citizens, some victims were killed with single gunshot wounds to the head and video, photographs and written accounts posted online by witnesses contradicted that assertion.

Sharif Kouddous, an Egyptian journalist, drew attention to video uploaded to YouTube Saturday morning by a witness named Mohamed Wasfi, who claimed to have captured the beginning of the clashes in Cairo’s Nasr City district.

Video uploaded to YouTube Saturday, said to show the start of deadly clashes in Cairo.

The footage, recorded above Nasr Street, showed police officers firing tear gas at supporters of the deposed president, Mohamed Morsi, who had marched down the road from their sit-in nearby. The video appears to show the confrontation after the protesters moved down the street, past the reviewing stand where former President Anwar el-Sadat was assassinated in 1981, and reached a police barricade near the October 6 Bridge. Despite claims of gunfire coming from the Islamist side, the video shows protesters running back down the street after the first volley of tear gas was fired directly at the crowd, and officers and men in civilian clothes walking calmly in front of the police vehicles just over a minute later.

The police released a compilation of video recorded during the subsequent clashes that showed Morsi supporters throwing rocks at the police in the dark and a man in civilian clothes firing a single blast of birdshot from a pistol during daylight hours. According to the interior ministry, that man was aiming at the police, although men dressed like civilians also fought against the Islamists alongside officers throughout the clashes.

Video of Saturday’s clashes posted on the YouTube channel of Egypt’s interior ministry.

Hours later, after journalists pointed out that the shooting victims were all on the Islamist side, the interior ministry released another 55 seconds of video, showing a badly wounded man in a hospital bed who was described as an officer shot in the head while speaking to Islamist protesters.

Throughout the day, Egyptians shared links to images of gunshots being fired from the police side. A video blogger who recorded images of the victims of the another deadly attack on Islamist protesters in the area, two weeks ago, captured video on Saturday of police officers shooting at protesters hiding behind a brick barricade across Nasr Street.

Video of shots being fired at Islamist protesters by police officers in Cairo.

Hossam el-Hamalawy, an activist blogger and journalist, pointed to video apparently recorded from behind Islamist lines during the clashes along Nasr Street later in the day that offered clear images of a masked police officer firing a rifle and a second clip that appeared to show a plainclothes officer firing a machine gun.

Video of a police officer firing a rifle during clashes with Islamist protesters in Cairo on Saturday.

Video uploaded to YouTube Saturday appeared to show a plainclothes police officer shooting at Islamist protesters in Cairo.

The activist photographer Mosa’ab Elshamy, who posted images of the clashes online as they unfolded, reported the “sound of non-stop gunshots” from the police side at about 6:30 a.m. local time.

Terrifying sound of non-stop gunshots coming from police & plain clothed men side in the ongoing clashes. http://t.co/0Bwd2VCIDE

â€" Mosa’ab Elshamy (@mosaaberizing) 27 Jul 13

Counted 24 bodies, all shot in head or chest, at Rabaa’s makeshift morgue. More being carried in. No words. http://t.co/vF35Hui5vp

â€" Mosa’ab Elshamy (@mosaaberizing) 27 Jul 13

Mr. Elshamy, who uploaded graphic photographs of the victims to Flickr, said in a brief account of what he witnessed on Twitter that he saw no armed Morsi supporters.

My photos from last night’s tragedy at Rabaa and the morning clashes. Some might be difficult to look at: http://t.co/cFYKrNIUjr

â€" Mosa’ab Elshamy (@mosaaberizing) 27 Jul 13

I was on Morsi-supporters’ side of the clashes for about 5 hours and honestly saw no arms with them. (7)

â€" Mosa’ab Elshamy (@mosaaberizing) 27 Jul 13

In a more detailed account he posted on Facebook, the photographer noted that since he arrived after the start of the clashes, he could not rule out “the possibility of them being armed earlier at night when things were more vicious and chaotic, making observing things more difficult.”

The BBC correspondent Quentin Sommerville reported that his team did hear occasional outgoing shots from the Islamist side, they only saw one man with a homemade shotgun.

We leaving 4 now. Fighting continues. In 4.5 hours we were there I didn’t see 1 armed Morsi supporter, but heard occasional outgoing shots.

â€" Quentin Sommerville (@sommervillebbc) 27 Jul 13

Rest of BBC team tell me they saw Pro-Morsi supporter with homemade shotgun. But point stands, most of the weapons were on the other side.

â€" Quentin Sommerville (@sommervillebbc) 27 Jul 13

Mohamed Soltan, an Egyptian-American activist who is taking part in the sit-in, and documenting it on his iPhone, also posted a number of very graphic images of the dead on Twitter. At one stage, Mr. Soltan watched as grief-stricken relatives of the dead came to identify their bodies in a makeshift field hospital.

“I just want to see his face” a family member screamed in agony!! Live from hospital field hospital http://t.co/oIssNU55He

â€" Mohamed Soltan (@soltanlife) 27 Jul 13

Families line up to come identity their sons/fathers/siblings.. Etc at the #Martyr room in the makeshift hospital http://t.co/qzcUwItpxN

â€" Mohamed Soltan (@soltanlife) 27 Jul 13

The journalist Sharif Kouddous recorded video of some of those bodies being carried away later.

Video of Islamist protesters killed during Saturday’s attack by the security forces.

The Bible Gets an Upgrade

Nathan Weber for The New York Times On a recent Sunday morning, the pews of the Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church in Chicago were aglow with smartphones and tablets at the 10:45 a.m. service.

Is it possible to improve on the word of God?

Most believers would say no, but what about improving on its user experience?

After all, the text of the Bible has been shared through scrolls, codexes and movable type. Now, the Bible is also a mobile app that has logged 60 billion minutes of reading time and has won a dedicated following. It has also changed the reading habits of the faithful around the world, as described in my article, “App Puts the Bible in 100 Million Palms.”

The success of that app, YouVersion, is due, in part, to how it has created an improved reading experience for Christians by incorporating tools for sharing and reading plans that divvy up the Bible on various themes (with gentle reminders to keep reading), as well as offering audio versions and even video clips to make the Bible a more modern experience.

More than 10 million reading plans have been completed since the app was introduced in 2008. The church team behind YouVersion sees a spike in activity on its servers every January, when thousands of Christians make New Year’s resolutions to read the Bible every day.

Some users, like Ali Supina, a youth pastor in Lake Ann, Mich., no longer even bother with printed Bibles.

OMG I don’t even own a real bible! You know your a youth pastor if all your bible resources are apps or digital! #youversion #bible jeesh!

â€" Ali Supina (@aligator33) 28 Sep 12

Like many people who use the app, the Sears family of Oklahoma City has YouVersion installed four times. Jen Sears, a human resources manager, carries her smartphone with her on her lunch break and listens to the Bible in audio while she eats. She and her husband, Dave, both use daily reading plans that remind them to catch up and offer easy ways to post their progress to social media sites.

Their four-year-old son, Austin, has been confused at times when his mother picks up her phone when she wants to pray. She said, “I told him I was going to go talk to God, and his eyes got really big and he said, ‘you have God on your phone?’” Mrs. Sears then showed him how the app worked. She takes it with her whenever she wants to pray.

YouVersion users also say the app’s simple search function has erased the embarrassment of flipping through Philippians when the pastor asks you to find Ephesians. Now, no one can tell if the person using YouVersion is lost in the book that is central to their lives.

The Bible app’s ubiquity, however, has created new suspicions at church. Now during a sermon, people wonder if the glowing phone in the next pew is for scriptural reference or text messaging.

“I don’t read my bible on my iPhone in church, because I will visit Twitter while I’m waiting,” Jon Acuff, a Christian speaker and author, said in an interview last year. “I don’t have the self discipline to have a Bible app open.”

In this parody music video, Josiah Jones, a Christian performer, sings about the same dilemma: “I get all sorts of glances when I’m digging in the word, is he looking at his Bible, or playing Angry Birds?”

But perhaps the other reason for YouVersion’s success is that while there are hundreds of Bible-related apps available for download, few have the kind of technical foundation and elegant user experience that YouVersion displays.

In general, experts agree that the market for technical products aimed at traditionally religious people has been underserved by developers and software designers. Beki Gitner, a professor of human computer interaction at Georgia Tech, who has studied how people use technology for spiritual purposes, said about YouVersion, “the sheer number of downloads is a good reminder to all of us that if we think about technology as purely a secular tool, we are missing out on how it’s being used by people all over the world.”

After all, an app affiliated with God may provide the ultimate kind of “brand loyalty.”

I once downloaded the bible app and have been too afraid to delete it â€" Pat Dudek (@pat_dudek) 1 Jul 13

The Bible Gets an Upgrade

Nathan Weber for The New York Times On a recent Sunday morning, the pews of the Fellowship Missionary Baptist Church in Chicago were aglow with smartphones and tablets at the 10:45 a.m. service.

Is it possible to improve on the word of God?

Most believers would say no, but what about improving on its user experience?

After all, the text of the Bible has been shared through scrolls, codexes and movable type. Now, the Bible is also a mobile app that has logged 60 billion minutes of reading time and has won a dedicated following. It has also changed the reading habits of the faithful around the world, as described in my article, “App Puts the Bible in 100 Million Palms.”

The success of that app, YouVersion, is due, in part, to how it has created an improved reading experience for Christians by incorporating tools for sharing and reading plans that divvy up the Bible on various themes (with gentle reminders to keep reading), as well as offering audio versions and even video clips to make the Bible a more modern experience.

More than 10 million reading plans have been completed since the app was introduced in 2008. The church team behind YouVersion sees a spike in activity on its servers every January, when thousands of Christians make New Year’s resolutions to read the Bible every day.

Some users, like Ali Supina, a youth pastor in Lake Ann, Mich., no longer even bother with printed Bibles.

OMG I don’t even own a real bible! You know your a youth pastor if all your bible resources are apps or digital! #youversion #bible jeesh!

â€" Ali Supina (@aligator33) 28 Sep 12

Like many people who use the app, the Sears family of Oklahoma City has YouVersion installed four times. Jen Sears, a human resources manager, carries her smartphone with her on her lunch break and listens to the Bible in audio while she eats. She and her husband, Dave, both use daily reading plans that remind them to catch up and offer easy ways to post their progress to social media sites.

Their four-year-old son, Austin, has been confused at times when his mother picks up her phone when she wants to pray. She said, “I told him I was going to go talk to God, and his eyes got really big and he said, ‘you have God on your phone?’” Mrs. Sears then showed him how the app worked. She takes it with her whenever she wants to pray.

YouVersion users also say the app’s simple search function has erased the embarrassment of flipping through Philippians when the pastor asks you to find Ephesians. Now, no one can tell if the person using YouVersion is lost in the book that is central to their lives.

The Bible app’s ubiquity, however, has created new suspicions at church. Now during a sermon, people wonder if the glowing phone in the next pew is for scriptural reference or text messaging.

“I don’t read my bible on my iPhone in church, because I will visit Twitter while I’m waiting,” Jon Acuff, a Christian speaker and author, said in an interview last year. “I don’t have the self discipline to have a Bible app open.”

In this parody music video, Josiah Jones, a Christian performer, sings about the same dilemma: “I get all sorts of glances when I’m digging in the word, is he looking at his Bible, or playing Angry Birds?”

But perhaps the other reason for YouVersion’s success is that while there are hundreds of Bible-related apps available for download, few have the kind of technical foundation and elegant user experience that YouVersion displays.

In general, experts agree that the market for technical products aimed at traditionally religious people has been underserved by developers and software designers. Beki Gitner, a professor of human computer interaction at Georgia Tech, who has studied how people use technology for spiritual purposes, said about YouVersion, “the sheer number of downloads is a good reminder to all of us that if we think about technology as purely a secular tool, we are missing out on how it’s being used by people all over the world.”

After all, an app affiliated with God may provide the ultimate kind of “brand loyalty.”

I once downloaded the bible app and have been too afraid to delete it â€" Pat Dudek (@pat_dudek) 1 Jul 13