Linked List: July 9, 2007

Monday, 9 July 2007

Steven Johnson on iPhone’s Battery ★

Steven Berlin Johnson, responding to New York Times columnist Joe Nocera’s claim that the iPhone’s unreplaceable battery is a consumer-hostile design decision:

How ludicrous and superficial — not to mention consumer unfriendly — to think that people might like a smartphone that’s significantly lighter and thinner than the competition!

Simpson Family Values ★

Long feature on The Simpsons by John Ortved for Vanity Fair, including interviews with cast members, Rupert Murdoch, Barry Diller, Conan O’Brien, and Brad Bird. (Via Andy Baio.)

More iPhone Battery Jackassery: CNN and CNet ★

From Kent German and Donald Bell’s iPhone review for CNet, republished by CNN:

Unfortunately, the Phone does not have a battery that a user can replace. That means you have to send the iPhone to Apple to replace the battery after it’s spent (Apple is estimating one battery will last for 400 charges — probably about two years’ worth of use).

Replicating iPhone Buttons the ‘-Webkit’ Way ★

Matthew Krivanek shows how to make iPhone-style horizontally scalable push buttons using just one PNG for the image, thanks to WebKit-specific CSS instructions. (Via Brent Simmons.)

iPhone and the Death of the Mobile Web ★

Nate Mook:

Pocket IE, a staple of Microsoft’s Windows Mobile platform is largely useless for loading anything but pages specially designed for mobile browsers. Opera Mini arguably does a better job, but requires Java and does not work on many popular phones such as the Samsung Blackjack. The Palm OS browser is a relic at this point.

This is what makes the iPhone’s debut especially important, because an answer has finally been found.

iTunes 7.3 UI Changes ★

Rory Prior:

iTunes 7.3 has a number of subtle user interface enhancements that aid usability and in some cases improve the cosmetics.

Wil Shipley: ‘iPhone’S AJAX SDK: No, Thank You’ ★

Wil Shipley:

Us programming in AJAX while Apple programs in real OS X is basically a case of Apple not eating its own dogfood, except that JavaScript isn’t dogfood, it’s dog shit.

Plus, regardless what you think of JavaScript as a language (and Shipley doesn’t think much of it), one enormous difference between Cocoa and AJAX development is that Cocoa has Interface Builder. NeXT programmers have been bragging — rightfully — about using a GUI tool to lay out GUIs for almost 20 years. With AJAX, you’re back to specifying your interface with code.

Shipley makes a great point about this being a tremendous opportunity for Apple, too:

If you look at it from another perspective, this is a “crisortunity” — it’s Apple’s chance to write a new, tighter Cocoa, that has a HUGE built-in market (eg, all iPhone users) to attract developers to it. And, then, eventually Apple could port this back to Macs, and in a few more years it could gently replace the old, kind of bloated Cocoa we have now, as Cocoa is doing with Carbon as we speak.

Jalkut on the iPhone ‘SDK’ ★

Daniel Jalkut:

It’s a common theme among developers that we feel burned not by the lack of an SDK, but by the fact that Apple expects us to believe that this is one.

That is precisely the point I was trying to make with my “shit sandwich” remark.

iDVD and the Spinning Pizza of Death ★

Just because an app looks like it’s wedged doesn’t mean it is. Halfway through a very lengthy video conversion, it looked like iDVD had gotten stuck with the beachball cursor. Tim Foster investigated — using some serious nerd-fu — and realized it wasn’t actually stuck, so he let it continue, and eventually it did finish. (Via John Siracusa.)

Why Daring Fireball Is Comment Free ★

Transcribed by Shawn Blanc, quoting me during my talk with Cabel Sasser at Macworld Expo in January. By far and away, the most frequently asked question about Daring Fireball.

Getting Photos From Lightroom to the iPhone ★

James Duncan Davidson:

But what’s the easiest way to get images from Lightroom to the iPhone? After a few hours playing with all the other features of the iPhone, I took a bit of time and set out to find out for myself.

Great suggestions.