Linked List: July 10, 2007

Tuesday, 10 July 2007

Bittersweet 

Craig Hockenberry on MobileSafari’s lack of support for CSS fixed positioning.

Will It Blend? 

An iPhone in a blender. This is what YouTube was made for. (Thanks to Joseph Lorenzo Hall.)

01-18-08 

Now this is what I call a trailer.

iPhone Backup Decoder 

Open source Python script by Padraig Kennedy for decoding the iPhone backup files iTunes stores on your computer.

Poka-Yoke 

I love this. Poka-Yoke is a Japanese phrase that originated at Toyota to describe designs intended to be mistake-proof; e.g., an ignition key that can’t be removed unless the car is in Park. Via Mike McCracken, suggesting a logical reason why Apple Mail’s keyboard shortcut for Send (Shift-Command-D) is relatively out of the way.

Marc Hedlund’s iPhone Observations 

Interesting observations from Marc Hedlund, who’s owned “one Newton, two Blackberrys, three Palms, and three Treos”. He praises the iPhone’s network threading, but dings the keyboard:

The iPhone keyboard blows. Let’s not mince words, here: text input was better on a Newton. The keys are way too close together, full stop. The auto-suggestion works okay if you’re typing dictionary words (and not, say, street names, as in the Google Maps app) and if you’re in a context where typing space to accept is useful (in URLs, for instance, there is no space bar).

NewsLife 1.0 

Fresh out of beta: ThinkMac’s $16 feedreader.

McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: A Letter to Optimus Prime From His GEICO Auto Insurance Agent 

John Frank Weaver:

Your policy with GEICO only reimburses you for accidents that occur while you are engaged in the reasonable use of your truck and trailer. As I told you when you originally purchased the policy, GEICO does not offer Megatron coverage, Starscream coverage, Soundwave coverage, Decepticon coverage, or Energon-blast coverage. Those are just not the types of damages we would expect from reasonable use.

(Via Jason Santa Maria.)

James Duncan Davidson: ‘iPhone Backup Data’ 

The Notes data gets backed up to an SQLite datebase containing HTML. (Or perhaps that’s the native storage on the iPhone, and the database just gets copied over when you sync.)