Linked List: September 14, 2007

Friday, 14 September 2007

iPod Touch’s Display Not as Good as iPhone’s? 

Photos from Macworld, comparing the iPod Touch’s display to the iPhone’s:

The touch is noticeably darker, lacks fine detail, and blows out dark “highlights” into the negative.

I didn’t expect this — I figured the Touch would use the exact same display. I wonder if they just got a bad iPod Touch, or if this is evident across the board?

Why the Magnifying Glass Doesn’t Work in Some iPhone Web Apps 

Justin Williams:

We designed PocketTweets so that scaling isn’t necessary. Unfortunately, setting user-scaling to false is what is causing the magnifying glass to not work in <textarea> tags. Taking the user-scalable parameter out of the equation allows me to magnify as I please.

Jiminy, That’s Thin 

Side-by-side, the iPod Touch is a lot thinner than the iPhone, which itself is pretty thin. From AppleInsider’s unpacking photos and tour.

iPhone Store Credit Page Shows Screenshots of iPhone OS X 1.1.1 

The screenshots that show you how to check your iPhone’s serial number are based on the as-yet-unreleased 1.1.1 version of the OS. (The current release version is 1.0.2; no idea what happened to 1.1.0.) One change is an additional setting under General for “Home Button”; my guess is that it’ll let you select an action for double-clicking. The iPod Touch uses a double-click of the Home button to bring up music player controls.

The Zap Colors Bookmarklet 

Nifty bookmarklet for those of you who dislike the DF color scheme. Adding a dark-on-light option to the DF preferences page has been on the to-do list for years.

Cottyn 

New online t-shirt shop. (Via Naz Hamid.)

Phone Different 

My thanks to this week’s RSS feed sponsor, Phone Different. If you want iPhone peripherals — cases, Bluetooth headsets, chargers, anything — Phone Different’s got them. Through Wednesday, use the coupon code “MACNERDERY” to get a 10 percent discount on any purchase. They’ve got a weblog and forum packed with additional iPhone nerdery, too.

Coudal Partners’ Layer Tennis 

At long last, the return of the game formerly known as Photoshop Tennis:

We’re just about ready to roll with Layer Tennis and we’re sure you’re going to find that it has been worth the wait. If you are going to be screwing around on Friday afternoons this Fall (and who isn’t?) make sure you’re screwing around somewhere with high-speed web access.

First match, Friday 28 September: Shaun Inman vs. Kevin Cornell, with commentary by yours truly. I can’t wait.

Fake Steve on the Ringtone Racket 

Fake Steve:

Perhaps, if enough people complain, we will drop this policy at some point in the future and make ringtones free. And maybe, at that point, we will offer anyone who paid 99 cents for a ringtone a retroactive partial rebate in the form of a fifty-cent store credit. I’ve got Phil Schiller working on this right now.

Namaste right back at you, Fake Steve.

A Baffling Phenomenon: Customized Ringtones 

David Pogue on the ringtone racket:

If I buy and download a pop song legitimately, shouldn’t I be able to trigger playback any way I want? Why must I pay one fee to play it by tapping Play, and a second fee to play it when someone calls my phone?

It just makes no sense.

The New England Patriots: Cheaters 

Shameful:

The National Football League fined New England Patriots Coach Bill Belichick $500,000 yesterday, and the team will forfeit its first-round draft pick in 2008 if it makes the playoffs, for violating league rules Sunday when a Patriots staff member was discovered videotaping signals by Jets coaches during the season opener at the Meadowlands.

See also: “Shady Brady and Bill Belicheat”.

iPhone $100 Store Credit Redemption 

Easy as pie: Just enter your iPhone phone number and serial number, and Apple sends you an SMS with a 6-digit passcode. Enter the passcode on Apple’s web site, and you get your $100 store credit. Took about two minutes, start to finish.

Mac Rumors’s Preview of Ambrosia Software’s WireTap Studio 

Impressive stuff. Stores your original recordings in a library:

Another related feature is lossless editing. No matter how many changes you’ve made to the recording, you can always go back to the original recording (at the highest quality). This feature is similar to how Apple’s iPhoto and Aperture applications work on digital photos, keeping the originals intact while you apply edits over time.

The LivePreview feature has to be seen to be believed.