Linked List: July 9, 2008

Wednesday, 9 July 2008

AnandTech’s MacBook Air SSD Benchmarks 

Anand Lal Shimpi’s real-world testing indicates that the SSD option improves battery life noticeably with the MacBook Air:

As expected, the impact on battery life isn’t huge but it’s definitely noticeable. With the 64 GB SSD installed we’re actually able to hit Apple’s 5 hour battery life claim with the MacBook Air. Our wireless browsing test actually saw the biggest improvement in battery life, increasing a full 43 minutes from a simple drive swap.

Web Surfing Test Shows SSDs Better for Battery Life 

Avram Piltch at Laptop Magazine disputes Tom’s Hardware’s findings regarding SSD drives and battery life:

Our conclusion is that, in real-world use, SSDs offer a small improvement in battery life. While this tiny improvement may not be enough to sell users on SSDs as power-saving devices, it is certainly enough to say that upgrading to SSD will not cost you any battery life and may provide you with more productive minutes as you wait shorter periods of time for programs to load or for your system to boot.

Tom’s Hardware: Flash SSDs Don’t Improve Your Notebook Battery Runtime 

I missed this article from Tom’s Hardware last week:

We’ve looked at almost a dozen different flash SSDs from seven vendors over the last few months, and measured acceptable or sometimes even disappointing power requirements with most flash SSDs. In an effort to determine the actual impact on notebook systems, we took four SSDs that we had available in our test lab, and ran a series of Mobilemark benchmark runs on a Dell Latitude D630 notebook. We found runtime differences of up to one hour (!) when using a flash SSD compared to a high-performance 7,200 RPM 2.5-inch notebook hard drive.

Has anyone run battery life benchmarks comparing SSD- and hard drive-equipped MacBook Airs?

Learning From ‘Bad’ UI 

Ryan Singer has a thoughtful piece regarding TripLog/1040, specifically regarding developer Steve Patt’s defense of its design in the comments on my Flickr entry.

My takeaway is this: I’m genuinely intrigued to see how things pan out for iPhone apps written by developers who don’t get the iPhone’s UI. Mostly these apps are going to come from developers coming from platforms other than the Mac, but I’ll bet some Mac developers will struggle, too — the iPhone UI isn’t anything at all like the Mac’s.

Patt’s defense of TripLog/1040’s design is that users will want all of these things on a single panel. Even if that’s true, though, to me the fundamental mistake in this design is shrinking everything to fit on screen at once. Just use more vertical space and let the user scroll the screen with their thumb to see the bottom. See, for example, the iPhone’s Settings app — it almost fits on a single screen, but instead of shrinking things to make them fit, it just scrolls off the bottom. But even if you’re sure that you do want to fit all of these controls on the iPhone screen at once, with no scrolling, this design is bad, because it takes up so much space for the number picker alone. That there is some logic behind TripLog/1040’s current design doesn’t make it good.

And a postscript regarding the tone of some of the comments in the Flickr thread: Constructive criticism of the design itself is, of course, OK. Gentle ribbing is OK. Personal insults are just wrong, though. Criticize the design, not the designer; the work, not the person.

Update: From the comments on Singer’s post, here’s an iPhone-style redesign by Raphael Campardou. And another here.

Thsrs — The Shorter Thesaurus 

David Friedman’s new thesaurus, only suggests words that are shorter.

Rogers to Offer Reasonable Data Plan 

Rogers:

Effective July 11, and as a limited time promotional offer for customers who activate by August 31 on a three year contract, a data-only offering of 6GB of data for $30 per month is being made available that can be added to any in-market voice plan. For example, with 6GB of data, iPhone 3G users can visit 35,952 web pages, or send and receive 157,286 emails, or watch 6,292 minutes of YouTube videos each and every month.

That’s extremely reasonable. Compare to the plans Rogers originally announced, where for $30 (CAD) you got just 300 MB of bandwidth.

For the sake of comparison, according to AT&T I used 242 MB of data transfer over EDGE in my most recent billing cycle — but I almost never load video or audio files over EDGE. I suspect anyone who makes frequent use of YouTube over the mobile network could go over 300 MB in a monthly easily. 6 GB, on the other hand, seems like enough to cover any reasonable usage.