Linked List: July 13, 2008

Sunday, 13 July 2008

Jirbo Jerkos 

The App Store is filling up with scammy-looking apps with names that start with spaces or punctuation marks so as to sort to the top of the lists. Apple needs to put an end to this; it already looks junky, and it’s just going to get worse as jackasses prepend their app names with more trick characters.

Update: On Twitter, Tim Wood points out that the problem is endemic to alphabetical sorting — if Apple merely disallows spaces and punctuation, the scammers will just switch to “AAAA Solitaire” to get to the top. Dave Dribin points out that Amazon avoids this by not even offering alphabetical sorting as an option. Apple should let you choose between popularity, release date (newest on top), and user ratings.

In the meantime, it also occurs to me that a few zero-star ratings from DF readers might help discourage the practice.

Tom Insam on the iPhone’s Three Different Sliders 

It’s not so much that one of them looks different that’s odd, but that they act differently.

A Small Change 

In horizontal mode, the iPhone 2.0 keyboard is about 30 pixels shorter, which leaves more room for content above. That’s the good news. The bad news: you still can’t use horizontal mode in typing-heavy apps like Mail and Notes.

iPhone 3G Display’s Color Temperature Is Warmer by Design 

Interesting, but I’m not sure it’s software. The speaker died on my original iPhone and I got it replaced under warranty in late May. The color temperature of my “new” original iPhone is far warmer than my original one from a year ago, and when I compare it side-by-side with my wife’s year-old iPhone, it looks similar to Macworld’s example picture here. This makes me think it’s hardware, not software.