Linked List: July 14, 2008

Monday, 14 July 2008

PC World: 3G iPhone’s Mediocre Battery Life Still Beats Rivals ★

Longest talk-time of any 3G phone they tested, but 3G is so battery-intensive that it’s still not a great score. (Via MacDailyNews.)

Bugging ★

Craig Hockenberry on the difficulties iPhone app developers face attempting to debug problems encountered by App Store customers.

Short Review of Evernote for iPhone ★

I can’t understand why anyone would deem an app in this state ready to ship.

Leaked Photos of Touchscreen BlackBerry Thunder ★

April 27, in an interview with The New York Times for a story on RIM’s competition with the iPhone:

There’s a reason that R.I.M. is averse to the iPhone’s glass pad. “I couldn’t type on it and I still can’t type on it, and a lot of my friends can’t type on it,” says Mike Lazaridis, R.I.M.’s co-chief executive and technological visionary. “It’s hard to type on a piece of glass.”

Perhaps he’s starting to get the hang of it. (Also: dig that Comic Sans.)

Also, two paragraphs down in the same Times story:

Indeed, two independent developers writing software for coming R.I.M. devices say that a touch-screen BlackBerry is in the works, and that R.I.M. engineers privately refer to it as the A.K. — for “Apple Killer.”

Steven Frank on FTP ★

Steven Frank:

If your host doesn’t support SFTP, you should find a different host. It’s not hard to support, and it’s ridiculous to force people into using insecure protocols in the year 2008. Ask them, for example, why they don’t support telnet. FTP is no better.

Bit.ly, a New URL Shortening Service ★

Marshall Kirkpatrick on Bit.ly, a new URL shortening service with some innovative new features. For example, because I’m linking to Kirkpatrick’s article through a Bit.ly shortcut, you can track how many times the link has been followed on this page.

Adobe Acrobat 9 and Flash Video ★

Apparently now you can embed Flash within PDF. Joy, that’s just what I wanted.

How We Built an iPhone App for $4873.92 ★

Geoff Litwack:

So last year I read Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start, inspiring, then I started reading his blog, and then he published “By the Numbers: How I built a Web 2.0, User-Generated Content, Citizen Journalism, Long-Tail, Social Media Site for $12,107.09” and I was like whoa, that is useful information.

But it turns out that if you do your own development work, you can launch an iPhone app for even less. Here’s what we spent.

Namco’s Ms. Pac-Man iPhone Game Controls ★

Good analysis from Touch Arcade on the dilemma facing developers writing traditional video games (like in this case, Pac-Man) for the iPhone: how do you take input on a button-less system for a game conceived around a very twitchy joystick? Namco offers three choices for the iPhone Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man ports: (a) an ersatz D-pad, (b) the accelerometer, and (c) “swipe”, where you just swipe your finger anywhere on screen in the direction you want to move.

I’m a Pac-Man junkie, so I bought Ms. Pac-Man, and I agree with Touch Arcade that swiping works the best, by far. But, alas, it still stinks overall — you can’t make turns quickly or precisely enough.

Apple Sells One Million iPhone 3Gs in First Weekend ★

“iPhone 3G had a stunning opening weekend,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “It took 74 days to sell the first one million original iPhones, so the new iPhone 3G is clearly off to a great start around the world.”

Over 10 Million App Store Downloads in First Weekend ★

That’s a big number.