By John Gruber
Mux — Video for developers
Linked List: November 20, 2008
Thursday, 20 November 2008
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Ryan Singer on Ffffound’s excellent keyboard shortcuts. Design isn’t just how things look — it’s about the experience of using them. (The Boston Globe’s Big Picture uses similar shortcuts.)
- The iPod Touch Doesn’t Have a Proximity Sensor ★
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DF reader Mark Handel, via email:
I can’t remember — does the iPod Touch have a proximity sensor? If it does not, that’s probably the reason that the proximity sensor is undocumented: Apple is trying to keep a very common “reference” hardware platform in the API. I think it was you who mentioned the problem with Android being that there was not a common hardware model: some have only touch screens, some have keyboards, etc.
The iPod Touch does not have a proximity sensor. The primary — and perhaps only — reason the iPhone does is so the screen can turn off and stop accepting touch input when you’re holding it to your ear for a call. I’m not sure this explains why the more useful proximity sensor APIs are undocumented, but it’s an interesting theory. And, clearly, some of the iPhone-only hardware features — the camera and microphone come to mind — are very much documented in the public APIs.
- Apple: ‘iPhone Your Life’ ★
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New section on Apple’s iPhone web site promoting third-party apps. Interesting for at least two reasons: (1) I’ve already found a couple of interesting apps I’d never heard of before, and (2) it shows you which iPhone apps Apple considers worth showing off.
- The Faces of Mechanical Turk ★
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Andy Baio:
Last week, I started a new Turk experiment to answer two questions: what do these people look like, and how much does it cost for someone to reveal their face?
- Mobispine MMS App for iPhone ★
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This is the app that the Swedish carrier Telia will be providing to Swedish iPhone users.
- On the Death and 441-Year Life of the Pixel ★
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Jonathan Hoefler has an example of pixel-based typography from 1567.
- Apple TV Software Update 2.3 ★
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With actual, albeit sparse, release notes:
Third-party Remote Controls — Apple TV can now learn other remote controls and use them in addition to the Apple Remote.
I can’t find any developer documentation for this yet. Update: Ah, I see, it’s a feature that allows the Apple TV to pair with existing universal remotes.
- Tweetie 1.0 ★
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Tweetie, a brand-new $3 iPhone Twitter client by Loren Brichter, is now available from the App Store. I’ve been using beta versions for a few weeks, and it is currently my favorite iPhone Twitter client by far. Tweetie shares a few conceptual similarities with Tweetsville, another very good new iPhone Twitter client — both take a very different approach than the king of the hill, Twitterrific.
The biggest difference is that both Tweetie and Tweetsville support loading additional tweets from further back in your timeline when you get to the end of the list. This makes it possible to “catch up” with older tweets in a way that just isn’t possible with Twitterrific. Tweetie also makes it possible to view individual users’ timelines within the app, using a left-to-right “drilling down” metaphor that allows you to go back to where you were. Tweetie wins out over Tweetsville by being faster, more stable (Tweetsville seems to more frequently run into low-memory situations when showing inline web views), and offering a more carefully thought out interface. The only thing I dislike about Tweetie is the SMS/iChat-style tweet list.
- Note2Self (iTunes Store) ★
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Note2Self is a $3 audio recording app for the iPhone, and, I believe, the first iPhone app with a “just lift it to your ear to record” feature. (It shipped with the feature in July.) However, unlike Google Mobile, Note2Self doesn’t use the proximity sensor, only the accelerometer.
I bought it last night to try it out. It works better than I’d have thought, but it’s far more finicky than Google Mobile’s implementation. With Note2Self you can trigger the “lift to record” feature just by moving the iPhone and holding it at the right angle — without putting it near your head. And sometimes when you do move it to your ear it doesn’t trigger. I think it’s about as good as it could be by sticking to the published APIs, but now that the proximity sensor cat is out of the bag, I expect to see an update that uses it soon.
- Erica Sadun on Using Undocumented iPhone APIs ★
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She makes an interesting distinction between the venial sin of using undocumented methods in a public framework (which is what Google has done with the proximity sensor), and the mortal sin of linking to a completely private framework. Sadun — who’s the author of The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook — even shows source code for an example app that catches proximity sensor events.
Based on some of the email I’ve gotten this morning, I think the occasional use of undocumented methods in public iPhone frameworks is actually pretty common in third-party iPhone apps. But that doesn’t make it safe, and I think Sadun is stretching the innocuousness of this practice when she writes:
Using unpublished APIs means that your applications can break at any firmware upgrade; Apple does not guarantee that routines will not change the way they stand behind the published APIs. However, developers use these routines for all sorts of good reasons both for items in App Store as well as out. And, often, the routines don’t break and have been stable for a long long time.
Undocumented routines are undocumented for some reason.