Linked List: March 10, 2009

Tuesday, 10 March 2009

On Advertising 

Mandy Brown:

Any economy which charges ever less for ever more intrusive ads will eventually be successful not in creating wealth but in driving the readers away, until the only ones left to heed the ads are all the other ads, the cell phones searching in vain for a target market among the cellulite.

User Interface of the Week: Password Engine 

My favorite part is that there’s a button for “Options”.

Update: Don’t miss gpsGuide, another iPhone app from the same author. Best help screen ever.

Would Safari 4’s Tab Interface Be Good for Touch Screens? 

Charles Ying looks at Safari 4’s new interface for tabs and speculates that it’s designed for future multi-touch displays from Apple.

I disagree. Tappable targets on a touch screen need to be bigger and/or further apart, because finger tips are large, whereas mouse pointers are very precise. The tip of the arrow mouse pointer is precisely one pixel. Apple’s iPhone UI guidelines suggest that a typical finger tip covers about 40 pixels on the iPhone’s 163 pixel-per-inch display. So I would say Safari 4’s tabs would be worse than Safari 3’s for touch screen use, because clickable targets in the title/tab bar are packed closer together. (For this same reason, the entire Mac OS X interface as a whole is poorly suited to touch screen use — look at how close the standard close/minimize/zoom buttons are.)

Dan Moren on the App Store 

Dan Moren:

Regardless, the review process for iPhone apps needs to be standardized, and it needs to be done now, not later. Apple’s created an impressive business out of the App Store — it’s time to stop acting like it’s being run out of a garage.

The Chimps Are Weaponizing 

OK, scratch that last idea. No chimps. (Thanks to DF reader Jim Colwell.)

149 Surprising Ways to Turbocharge Your Blog With Credibility! 

Co-presentation by Merlin Mann and yours truly at SXSW this Saturday at 3:30 pm. Maybe we’ll have a special guest, or bring a chimpanzee up on stage with us.

You can’t make this stuff up. Apple has rejected the latest version of Tweetie — currently the most popular Twitter client in the App Store — because there’s a swear word in the current list of top Twitter trends. The trends feature isn’t new to this version of Tweetie, nor is Tweetie the only iPhone Twitter client that has the feature. It’s just that there happens to be a dirty word in the trend list now.

Update: As of two hours ago, Tweetie 1.3 was approved by Apple, curse words in trends be damned.

On the Renaming of Xcode Projects 

Chris Espinosa:

One of the FAQs of Xcode is “Why is Save As… disabled for my project file?” Or, put more bluntly, how do you duplicate or rename a project?

Palm Issues Official Retraction of Roger McNamee’s Pre Crazy Talk 

Translation: This dude is crazy but we can’t get rid of him because it’s his money that’s keeping the company afloat.

More from Dan Moren and John Paczkowski.

(The problem with McNamee’s trash talk regarding the iPhone is not about whether the Pre will actually be a worthy rival. Let’s just concede that it will. The problem is that this is the wrong way to set expectations. Clearly there is room for both the iPhone to continue to sell well and for the Pre to have a successful launch — but investors who took McNamee at his word would deem that scenario a failure for Palm.)

Jakob Nielsen’s Kindle 2 Usability Review 

Jakob Nielsen:

11 years ago, I wrote that electronic books were a bad idea. Has Kindle 2 changed my mind? Yes. The two factors that convinced me were (a) equal-to-print readability and (b) multi-device integration.

Silicon Graphics Shares Delisted From NASDAQ 

The long, slow demise of a pioneering computer graphics powerhouse.

Formula 1 Steering Wheel User Interfaces 

More information here. (Via The Big Picture, which has a nice close-up of a Renault steering wheel.)

Wolfram/Alpha 

Always so timid, that Stephen Wolfram.