Linked List: July 14, 2009

Tuesday, 14 July 2009

Auto-Correcting German and Swiss German 

Lukas Mathis, responding to my footnote regarding how the iPhone’s auto-correction doesn’t work as well in some languages as others:

All this is to explain why people in Switzerland often don’t use auto-correction: Instead of helping us type properly, it replaces correct words with incorrect words most of the time.

It’s worth pointing out, too, though, that the fact that the iPhone’s keyboard is implemented in software is a huge win for anyone who wishes to switch between different languages. I suspect that’s a huge selling point for the iPhone, albeit not so much here in the U.S.

The Words You Wear 

Rands translates buzzwords:

Heads-up — “You’re screwed.”

‘It’s a Medium, Not a Grande’ 

Good design and clever copywriting by Mucca Design for Brooklyn Fare. (Via Monoscope.)

Apple Press Release Trumpets 1.5 Billion App Downloads in First Year 

Interesting quote from Jobs in the press release:

“The App Store is like nothing the industry has ever seen before in both scale and quality,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “With 1.5 billion apps downloaded, it is going to be very hard for others to catch up.”

He sounds confident.

Dan Frommer on Why BusinessWeek Might Only Fetch $1 

Whoever buys them assumes their union contracts, debts, and subscription liabilities.

Update: And, answering my other question, here’s a report yesterday from BusinessWeek’s own Jon Fine.

Paul Constant Reviews Twitter Using Twitter 

A thoughtful and interesting essay, posted as a series of tweets. E.g.:

As in haiku, which has dozens of esoteric limitations, when you constrain a form, you can often broaden what people can do with it.

Wolfram Alpha and Hubristic User Interfaces 

Mencius Moldbug’s perceptive critique of Wolfram Alpha:

Briefly: there is actually a useful tool inside Wolfram Alpha, which hopefully will be exposed someday. Unfortunately, this would require Stephen Wolfram to amputate what he thinks is the beautiful part of the system, and leave what he thinks is the boring part.

WA is two things: a set of specialized, hand-built databases and data visualization apps, each of which would be cool, the set of which almost deserves the hype; and an intelligent UI, which translates an unstructured natural-language query into a call to one of these tools. The apps are useful and fine and good. The natural-language UI is a monstrous encumbrance, which needs to be taken out back and shot. It won’t be.

BusinessWeek Sale May Fetch Only $1 

Two thoughts:

  1. This makes no sense to me. Even if they just shut down the print magazine and kept the web site, it seems like it should be worth more than $1. I mean, shit, I’d personally offer double that to buy them myself.

  2. It’ll be interesting to see how BusinessWeek covers this.

MetaFilter’s $5 Sign-Up Fee 

A few readers emailed to point out that Pinboard’s new user sign-up fee isn’t entirely original, pointing to the $5 fee that MetaFilter has had in place for a few years. I’m sure others have done something similar, too. What I think is original, though, is the way Pinboard’s fee increases slowly as new users join — (a) encouraging early adoption, and (b) throttling growth. I.e., in addition to bringing in some cash, it’s also a clever way to ensure that a new web app doesn’t grow too fast too soon. It serves a similar purpose to a strictly-limited-number-of-invitations beta rollout like Gmail’s.

Verizon Wants to Build Its Own App Store 

Good luck with that.

Push Notifications Don’t Work for Third-Party Apps on Hacked SIM-Unlocked iPhones  

There’s nothing app developers can do about it, but the users of hacked carrier-unlocked iPhones are blaming them anyway.