Linked List: July 28, 2009

Tuesday, 28 July 2009

Unofficial Rules of the App Store 

New weblog devoted to “unpublished rules and clarifications from Apple’s App Review team that can cause your iPhone app to be rejected.” (Via Marco Arment.)

Cocksure 

Malcolm Gladwell on the psychology of overconfidence.

Dave Cronin’s Spot-On Criticism of the iPhone Phone App 

This has bothered me for two years now, but I never really thought about just how wrong it is:

Whenever someone calls me, I don’t answer, and the caller leaves a voicemail, a “2” is displayed in the little red circle over the Phone icon on the Home screen. [...] Maybe I’m kind of a simpleton, but doesn’t that kind of make it seem like I’ve missed two calls? Or that I’ve got two voicemails?

He makes some good suggestions for how Apple can fix this.

New Scientist: ‘Humans Prefer Cockiness to Expertise’ 

New Scientist:

The research, by Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shows that we prefer advice from a confident source, even to the point that we are willing to forgive a poor track record. Moore argues that in competitive situations, this can drive those offering advice to increasingly exaggerate how sure they are.

This might be the best explanation of how someone like, say, Rob Enderle continues to be quoted as an expert regarding issues on which he is almost always completely wrong.

(Thanks to DF reader Glenn Cole.)

A Man’s Home Is His Constitutional Castle 

Christopher Hitchens on Henry Louis Gates’s arrest:

It is the U.S. Constitution, and not some competitive agglomeration of communities or constituencies, that makes a citizen the sovereign of his own home and privacy. There is absolutely no legal requirement to be polite in the defense of this right. And such rights cannot be negotiated away over beer.

AT&T’s Special Treatment of the iPhone 

Om Malik on the Google Voice/App Store situation:

Some allege that Apple is doing this at AT&T’s behest. That is just flat-out wrong: If it were true, then Google Voice would be banned on BlackBerry devices that use AT&T as well. As of this morning, everything is working fine on my AT&T-connected Bold (except for the usual dropped calls, of course). And are people forgetting that you need AT&T’s voice network to send and receive Google Voice calls?

Leaving aside my information from an informed source that it was indeed AT&T that got Google Voice pulled from the App Store, Malik’s reasoning does make sense.

But, trust me, it was AT&T’s decision. And this is not the first time AT&T has treated the iPhone differently than other phones they carry. Remember the SlingPlayer app? At AT&T’s behest, the iPhone version was restricted to Wi-Fi, despite the fact that the BlackBerry version works over 3G.

The big difference, of course, is that there is no single BlackBerry store.

Update: It Was AT&T 

I just posted the following correction to today’s earlier piece on the Google Voice/App Store thing:

Well, so much for my speculation. A reliable little birdie has informed me that it was indeed AT&T that objected to Google Voice apps for the iPhone. It’s that simple.

Train Wreck, Eh? 

In the face of ever-more-rampant rumor and speculation that Apple is preparing The Tablet for release, Michael Scalisi has declared it a “train wreck” in a piece for PC World. Yes, it’s a very foolish thing to do, reviewing a product based on nothing more than assumptions and idle speculation.

But really, Scalisi only made one mistake. His list of design and marketing problems faced by any “tablet” computer is accurate. His mistake is assuming that Apple would ship a tablet without having solved these very real problems. How do you type? How do you carry it around? How do you protect the screen from getting scratched? If you’re supposed to watch video on it, how do you prop it up? If you already have an iPhone and a MacBook, what would you need this for?

I have no idea what the answers to any of these questions are. But rest assured that if The Tablet is indeed imminent, Apple does. This thing is like the iPhone before it was revealed. There was a frenzy of speculation and rumor that Apple was poised to announce a mobile phone, but no one had any clue what it was actually going to be like.

William Shatner Performs Palin’s Farewell Speech as Poetry 

See, now this is mockery.