Linked List: August 14, 2009

Friday, 14 August 2009

Secrets of Magus 

Speaking of Ricky Jay, Mark Singer’s 1993 profile of him for The New Yorker is a classic. Perfect reading to start the weekend.

SimplyTweet 2.0 

My thanks to MotionObj for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote SimplyTweet 2.0, their feature-packed Twitter client for the iPhone and iPod Touch. SimplyTweet 2.0 now has built-in support for push notifications for mentions and direct messages on iPhone OS 3.0, support for themes, search, and multiple picture uploading to sites such as TwitPic and Posterous.

Zune SDK Is XNA Game Studio? 

Apparently this is the SDK for the Zune, and, presumably, the Zune HD.

A bunch of readers emailed me with the link to this “case study” from Microsoft a few weeks ago regarding an iPhone developer who ported their app to Windows Mobile 6.5 (well, to one specific Windows Mobile phone). But trust me, my iPhone Twitter client developer source was pitched on porting his app to the Zune, not to Windows Mobile.

The whole situation just goes to show how utterly convoluted Microsoft’s mobile development message is. They’re all over the map. And that’s not even mentioning their “Pink” project, which is apparently some sort of next-generation Sidekick.

Capo 1.1 

Nice update to SuperMegaUltraGroovy’s tool for musicians. I just love this UI.

Update on Pogue’s ‘Take Back the Beep’ Campaign 

David Pogue, on his campaign to get U.S. mobile phone carriers to eliminate the 15-second recorded instructions you hear when leaving a voicemail message:

Verizon’s PR contact, Tom Pica, hasn’t responded to my request for a progress report. He’s probably still irritated at me. When ABC News interviewed him about this campaign, he told them that customers can already turn off the instructions. Which isn’t true. So that night on Twitter, I said that he was lying.

He called me to let me know that he wasn’t lying — he was misquoted. What he said was that you can turn off voicemail altogether if you don’t like the 15-second instructions.

Well, O.K., but … huh?

Isn’t that like saying, “My son bites his nails, so let’s chop off his hands”?

iPhone 3GS vs. Palm Pre Customer Satisfaction 

Philip Elmer-DeWitt:

Palm Pre owners love their smartphones, but not as much as owners of Apple’s new 3GS iPhone love theirs.

In a survey of 200 3GS users conducted Aug. 4-11 by RBC Capital and ChangeWave Research, 99% pronounced themselves satisfied, of which 82% were “very satisfied.” In a matching survey of 40 Pre owners, 87% said they were satisfied and 45% “very satisfied.”

The Pre’s numbers are good. The 3GS’s are amazing. I can’t recall ever seeing a number like 99 percent in a customer satisfaction survey before.

Number one source of dissatisfaction for iPhone owners: AT&T’s network. It’s an anchor around Apple’s neck.

Always On 

Adam Lisagor notes a subtle but significant improvement to the camera with the iPhone 3GS:

My hypothesis: from the moment you launch the Camera app, data is not only streaming to the viewer, but being cached to memory at full resolution, much like a TiVo with a live broadcast. Where there’s been latency in previous versions of the iPhone hardware/software due to processing limitations, those limitations have been overcome in the iPhone 3GS, closing the gap between intention and result by processing the streaming input from a microsecond before the shutter was released. In essence, the iPhone is constantly storing the picture you want before you even take it.

I sort of noticed the same thing subconsciously — a few times where I thought I’d missed the shot based on my experience with the original iPhone and 3G, I’ve gotten the shot with the 3GS. But after reading Adam’s piece and testing it out side-by-side with my old 3G, there’s no maybe about it. As Adam says, something smart is happening here.

Jon Stokes on OLED Displays 

Interesting chart showing power consumption: OLED wins versus LCD for most cases, but loses when most of the screen is white. This favors light text on dark backgrounds for user interfaces.