Linked List: September 16, 2009

Wednesday, 16 September 2009

Brilliant idea: Heather Armstrong is publishing her hate mail.

Official video from Google showing what’s new in the latest release of Android.

Reports of Trackball Trouble With the BlackBerry Tour ★

Sounds like the scrollball in the Mighty Mouse:

In a research note, Hallaren writes that RIMM is “having a big trackball problem,” especially with the Tour. He reports that RIMM “needs customers to clean the track ball frequently, and preferably with compressed air.” He adds that, “not surprisingly, most customers prefer not to.”

TownHall reports that return rates on the Tour at Sprint “have been climbing toward 50%.” He adds that Sprint perceives “RIM overall quality control is a huge problem.”

The Tour is the new flagship BlackBerry model.

Kottke on the iPhone as the Universal Pocket Device ★

Crackerjack piece by Kottke on how the iPhone — and, to a lesser extent, other mobile platforms like BlackBerry, Android, and WebOS — isn’t just competing against phones, but against dozens of different types of pocketable gadgetry: cameras, music players, game players, e-book readers, etc.

In a footnote, he speculates that Apple might soon change the iPhone’s name:

You’ve got to wonder when Apple is going to change the name of the iPhone. The phone part of the device increasingly seems like an afterthought, not the main attraction. The main benefit of the device is that it does everything. How do you choose a name for the device that has everything? Hell if I know.

If Apple were worried about the applicability of the noun in iNoun formations, they’d have changed the name of iTunes, of which tunes are now just a part of it, years ago. If this platform is here for the long run, the general purpose name that best works for a general purpose device is already here: iPod. In fact, iPod, semantically, is a better name for the iPod Touch than it ever was for the original focused-on-music models. As I see it, the phone in iPhone isn’t about telephony, but about the necessary contract with a mobile carrier.

Michael Tsai on the Precedence of ‘or’ in AppleScript ★

I’ve gone back and tested it on 10.5, and Tsai is correct that my original script, although it ran without error, wasn’t doing what I thought it was doing. And I concur with his suggestion that this is the most AppleScript-y way to do it:

if _browser is not in {"Safari", "WebKit"} then

This syntax also has the advantage of scaling better if you’re comparing against more than just two strings. I’ve edited my previous entries on this technique accordingly.

iTwinge ★

Is this a joke?

Malick ★

Great find by Jim Coudal: cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki on working with Terrence Malick. So good.

Matt Rosoff on the Zune HD Web Browser ★

That keyboard looks terrible.