Linked List: November 3, 2009

Tuesday, 3 November 2009

Gestures as a Language 

Jeffrey Sambells nails it:

Gestures should be treated as a language, like sign language for touch devices. We need a common set of gestures to interact with all touch enabled devices. I shouldn’t have to learn a different language just to use a different device.

I spent all day yesterday trying to figure out why I cared so much about Android 2.0’s lack of standard multi-touch UI gestures. That’s it exactly. This isn’t something someone should be able to own.

Pierre Igot on Click-Through in the Snow Leopard Finder 

The rules are complicated. As Igot describes, click-through can change the selected item only in icon view, not list or column view, but click-through is enabled for double-clicks in all views. Igot writes:

How is the user supposed to “know” and remember intuitively that click-through now only works in icon view mode and not in list view mode and column view mode? And how is the user supposed to “know” and remember intuitively that, even though click-through no longer works, “double-click-through” (to coin a phrase) still does?

I don’t think the behavior is specific to the Finder, though — I’m pretty sure that in list and column views, what Igot describes is the standard behavior for Cocoa table, outline, and browser (a.k.a. column) views. The problem is the complexity of the rules. If the rules are hard to explain, it’s a good sign the rules are too complex.

Count me in with Chris Clark: click-through should be disabled.

Dutch Teenager Hacks Jailbroken iPhones, Tries to Extort €5 

He used port scanning to identify iPhones on T-Mobile’s network, and took advantage of the fact that jailbroken iPhones have SSH running and most use the same default password for the root account. The hack seems to have been nothing more than a wallpaper image that shows a fake alert dialog box. (A clever attack, but the fake alert was poorly done — he didn’t even use Helvetica.)

Apple to Open Store in Center City Philadelphia 

The Philadelphia Metro reports:

Design plans for a new store near 16th and Walnut streets go before the city Art Commission tomorrow. Apple has already posted job listings on its Web site for the store, but a spokeswoman said yesterday that an official announcement about a new store here isn’t ready yet.

Talking Apple had the scoop on the location about two weeks ago.

App Store Rejection of the Week 

Jason Snell:

Our book about the iPhone has been rejected from the App Store BECAUSE IT CONTAINS THE WORD iPHONE.

David Pogue, of course, has an e-book available in the App Store titled “iPhone: The Missing Manual”. (Dan Moren has a possible solution.)

Update: Looks like they’ve straightened this out.

TapeDeck 1.3 

Nice update to the fun $25 audio recording app from SuperMegaUltraGroovy, including the addition of lossless recording.

Andrew Shebanow’s Retort Regarding Open Government and PDF 

Andrew Shebanow:

The issue at hand is not whether governments should pick HTML or PDF. The issue at hand is whether governments are capable of publishing information at all. Show me an HTML creation tool that creates high quality, standards conformant markup from a Word document or any of the zillions of editing tools that government employees use.

Good point, and I regret having lumped PDF in with Flash in my criticism yesterday. It’s the idea that Flash should have any role whatsoever in a serious debate on open publishing formats that I have a problem with.

‘The Ones That Win Are the Ones That Ship’ 

Mark Pilgrim asks (and answers): Why do we have an IMG element in HTML? So good.