Linked List: November 9, 2009

Monday, 9 November 2009

The first comment on Robert Scoble’s Droid piece I linked to earlier today is from Thomas Marban, one of the developers of Twidroid, which is widely (maybe even universally) hailed as the leading Twitter client for Android. Marban writes:

one of the main reasons why UIs are unequally inferior are not only the way you build apps (open vs. closed hw/sw system) and the SDK itself but also marginal to non-existing UI standards, no ready-made drag & drop UI items, variations in carrier- & device firmware, hard- & software input, screen sizes, international customizations, modded phones, rooted phones and last but not least completely different expectations among users and the linux’ish target group itself. in a nutshell: beautiful mess. obviously, all these reasons eat up a huge pile of time that one could better spend with improving UX and polishing the interface. those who started early with android development have learned and are still learning it the hard way, just like they did with win 3.1 back in the days.

That doesn’t sound like someone who plans to ever ship something of the caliber of Tweetie, Birdfeed, or Twitterrific. From what I’ve seen of Twidroid, it’s not even as good as Craig Hockenberry’s original version of Twitterrific for iPhone, which was written as a jailbreak app before the iPhone officially supported third-party software. If Android hardware diversity is already a problem for third-party developers, it’s only going to get worse.

Close Votes Are a Feature, Not a Bug ★

Interesting political observation from Rafe Colburn:

Every vote over the minimum necessary to secure passage represents compromises that the Democrats as a group would prefer not to make. It’s not that Nancy Pelosi was lucky to pass the bill, it’s that the Democrats wrote the strongest bill they could that would get enough votes to pass. That’s good strategy.

Why Google Dropped $750 Million on AdMob ★

$100 million in annual revenue and growing fast.

Droid Limited to 256 MB of Storage for Apps ★

Taylor Wimberly:

The Motorola Droid will be the most powerful Android phone to date when it launches on November 6, 2009. However, the device still features the same shortcomings of all other Android phones. The Droid ships with a 512 MB ROM which contains only 256 MB available for app storage.

Google does not support installing apps to the SD card (and likely never will), so developers are limited in what they can create.

This is another one of those things where I simply don’t understand why Motorola doesn’t follow Apple’s lead and provide ample built-in storage rather than relying on removable SD cards. I just checked, and I have about 1.8 gigabytes of apps installed on my iPhone. Many of the top iPhone games weigh in at 50 or even 100 MB each. My two biggest games alone (Texas Hold’em and Need for Speed Undercover) weigh in at just over 256 MB combined. Just two games.

Did Motorola even look at the size of popular apps in the App Store before releasing this?

(HED) Folo My Lede (UNHED) ★

William Safire, back in 1990, on “lede” as a variant spelling of “lead”.

Mac OS X 10.6.2 Update ★

Lots of fixes.

Marshall Clow Reviews Yojimbo 2.0 for MacNN ★

Marshall Clow:

The Tag Explorer, a welcome new feature in Yojimbo 2, lets you see which items are marked with particular tags. Unlike a search mechanism, which is top-down, the Explorer lets you see how your data is organized or, if you are like me, disorganized.

Agreed, great feature.

Google Acquires AdMob for $750 Million ★

AdMob provides in-app advertising to a slew of iPhone apps.

Support for Same-Sex Marriage by Age and State ★

Striking differences in support by different age groups. There are only 12 states where same-sex marriage doesn’t have majority support from 18-29 year-olds.

Upcoming Ricoh GXR Interchangeable Lens/Sensor Camera System ★

Interesting new camera system from Ricoh — rather than just interchangeable lenses, each lens comes with its own image sensor. Ricoh cameras aren’t cheap, but you get what you pay for. My love for my Ricoh GR-D is unholy. (Via Wouter Brandsma.)

Update: Here’s a thread on DPReview.com with some info.

App Store Rejection of the Week: Bobble Rep ★

Directory of U.S. congressional representatives and senators, rejected because each is illustrated with an animated bobblehead caricature by Mad Magazine’s Tom Richmond.

(Via Metafilter.)

AT&T Announces New 3G LaptopConnect Device ★

So they’re rolling out higher-speed standalone 3G tethering for use with these devices, but still won’t sell tethering service to iPhone users. I cannot wait to dump these clowns.

Robert Scoble on the Droid ★

Robert Scoble, long-time iPhone user, bought a Droid, and his thoughts on it are interesting:

Second, the hardware. I totally disagree with CrunchGear on this point. Greg Kumparak said that the Droid is “a shining example of great industrial design.”

Oh, please.

It’s a phone an engineer could love. Compared to the iPhone or the Palm Pre it isn’t even in the same league. The battery door on the back proves my point. The iPhone? They just got rid of the idea of replaceable batteries and the Palm Pre spent a LOT of time making sure that having a replaceable battery did NOT make the phone have a noticeable door. The back of both the iPhone and the Palm Pre is smooth. The back of the Droid is not. That is NOT a shining example of great industrial design.

Android may well have a bright future, and I’m certainly very intrigued by it personally. But I suspect no Android phone will show the attention to detail of an iPhone or a Palm WebOS device.

I’m very much enjoying Scoble’s perspective on the Droid — more about the user experience and less about the technical specs — but I can’t let this bit from his conclusion go without comment:

I told Dave Winer that it looks a lot like Windows 3.1. The Mac back then was way better, but we all know that Apple ended up in 1995 with a small market share compared to Windows 95. The thing is, the Droid is Windows 3.1. It is showing the momentum is shifting but now Google has to ship their metaphorical equivalent of Windows 95. It isn’t this phone.

Windows 95 was a huge improvement over Windows 3.1, and it appeared at a time when Apple’s leadership was weak and the Mac OS was stagnant. But even Windows 3.1 had a massive monopoly-size market share, and I’m pretty sure the Mac never had more than about 5 percent of the U.S. unit sale market share in the ’90s. I don’t think this analogy is applicable to the current situation at all.

Jon Deal on How to Move Your Home Folder Off Your Boot Drive in Mac OS X ★

The idea is to use a smallish SSD drive as the boot drive, and a large hard disk for storage.

Rupert Murdoch Threatens to Pull WSJ, Other News Corp. Sites, From Google ★

When news sites complain that Google is “ripping them off” by indexing their content, the question is why don’t they just block Google’s spiders via robots.txt? The answer, of course, is that they don’t want to give up the traffic Google throws their way — they want the traffic and they want Google to pay them for it. Murdoch, though, is now saying they just might do it and block Google’s spider.

FingerMgmt — Multi-Touch Demo App for Mac OS X ★

Very cool freeware app by Jonas Nordberg — it plots the multi-touch input from a recent vintage MacBook trackpad or the Magic Mouse.

Burying the Lede ★

There’s a new worm in Australia that attacks jailbroken iPhones using the default SSH password. I.e. it only works if (a) your iPhone is jailbroken, and (b) you haven’t changed the default root password. Forbes’s Andy Greenberg waits until the fifth paragraph before mentioning this.

Update: Several readers point out that OpenSSH isn’t even installed by default when jailbreaking an iPhone. So that’s a third essential requirement to be vulnerable to this attack.

Slide Different ★

Neven Mrgan:

I love Photoshop. It’s where I spend eight hours five times a week. I just wish that one of these days, instead of piling on more furniture, they’d clean up the place.