Linked List: January 21, 2010

Thursday, 21 January 2010

Andy Ihnatko on the Nexus One and Android OS 2.1 

Great review. Six days into my Nexus One test drive, I concur with nearly every word. (Don’t miss his excellent set of photos comparing the Nexus One’s camera to the iPhone 3GS’s.)

Realism in UI Design 

Lukas Mathis:

The thing on the left is a house. The thing on the right means “home”. Somewhere between the two, the meaning switches from “a specific house” to “home as a concept”.

Vimeo Introduces HTML5 H.264 Player 

Nice. And, just like YouTube’s, it only works with Safari and Chrome because they’re using H.264. Firefox supports the HTML5 video element, but only for Ogg Theora video. Get with the program, Mozilla.

iProxy — Poor Man’s iPhone Tethering 

Torsten Curdt has released an open source variation on the idea behind the late great NetShare. Writes Curdt:

iProxy is not as convenient as the real tethering. The internet connection is a few clicks more away. But if you’ve got a developer certificate (or have a friend that has one) it certainly is cheaper than handing out the money to your favorite telco. Especially if you only need this connection only every now and then.

Only those with iPhone developer accounts can make use of it, alas, because for obvious reasons it can’t be distributed through the App Store.

Pen vs. Keyboard vs. Newton vs. Graffiti vs. Treo vs. iPhone 

Phil Gyford time-tested six different methods of writing the same 221-word passage: pen-and-paper, Newton MessagePad 2100, Palm Vx Graffiti, Palm Treo hardware keyboard, iPhone 3G software keyboard, and a full-size MacBook keyboard.

What a great idea.

Products, Not Prototypes 

Joel Johnson:

The fact that Apple does not reveal prototypes but shipping products is the fundamental difference between their entire business strategy and that of the rest of the industry.

Bingo.

300&65 Ampersands 

Would make for a good printed calendar.

Amazon Offering Money-Back Guarantee on Kindle to Some Customers 

They’re sending an offer to frequent book purchasers, with the offer that if they buy a Kindle and decide they don’t like it, they can get their money back and keep the Kindle. Funny thing is, the offer expires next week, a day before Apple’s press event.

Kindle Development Kit 

Amazon pre-announces upcoming SDK for Kindle apps, “limited beta coming next month”. I wonder why they pre-announced this now?

YouTube Now Testing HTML5 as Alternative to Flash 

Sign up for the beta on this page, and boom, you get videos using H.264 and the HTML5 video tag instead of Flash. Working great for me. Note, though, that it only applies to videos on youtube.com itself — YouTube videos embedded in web pages on other sites still use Flash.

Update: It’s worth noting that YouTube is only supporting H.264, so it only works with Safari and Chrome, not Firefox. (Firefox supports only the Ogg Theora format. Don’t hold your breath waiting for YouTube to re-encode everything in Ogg Theora.)