Linked List: March 26, 2010

Friday, 26 March 2010

Gawker Publishes Pro-Flash Comments From Anonymous News Publishers ★

It’s a simple choice: do something other than Flash and get your content on the iPad, or stick with Flash and ignore the iPad. Complaining about the iPad’s lack of Flash doesn’t constitute a decision.

Update: Here’s the best point made:

“Steve has not offered a solution to that. Where is my HTML5 development tool? Perhaps he needs to try some Flash development first-hand to see what the big deal is.”

There’s a real need for a high-level IDE that does for HTML5 (canvas, JavaScript, video, audio, databases) what Flash’s dev tools do for Flash Player. Imagine the joy if it were Adobe that made it.

Steve Jobs and Eric Schmidt, Having Coffee ★

How about that.

James Cameron’s Pursuit of Technical Perfection ★

The Hollywood Reporter, on the 100 different versions of Avatar created for various countries, theater, and screen sizes:

In some cases, a single multiplex required different versions for different auditorium configurations. Creative decisions involving light levels also led to additional versions. 3D projection and glasses cut down the light the viewer sees, so “Avatar” also had separate color grades at different light levels, which are measured in foot lamberts.

“If we had just sent out one version of the movie, it would have been very dark (in the larger theaters),” Barnett says. “We had a very big flow chart with all of the different steps, so we could send the right media to the right theater.”

Kubrickian. (Via Kottke.)

MacUpdate’s $49.99 Spring Bundle ★

My thanks to MacUpdate for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote their Spring 2010 bundle of Mac apps. Apps include: Parallels Desktop 5, Timeline 3D, Hydra, Spell Catcher, Back-in-Time, ForeverSave, WebSnapper, MacDVDRipper Pro, MacScan, and HyperSpaces — all for just $49.99.

Bant — Diabetes Monitoring iPhone App ★

Free app, developed by a team at Toronto General Hospital. Looks useful and very well-designed. (Named after Frederick Banting, the discoverer of insulin.)

Army, Apple Meet to Discuss Hand-Held Solutions for Soldiers ★

Edric Thompson:

Apple officials gave the Army group tours of its laboratories and other facilities and talked about some examples of where the military is already using Apple technology. The Army’s research and development command is evaluating commercial hand-held solutions such as iPad, iPhone, iPod, iMac, and MacBook platforms.

The Impossible Bloomberg Makeover ★

Dominique Leca, writing for UX Magazine:

The Bloomberg terminal is the perfect example of a lock-in effect reinforced by the powerful conservative tendencies of the financial ecosystem and its permanent need to fake complexity.

Simplifying the interface of the terminal would not be accepted by most users because, as ethnographic studies show, they take pride on manipulating Bloomberg’s current “complex” interface. The pain inflicted by blatant UI flaws such as black background color and yellow and orange text is strangely transformed into the rewarding experience of feeling and looking like a hard-core professional.

As Lukas Mathis wrote in response, “Some users want terrible user interfaces.”

Paczkowski: Intellectual Ventures Owns Smartphone Motion-Control Patent ★

Surprise, surprise.

Hg Init ★

Six-part tutorial on Mercurial by Joel Spolsky, geared toward Subversion users.

The Vanderbilt Republic: ‘The Mechanical’ ★

This week I got my reward for having backed The Vanderbilt Republic’s “Masters” project at Kickstarter — this one-of-a-kind Fujiroid print of one of the portraits from the project. So great.

I’ve backed a couple of Kickstarter projects so far, and there’s a visceral satisfaction that comes whenever I get a backers’ reward in the mail. We — or at least I — deal with so much that takes place as pixels on screens that physical artifacts are more meaningful, more important, than ever. I know I’m backing a Kickstarter project when I send the money, but I feel like I’m involved when I get something in my hand in return. Artifact is the only word I can find that fits.

The Vanderbilt Republic has a follow-up project at Kickstarter now, to raise funds to process the 1,600 sheets of 4×5-inch film they shot in Cambodia over six weeks. Count me in.

Jason Kottke on The Pipeline ★

Speaking of podcasts, my friend Dan Benjamin had an insightful interview this week with my friend Jason Kottke. (The whole archive of Dan’s “The Pipeline” is great — his interview guests so far include Merlin Mann, Matt Haughey, and Jim Coudal.)

Yours Truly on This Week’s Tech Night Owl ★

I was a guest on this week’s episode of Gene Steinberg’s Tech Night Owl, talking mostly about Apple’s HTC patent lawsuit and Apple’s growing rivalry with Google.

David Pogue on Line2 ★

David Pogue on Line2, a very Google Voice-like VOIP app for the iPhone that Apple accepted into the App Store.

Curiously, at this moment Line2’s web site claims “Toktumi and Line2 are currently experiencing a denial of service attack. We are trying to isolate the attackers and restore service. Please stand by.”

Update: Even more curiously, Line2 can no longer be found in the App Store. This URL, for example, now leads to a “The item you’ve requested is not currently available in the US store” error.

Update 2: It’s back in the store.

Detailed Analysis of the Nexus One’s Screen ★

Interesting, technical look at the pixel-level details of the Nexus One’s OLED display:

The result is that PenTile works great on the Nexus One screen when color photographs are being displayed—it just doesn’t work as well for text because text is always displayed with high contrast to make it readable. And it’s arguable that text display is the most important use-case to optimize for on a mobile phone screen.

For various reasons, I don’t expect Apple to use OLED. I think Apple is all-in on LED-backlit IPS displays (which they’re using for the iPad and iMac, and promoting in the tech specs).