Linked List: April 14, 2010

Wednesday, 14 April 2010

Keeping the Platform Nimble 

Steve Cheney raises a good point regarding Apple’s renewed push for App Store developers to use Apple’s own iPhone SDK:

By telling developers to move to Xcode tools, Apple is setting the stage to potentially switch architectures.

History often repeats itself: In 2003, Apple advised developers to switch to Xcode tools. This was not a coincidental move — 2 years later Apple moved to Intel across its entire Mac line. Developers who complied could simply press a button and applications would run natively (full performance) on new Intel Macs.

Adobe did not ship (non-beta) Intel-native versions of the Creative Suite apps until April 2007, 16 months after Apple began shipping Intel-based Macs (and about two years after Apple announced the Intel transition). Adobe was also late shipping Mac OS X versions of Photoshop.

Cheney’s idle speculation that the A4 CPU in the iPad is something other than ARM is not the case, but, still, it’s not silly in the least bit to think that Apple will someday add a new architecture for iPhone OS devices (or, will someday push for iPhone OS apps to go 64-bit). Not wanting to wait two years for Adobe to update Flash’s iPhone compiler is perfectly reasonable on Apple’s part. Adobe has a track record regarding their preparedness for Apple platform shifts, and it’s not good.

The Progress of the Platform 

I largely agree with this thoughtful take on the Apple-vs.-Adobe Flash-for-iPhone situation by Ian Samuel:

Stop trying to get out of writing real iPhone apps, Apple seems to be saying.

Android-Based Alex E-Reader Now Shipping, for $399 

Good luck with that.

Intel Posts a Strong First Quarter, Fueled by High-End Laptop Sales 

High-end laptop sales are up, netbook sales are down. Seems like a good time to re-link my piece from October on Apple netbook claim chowder.

PhoneGap Still OK for iPhone App Development 

PhoneGap — a framework for writing App Store apps using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript — is apparently not in violation of Apple’s new Section 3.3.1 iPhone developer agreement terms.

Update: Looks like maybe Appcelerator is OK too.

The Official Panic Basketball Team 

“We can totally help,” I said. “With one condition: they let us design the jerseys!”

Around the World in Ten Layers 

Speaking of Coudal, there’s an “around the world” exhibition Layer Tennis match on Friday, with Z in the commentary booth. Love the poster on the Coudal front page.

‘Lunatic at Large’ 

Ben Child, reporting for The Guardian:

Among the discarded projects of the famously fastidious Stanley Kubrick are “lost” movies about Napoleon Bonaparte, the Holocaust and the American civil war. Now, 11 years after his death, a treatment by the legendary film-maker titled Lunatic at Large looks set to make it to the big screen, with Scarlett Johansson and Sam Rockwell attached to star.

No word yet on who will direct. (Via Kevin Guilfoile at Coudal.)

Crashed on Quit Again 

Garrett Murray:

Why would quitting the app cause a crash so frequently? This would be like if you worked in an office from 9-5 and every day at 4:59pm you became filled with rage and ran around throwing chairs and breaking windows. Then you went home and came back the next day acting like nothing happened.

Hacker News Comments on My ‘Mobile Multitasking’ Piece 

Several insightful comments. “Jsz0” writes:

You certainly do need a task manager on Android for the simple reason that certain types of applications can be battery hogs. They may not tax the performance of the device enough to be killed automatically. I know Android 2.x is supposed to monitor battery usage but it simply doesn’t work very well — or at all in some cases. Subsonic (streaming audio client) kills my phone’s battery if I don’t kill it manually with a task manager. The app does not include a quit option. It can kill my battery in about 3 hours even if I pause playback because it keeps its connection to the server open. Another app I use, Jabiru (jabber client), does the same thing but it does have a disconnect and quit option so I wouldn’t need a third party task manager to deal with it. So it seems to me Android’s multi-tasking is largely dependent on the applications you use.

I’ve gotten a few emails from Android users claiming the same. I didn’t see this using a Nexus One, but, I didn’t use the apps mentioned above. The gist is that there do exist some third-party Android apps which have a detrimental effect on responsiveness and/or battery life in the background.

“Jiri” has an astute observation:

These Android/iPhone apps’ architecture is very close to web page approach. In web environment, you can load the page, interact with page, you can close it anytime and do something else.

David Quintana on Mobile Multitasking 

More on the differences between Android and iPhone OS 4.

Google Chief Java Architect Worries Over ‘Rudderless’ Java 

Joab Jackson, reporting for IDG:

The Java platform has “appeared rudderless for the last few years,” said Google’s chief Java architect, Josh Bloch, speaking Wednesday at the Red Hat Middleware 2020 virtual conference. “A malaise [has fallen] over the community and the end is not in sight.”

Five bucks says Gosling goes to Google. (Android’s Dalvik virtual machine is the most interesting thing that’s happened to Java, the language, in a long time.)

Library of Congress Acquires Entire Twitter Archive 

Matt Raymond from The Library of Congress:

Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter’s inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That’s a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions.

Update: Server is down (surprise, surprise, it’s a WordPress site), but Google has it cached.

Uninformed Gizmodo Rant of the Day 

First draft: Apple screwed Kindle iPad app.

Second draft: Never mind, Kindle iPad app has a confusing UI for settings.

Donovan McNabb: ‘I’d Like to Thank the Ungrateful, Over-Expecting, Oftentimes-Racist Fans of Philadelphia’ 

And people wonder why I’m a Dallas Cowboys fan.

Apple Announces One-Month Delay for International iPad Sales  

Apple:

Faced with this surprisingly strong US demand, we have made the difficult decision to postpone the international launch of iPad by one month, until the end of May. We will announce international pricing and begin taking online pre-orders on Monday, May 10.

No quote from Jobs in this one.

Don’t Take Your iPad to Israel 

Bar Ben Ari and Zohar Blumenkrantz, reporting for Haaretz:

If you had thought to buy Apple’s new iPad tablet computer any time soon and bring it to Israel, you may have to change your plans: Starting yesterday, the Communications Ministry has blocked the import of iPads to Israel, and the customs authority has been directed to confiscate them.