Linked List: April 20, 2010

Tuesday, 20 April 2010

Blowing Up HTML5 Video and Mapping It Into 3D Space 

Wild.

Adobe’s Mike Chambers on Section 3.3.1 and Adobe’s Response 

Mike Chambers:

While it appears that Apple may selectively enforce the terms, it is our belief that Apple will enforce those terms as they apply to content created with Flash CS5. Developers should be prepared for Apple to remove existing content and applications (100+ on the store today) created with Flash CS5 from the iTunes store.

We will still be shipping the ability to target the iPhone and iPad in Flash CS5. However, we are not currently planning any additional investments in that feature.

They’re resting their hopes for Flash as a mobile platform on Android.

Twitterrific 1.0.1 for iPad 

Update to the best iPad Twitter client adds Instapaper support (sweet) and fixes bugs.

Claim Chowder: Tomi Ahonen on iPhone Sales 

Tomi Ahonen, former Nokia executive and self-professed expert on mobile phones, 11 days ago:

You read it right. I am writing the first history of the once-iconic iPhone, written now in early April 2010, before Apple has released its first quarter earnings for 2010. This is literally the peak of the short reign that Apple’s iPhone had as the most emulated smartphone. […] And mark my words, the numbers are now very clear, Apple’s market share peak among smartphones, and among all handsets, on an annual basis, is being witnessed now. Yes its true, Apple cannot grow market share into 2011. But its not for reasons you might think.

[ten thousand words of gibberish snipped]

The Apple iPhone sales pattern differs from all other major smartphone makers because Apple only releases one new model per year. So the sales take off strongly and then decline as the rivals keep releasing newer phones. Apple’s best quarter is its Christmas quarter. This year they were not able to grow market share. And we already know, that Apple’s January-March quarter was a heavy fall from the Christmas level of sales (as it always is, this is the normal pattern).

Apple, today:

The Company sold 8.75 million iPhones in the quarter, representing 131 percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter.

So the “heavy fall from the Christmas level of sales” we “already know” about was, uh, an increase of 50,000 iPhones. This was the most iPhones Apple has ever sold in a quarter. (And does not count the 63 percent year-over-year growth in sales of the iPod Touch.)

Unaffiliated Apple Analysts Out-Perform Wall Street Analysts Again 

Turley Muller was the most accurate, once again. (And even he vastly underestimated the total number of iPhones sold.) If you’ve got money invested in Apple stock, take note of these track records.

High DPI Web Sites 

Dave Hyatt on CSS pixels and high-resolution displays, from back in 2006. Also highly informative.

A Pixel Is Not a Pixel Is Not a Pixel 

Peter-Paul Koch on CSS pixels and display resolutions. Informative, as always.

Regarding Flash Player for Smartphones 

Kevin C. Tofel:

Whether you agree with Apple’s steadfast refusal to allow Flash on its mobile devices, the lack of Flash doesn’t appear to be hurting Apple device sales. Even without Flash support, Apple recently reported it has sold a total of 50 million iPhones and in only a few days, 500,000 iPads, not to mention a vast number of iPod touch devices. Some consumers do refuse to buy a Flash-less Apple device, but I’d wager that they’re in the minority.

Number of iPhones with Flash Player: 0.

Number of competing phones with Flash Player: 0.

We keep hearing that the second number is going to change. If and when it does, we’ll see whether it’s a competitive problem for the iPhone and iPad.

And for what it’s worth, I still haven’t seen a definitive answer as to whether Google plans to make Flash Player a standard component for Android, even when Adobe releases it.

SproutCore Touch 

Impressive framework for creating touchscreen HTML5 interfaces. Their demo — a documentation viewer — works great on the iPad.

Apple Q2 Earnings: Another Great Quarter 

Revenue and profits are way up. iPhone, iPod, and Mac sales all beat consensus estimates. iPhone sales were up 131 percent year-over-year — an astounding number, given that they sold more iPhones this quarter than during the holiday quarter. Best non-holiday quarter in company history.

Here’s Apple’s data (PDF).

Macworld’s Live Coverage of Apple’s Q2 2010 Financial Call 

Starts at 5pm EDT. My money says Steve Jobs is not on the call, and Apple will have nothing more than “no comment” to say regarding the much-publicized stolen iPhone 4G. But, we can hope.

iPad Thieves Rip Off Part of Man’s Finger 

Gruesome story in Denver:

Jordan left the store with his iPad bag tied around his hand. Unreleased surveillance film shows two young men following him.

A few feet from the doors to the parking garage Jordan felt a violent tugging at his arm. He looked down and saw a young man trying to grab his bag. “He was almost sitting on the ground he was pulling so hard and it was still tied around my fingers; and it wouldn’t come off and then finally he gave it one big jerk; and that’s when he stripped the skin off my pinky and it went right down to the bone.”

Nick Denton has obtained the finger for $10,000.

Mark Fiore’s NewsToons App Now in App Store 

Remember when this was the hot Apple news?

Has Gizmodo Broken the Law With Its iPhone Story? 

Ian Betteridge has an excellent post examining the legal implications of the stolen next-gen iPhone affair, including citations from the relevant sections of the California code.

Betteridge concludes that Apple will not file a criminal complaint. That’s certainly the question right now.

Selecting Hair With Refine Edge in Photoshop CS5 

I remember when this sort of masking took hours of painstaking work.

Jeff Bercovici, for DailyFinance:

Asked whether he’s concerned his company may have committed a crime in buying the phone, Denton says that Gaby Darbyshire, Gawker Media’s chief operating officer, researched the relevant case law and came away satisfied that Gizmodo was in the clear.

Gaby Darbyshire, however keen a legal mind she may possess, is not a U.S. attorney. She’s a former English trial lawyer. I suspect Denton might have gotten different advice if he’d asked a California attorney familiar with California’s lost property statute:

One who finds lost property under circumstances which give him knowledge of or means of inquiry as to the true owner, and who appropriates such property to his own use, or to the use of another person not entitled thereto, without first making reasonable and just efforts to find the owner and to restore the property to him, is guilty of theft.

Marco Arment’s iPhone OS Font Test Page 

Back in 2007 I put together a test page to see which fonts were included in the original iPhone OS. It’s fallen out of date. Marco Arment has made a new version, and it’s a bit more cleverly coded, in that unsupported fonts all show up rendered in Marker Felt, making them easy to discern.

The bad news: the swell new fonts Apple has included in the iPad’s OS (like Baskerville, Futura, Gill Sans, and Hoefler Text) are not included in the iPhone OS 4.0 beta 1. And in both OSes, they’re still including the anemic Courier New but not good sturdy Courier. And don’t get me started on including Arial when Helvetica is right there.

Looks Right 

I agree with Todd Heasley — it’s delightfully Dieter Rams-ish.

Charles Arthur on the Legal Implications of Gizmodo Buying a Stolen iPhone Prototype 

I don’t see how Gizmodo can plausibly argue that they didn’t know, all along, that this unit belonged to Apple. Are they counting on Apple forgiving and forgetting once the unit has been returned?

Apple Senior VP and General Counsel Bruce Sewell Sends Letter to Gizmodo Asking for Device to Be Returned 

The jokey tone of Brian Lam’s post reporting this letter and the focus on the “see, we’re giving it back!” angle, distracts from the most interesting aspect. Lam quotes his own response to Sewell, wherein he writes:

Happy to have you pick this thing up. Was burning a hole in our pockets. Just so you know, we didn’t know this was stolen when we bought it.

Stolen, not lost.