Linked List: May 12, 2010

Wednesday, 12 May 2010

‘You Already Know How to Use It’ 

Excellent new iPad TV ad from Apple.

Two side notes: (1) they never show an iPad 3G, only the more aesthetically pleasing Wi-Fi-only model; and (2) it’s a nice homage to this classic Newton ad.

(Via Arnold Kim.)

HTML5 Browser Readiness Infographic 

Created, of course, using HTML5.

Facebook’s Bewildering Tangle of Privacy Options 

Comprehensive look at Facebook’s privacy options from The New York Times.

Facebook’s 2010 privacy policy is longer than that of other social networks, even exceeding the United States Constitution, without amendments.

And:

To manage your privacy on Facebook, you will need to navigate through 50 settings with more than 170 options.

Or you can manage it my way, by never having signed up for it.

Rob Pegoraro on How Not to Talk About the Verizon-Android-Tablet Story 

Two good requests.

Wolf Rentzsch Cancels C4 

Wolf Rentzsch:

With that background in place, I hope you can understand how Section 3.3.1 has broken my spirit.

Welcome to Steam 

Steam for Mac is now available. Some game called “Portal” is available for free for the next two weeks.

‘A Word Is Worth a Thousand Pictures’ 

Tog:

In 1985, after a year of finding that pretty but unlabeled icons confused customers, the Apple human interface group took on the motto “A word is worth a thousand pictures.”

(Thanks to DF reader Rob Cope.)

HTC Countersues Apple for Patent Infringement 

HTC PR:

HTC Corporation today took legal action against Apple Inc., filing a complaint with the United States International Trade Commission (ITC) to halt the importation and sale of the iPhone, iPad and iPod in the United States.

Office for Mac’s Floppy Icons 

Rick Schaut on floppy-for-save icons:

Second, text in an icon violates one of the cardinal rules of localization. Once you put text in an icon, you then have to have a version of the icon for every language you want to support.

Localization is hard, but it often makes for a better design to use text rather than (or in addition to) icons. I think it’s a tremendous strength of the iPhone OS that so many of the buttons use simple text labels.

John closes his remarks by saying, “I can’t think of a single floppy-disk-for-save button anywhere in Mac OS X or iPhone OS…” Well, I can think of three: Word, PPT and Excel use a floppy disk as the icon. It’s the icon we’ve been using for “Save” since back when having a floppy disk for that icon actually had meaning.

I was referring to the system software and bundled apps from Apple itself. I’m sure there are many third-party Mac apps that use floppy-for-save icons. I still say it’s an anachronism, even for Office, but at least with Office there’s a good argument to be made about long-standing user expectations. But: there’s not a floppy icon to be found anywhere in Apple’s iWork suite, and I’ve never once heard of a user who was unable to save their iWork documents.

But the anachronism is particularly egregious in something like Windows Phone 7 — a brand-new software platform, with a new UI style, which runs only on hardware where a floppy drive wouldn’t even fit.

New Seattle’s Best Branding 

Radical redesign. I like it. (Their coffee, though, I dislike.)

The Tax Foundation: ‘A Closer Look at Popular USA Today Article Claiming Historically Low Taxes’ 

Gerald Prante:

Despite these problems of data definition, the headline’s claim about 2009 being a year of historically low taxes isn’t far off. Tax Freedom Day, which is calculated by taking total taxes divided by a broad income measure, NNP (which is somewhat close to personal income), had a rate of about 26.6 percent in 2009, which was the lowest since 1959.

Next Generation iPhone Turns Up in Vietnam 

The screen turns on, but it’s running some sort of test firmware, not the actual OS. It doesn’t seem to reveal anything new since the Gizmodo unit, other than the elimination of the two visible screws at the bottom. Oh, and a teardown reveals an A4 processor — but you knew that already.

Keyboard Maestro 4.3 

Some nice new scripting features in this update to one of my favorite secret weapons.