Linked List: June 21, 2010

Monday, 21 June 2010

The iPad Keyboard Dock Works With the iPhone 3GS 

Bluetooth keyboards work with iPhones running iOS 4, too.

What If Nokia Went Android? 

“Science fiction” from the astute Jean-Louis Gassée.

Cabel Sasser on Saving Icons for Snow Leopard 

The hassles of color management and icon design.

Duncan Wilcox: ‘Touch Content Creation’ 

Duncan Wilcox:

To a novice user, aiming at something on screen with a mouse is like trying to ring a doorbell using a broomstick. The tool that’s between you and the target object is the cause for the lack of directness. You will get used to it out of necessity, but that doesn’t make it better than direct interaction.

The lack of indirection in the iOS experience is at the heart of what Apple describes as “magical”.

Craig Hockenberry on iOS 4 Multitasking 

Craig Hockenberry:

This sleight of hand makes it feel like you’re running many more applications than you actually are. It also explains how your iPhone can continue to have great battery life while you interact with many different apps. Most of your apps will be frozen and not using power: only the app on your screen is active. And even with audio, phone or GPS apps that are running in the background, you won’t be using more than one of those at a time (go ahead and try to listen to Pandora and the iPod apps at the same time!)

Nik Fletcher: ‘Subtle Changes You May (Or May Not) Notice in iOS 4’ 

Constant, iterative refinement — that’s how Apple rolls.

Dan Frakes on iOS 4 Folders 

Using three folders (“Utilities”, “Photography”, “Reading”) I’ve got all the apps I use most frequently on my first home screen. It took me a while to get used to, but I really like this feature.

Dan Moren’s iOS 4 Review 

Good review from Dan Moren:

While formal benchmarking is tricky on the iPhone, my initial impression of iOS 4 on my iPhone 3GS is that it’s quite snappy — more so than version 3.1.3. The OS as a whole seems more responsive, but there are a couple of places where speed improvements are pronounced: in general, the Camera app running on an iPhone 3GS seems far zippier now than previously. Pictures get taken almost instantaneously, and I didn’t notice any of the sluggishness that has occasionally plagued iPhone 3.0.

I’ve been running the betas (and, since WWDC, the GM release) on my 3GS for weeks, and I agree. iOS 4 feels faster than 3.x on the same hardware.

‘For All Our Failings, Despite Our Limitations and Fallibilities, We Humans Are Capable of Greatness’ 

Wonderful short film by Michael Marantz based on an excerpt from Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. (Via Jack Shedd.)

iBooks 1.1 

Now available for the iPhone (on iOS 4), with over-the-air note and bookmark syncing with the iPad version. Also new: PDF reading (with a great reading experience), the option to use Georgia as the e-book typeface (a great choice on the crude pre-Retina Display screens), and — hallelujah — the option to use ragged-right for e-book justification. A great update.

ALT/1977 

Alex Varanese:

What would you do if you could travel back in time? Assassinate Marilyn Monroe? Go on a date with Hitler? Obviously. But here’s what I’d do after that: grab all the modern technology I could find, take it to the late 70’s, superficially redesign it all to blend in, start a consumer electronics company to unleash it upon the world, then sit back as I rake in billions, trillions, or even millions of dollars.

Fun.

Google Updates Gmail’s Web Interface on iPad 

Set using Arial instead of Helvetica, of course.

Dharma Initiative Alarm Clock 

“Trust us, brother, this is no way to live.” (Via Dan Benjamin.)

Jacqui Cheng and Clint Ecker’s iOS 4 Review for Ars Technica 

Safari Reader works like a charm to stitch all seven (!) pages into a single scrollable view.

And People Say Paul Thurrott and I Never Agree 

Paul Thurrott:

Also it’s worth pointing out that the future is cloudy, and that my record on prognostication is something like 127 to 3, with me being on the raw end of that score. I’m just not good at predictions.

Needling aside, Thurrott makes a good point regarding the catch-up game Microsoft is playing against Apple in the mobile space: it’s not enough to catch up in terms of the consumer user experience, but they need to catch up with regard to what Apple offers developers, too:

To those who would argue that this is early days and that Microsoft’s documentation can only catch up, I’d say, wake up. When the iPhone debuted three years ago, it was a bolt of lightning in what was then a very immature smart phone world. Three years later, everything has changed, and the market in which Windows Phone will compete is vastly different. In 2010, it is not enough for Microsoft to provide what Apple had in 2007, and this is as true with developer tools and documentation as it is with anything else. Microsoft isn’t competing with the Apple of three years ago.

What we need, then, is not a trickle, but a fire hose. We need what Apple offers iOS developers. That’s the bar.