Linked List: June 25, 2010

Friday, 25 June 2010

Yankees vs. Dodgers 

Tonight the Yankees face off against Joe Torre for the first time.

ChimpKit 

My thanks to MailChimp for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote ChimpKit, a complete Objective-C wrapper for their MailChimp API. MailChimp is a terrific email marketing and mailing list service, and ChimpKit lets you connect email addresses and add them to mailing lists from directly within your app itself.

Try it out and MailChimp will give you six months of free, unlimited sending — no matter how big your list, or how frequent your messages. If you’ve got an app published on the App Store, sign up and MailChimp will comp your account. Now that’s a great demo offer.

Blippr, a New (to Me at Least) JavaScript-Powered Rollover Minefield 

Sort of like those double-underscore keyword jerks, but with the added indignity of inline smiley emoticons. Stay classy, Mashable. Update: Ends up Mashable actually bought Blippr back in March 2009. Amazing.

Another reason that it pays for developers to adopt new APIs quickly — do a good job and Apple may lend a promotional hand.

iPhone 4 Tops Macworld’s Smartphone Camera Test 

Heather Kelly:

Unsurprisingly, the two point-and-shoot cameras came in first in our image quality tests. The next best camera, and the highest scoring of all the smartphone cameras that we tested, was none other than the iPhone 4. Next in the rankings was the Droid X, followed by the EVO 4G, the Samsung Galaxy, and way at the bottom, the iPhone 3GS.

David Foster Wallace on FaceTime 

Kottke quotes from Infinite Jest; I thought of this right after the WWDC keynote finished.

Enabling and Disabling FaceTime 

When I first started using my iPhone 4 yesterday in its default factory-fresh state, FaceTime worked just fine. But then after restoring from a backup of my old iPhone 3GS, FaceTime was no longer available. No FaceTime button during phone calls, no FaceTime button in my Contacts listings.

The problem: after restoring from that backup, FaceTime was disabled. After toggling it back on in Settings → Phone, FaceTime was back to working as expected.

Theory on the bug: my iPhone 3GS had already been updated to iOS 4.0, which perhaps meant the preference setting for this toggle was turned off because that phone isn’t FaceTime-capable. I’ll bet if I had restored from a backup of a device still on iOS 3, the FaceTime setting would have stayed at the default value of “On”. Update: Based on comments from several readers, that’s not it — some have restored from a 4.0 backup and FaceTime was on by default, and others have restored from a 3.1.3 backup and had it off by default. Best guess now: it depends whether you restore from backup the very first time you connect the phone to iTunes. If you do, FaceTime is on by default; if not, it’s off. (I didn’t restore at first, because I wanted to use it right away.)

My First FaceTime Call, Recorded for Posterity 

Clayton Morris and yours truly, trying out FaceTime.

Christopher Breen on iMovie for iPhone 

I love this app.

‘These Pixels Are Remarkably Small’ 

Retina neuroscientist Bryan Jones on the Retina Display, including incredible macro photography of the various iOS device displays.

Update: Site’s running slow; here’s a cached version that should be faster.

App Store Scammers of the Week (iTunes Link) 

Here’s an App Store developer whose body of work in the store consists of gems like this $200 “43 Nutrition Secrets” and this $100 guide to adware and spyware. Best of all is the developer’s name: “Hot Asian Girls”.

(Thanks to DF reader “Zr40” for the tip.)

Google Exercises Android Market Remote Application Removal Feature 

Rich Cannings, Android security lead:

Recently, we became aware of two free applications built by a security researcher for research purposes. These applications intentionally misrepresented their purpose in order to encourage user downloads, but they were not designed to be used maliciously, and did not have permission to access private data — or system resources beyond permission.INTERNET. As the applications were practically useless, most users uninstalled the applications shortly after downloading them.

After the researcher voluntarily removed these applications from Android Market, we decided, per the Android Market Terms of Service, to exercise our remote application removal feature on the remaining installed copies to complete the cleanup.

Proof that their system works as intended. Also proof that while Android Market is significantly less regulated than Apple’s App Store, it’s not a Wild West free-for-all.

Nice Job, New York Times 

Story by Miguel Helft for The New York Times on the “disappearing bars depending how you hold it” iPhone 4 issue, based mostly on coverage of the issue by Gizmodo’s Jesus Diaz and Brian Lam, with no mention whatsoever of Gizmodo/Diaz/Lam’s — how shall we say? — rather testy relationship with Apple of late.

The best part? Despite the fact that the article is ostensibly about problems with the iPhone 4’s reception, it ends with this:

Even Brian Lam, Gizmodo’s editorial director, saw an upside to the iPhone 4, antenna problems and all. “We are paying attention to the antenna issue because it could be a big deal,” he said.

But Mr. Lam said that for years, he had not been able to use older iPhones to make calls from his home. That changed on Thursday, after he bought an iPhone 4. “I have made three hours of calls today,” he said.

“Antenna problems and all”, indeed.

Engadget on the iPhone 4’s Reception 

Engadget has this official statement from Apple on the iPhone 4 reception issue:

Gripping any mobile phone will result in some attenuation of its antenna performance, with certain places being worse than others depending on the placement of the antennas. This is a fact of life for every wireless phone. If you ever experience this on your iPhone 4, avoid gripping it in the lower left corner in a way that covers both sides of the black strip in the metal band, or simply use one of many available cases.

The key phrase is “if you ever experience this”; most iPhone 4 users seem unaffected by this. Engadget has a video showing the same thing happening with an iPhone 3G from 2008, and Joshua Topolsky admits that in their testing of the iPhone 4, “we had improved reception and fewer dropped calls than we experienced with the last generation, and we never noticed this issue.”

My best guess at this point is that the issue pops up in areas with spotty 3G coverage. With nothing covering the antenna, the improved reception of the iPhone 4 gives you more bars, maybe even up to 5. But when you cover the antenna in these areas with poor coverage, the phone is unable to get a strong signal. I’ve seen several reports from people who can reproduce the problem, but only from certain locations.