Linked List: August 2, 2010

Monday, 2 August 2010

In case you missed it over the weekend, I took a few photos and a video at the opening of the new Apple Store on Walnut Street here in Philadelphia.

MisinformationWeek ★

From page 3 of Eric Zeman’s comparison of the iPhone 4 and Droid X:

The iPhone 4 won’t support applications built in-house by businesses. All iPhone apps must be approved by Apple and are only distributed through the iPhone App Store. Enterprise app writers can develop for Android handsets, which support non-market applications to be installed. This gives the Droid X a slight advantage when it comes to apps.

Yes, if only the iPhone supported an enterprise development system that didn’t route through the App Store, that’d be a heck of a feature. I bet it’d be successful, too.

Update: The article has been corrected.

Global Smartphone Market Share ★

Graphs and analyis by Horace Dediu, based on data from Canalys.

PDF Security Exploit Allows ‘JailbreakMe’ Website to Jailbreak iPhones and iPad Over the Web ★

Jim Dalrymple:

Unlike some jailbreaking apps, JailbreakMe.com does not require a third-party app. All you have to do is visit the JailbreakMe.com on your iPhone and follow the onscreen instructions. When it’s done, your phone will be jailbroken.

Yikes. It’s odd how the press is mostly covering this as “jailbreaking now more convenient” rather than “remote code exploit now in the wild”.

Here’s an analysis by Ching-Lan Huang suggesting that it’s using a PDF heap overflow to execute code. But Huang is wrong — Apple has its own PDF rendering engine, it doesn’t use Adobe’s, and the heap overflow bug Huang points to is in the Acrobat PDF renderer. Charlie Miller says it’s exploiting a PDF font bug in Apple’s renderer, and says:

Starting to get a handle on jailbreakme.com exploit. Very beautiful work. Scary how it totally defeats Apple’s security architecture.

Chris Glass’s Photographs of Graceland ★

Just great.

Halo 2600 ★

New Atari 2600 game by Ed Fries; here’s a great write-up on how and why he made it. (Via Andy Baio.)

Washington Post Co. Sells Newsweek to Sidney Harman for $1 ★

Less than the cost of a single newsstand issue. Of course, that’s because the magazine comes with $70 million in debt. (Harman is the co-founder of Harman Kardon.)

MGSplitViewController for iPad ★

Offers more layout options than the system’s built-in iPad splitview controller — like showing the left-side source list as a real source list rather than a popover when in portrait orientation. (Apple’s WWDC 2010 app used this style of layout in portrait; the standard behavior is like Mail, where you can only get a popover in portrait.)

Using Blocks in iOS 4 ★

Mike Clark:

Simply put, blocks let you encapsulate chunks of code and pass them around like any other object.

‘You Understand? You Love Whiskey. It’s Suntory Time! OK?’ ★

English translation of the Suntory whiskey commercial shoot in Lost in Translation.

Peter Belanger Shot the Macworld iPhone 4 Cover Photo Using an iPhone 4 ★

Not just using the iPhone 4 camera, but he also limited himself to photo editing software on the iPhone itself.

On Turning Windows Into an Optimal Touchscreen OS ★

Microsoft tech evangelist Joey deVilla responds to criticism that Microsoft just isn’t committed to or doesn’t get the mobile touchscreen revolution. The really good stuff is in the comments, though, where Peter Bright — who wrote the “Ballmer still doesn’t get the iPad” piece for Ars Technica that at least partly prompted deVilla’s piece — writes:

I have heard it suggested that there is an effort to produce such a front-end, a “modern shell” (though I don’t really like calling it a “shell”, because a shell implies to me something that is rather thin; something that can be chipped away to reveal the interior. This is not possible on the iPhone, nor should it be on a Windows slate IMO), that would be a better model for touch devices. However, it is hard to be confident or excited about such a thing — if it even exists — when Microsoft is saying nothing about it.

Maybe Ballmer thinks Microsoft can get away with a thin touch UI “shell” because that’s how Windows itself started — as a thin GUI shell on top of DOS. The problem with that is that 2010 isn’t 1990. Times change.

Justin Williams on Pull-to-Refresh ★

Justin Williams:

If pull-to-refresh stayed exclusive to Twitter for iPhone, I wouldn’t mind it as much, but like most popular things, my disdain grows as I see more poorly implemented or misguided variations of the feature.

The Great Game ★

Nice piece by Tim Bray on the state of the mobile market:

This is the big league; bigger today than the computer industry ever was, and growing fast. This is as fierce a concentration of R&D heat and manufacturing virtuosity and distribution wizardry and marketing mojo as humanity has ever seen.

But who’s in the race? Bray argues that it’s down to Android and iOS:

Thus I think there’s a good chance that while Gruber’s right about the no-monopoly bit, he may be wrong about the several-times-20-40% bit, at least in the Net-phone market: for the next little while it’ll be two players, with market shares something like 80/20 or 60/40 or 50/50.

He may be right. I’m loath to write off BlackBerry though — I see too many of them in the wild. And here’s a story today in The Guardian arguing that BlackBerrys are the smartphone of choice for teenagers in the UK. I don’t think BlackBerry will ever catch Android and iOS in terms of web surfing and apps, but Android and iOS might never catch BlackBerry in terms of messaging. I’m also loath to write off Windows Phone 7. What if WP7 is a best-of-breed mobile gaming platform?

A great game, indeed.

What Happens to Market Share Numbers If You Count the iPad as a Portable Computer? ★

Answer: Apple shoots from number seven to number three in worldwide portable computer sales. And the growth curve is even more striking.

And what’s the argument against counting the iPad as a portable computer? The average selling price is higher than most Windows laptops. “Netbooks” count. Is it because the iPad’s OS didn’t have a 1.0 in the 1980s?

Nielsen: Android Sales Overtake iPhone in the U.S. ★

Talking points: Tremendous growth for Android; Android (27%) and iPhone (23%) still trail BlackBerry (33%); but RIM’s in trouble, because most Android and iPhone owners like their phones and most BlackBerry owners are thinking about getting something else next time; the numbers only count phones, so the iPod Touch doesn’t count; the numbers are only for the U.S.

And, a question: How much of Android’s U.S. success is attributable to Verizon’s strength as the number one U.S. carrier? I.e., how different would these numbers look in an alternate universe where Verizon, not AT&T, is the iPhone’s exclusive U.S. carrier?

English Swear Words for Koreans ★

Perhaps I have a future teaching English as a second language. (Via Mike Davidson.)