Linked List: November 1, 2010

Monday, 1 November 2010

What the Fuck Has Obama Done So Far? ★

Apt domain name.

Bug-fix update from Apple to address the library-updating data loss bug that was triggered — according to Apple — “in extremely rare cases” when upgrading from iPhoto ’09.

Ben Kenobi: Private Jedeye ★

Pairs well with the previous link.

‘Tatooine’ ★

“The Star Wars trilogy recreated with paper animation, set to a Sith-ly mellow song by Jeremy Messersmith.” Just great.

The NPD Group: Apple and RIM Are Top U.S. Smartphone Handset Makers, but Android Takes Big Lead in OS Share ★

Remember, though, that they’re only counting phones, not iOS devices in total. See also: similar numbers from Canalys.

Amazon S3 Price Reduction ★

A great service gets even better. Maybe the greatest success of the “cloud” computing era.

Engadget’s Samsung Galaxy Tab Review ★

Joanna Stern:

The browsing experience on the Tab is rock solid — pages loaded quickly over WiFi and scrolling / zooming was snappy. […]

Perhaps the best part about the Tab is that you don’t have to worry about the sluggish performance we’ve seen on other Android and Windows tablets. The entire experience is very snappy, and it kept up with us even when we had four or five applications open. Of course, there were times when it would freeze up — notably when we had a game of Angry Birds running and we were attempting to test a 720p video — but chances are you won’t be taxing the 1GHz ARM Cortex A8 processor and 512MB of RAM that much. As we mentioned earlier, Flash videos within the browser took a few seconds to appear and did slow down the general browsing experience, but once we were able to hit the play button they ran smoothly. […]

So, how about that battery life? It’s pretty good. After periodically surfing the web and reading on the Tab for about a day and a half with just 3G on, the battery is at about 20 percent.

Very different comments on scrolling, performance, and battery life than the aforelinked review by James Rivington at TechRadar. So which is it? Smooth scrolling and long battery life? Or juddery scrolling and poor battery life?

Update: Stern has slightly updated her review, at least regarding scrolling. It now reads:

For the most part, the browsing experience on the Tab is rock solid — pages loaded quickly over WiFi and scrolling / zooming on most pages was snappy. When loading a few sites — like this very technology site — we did notice the scrolling to be a bit jittery and not as smooth as on the iPad.

Disunion ★

New from The New York Times: follow the Civil War as it unfolded, 150 years later. Great idea for a weblog.

TechRadar Reviews the Samsung Galaxy Tab ★

James Rivington:

So let’s get this out of the way right off the bat — the Galaxy Tab is not as slick as we were hoping it would be. In fact, it’s not slick at all.

Despite the 1Ghz processor, there are some significant performance issues here and in many cases they hamper the usability and performance of the Tab to treacherous levels.

The problems are most evident when browsing the web. Scrolling down your average website is quite juddery. The smoothness of the iPad is nowhere to be seen, and our fingers had often swiped and left the screen before the device responded and began to scroll.

Runs hot and gets poor battery life to boot. (Via Matt Gemmell.)

‘I Remember’ ★

The Democrats should have had this ad running non-stop nationwide for the last week.

The Android UI Dilemma: Unify or Differentiate? ★

Ben Hookway on Android fragmentation:

The economic model of handset OEMs necessitates UI differentiation and Google is taking that away. For Google to expect Apple-like control on a fundamentally different business model is just unrealistic.

Here’s the fundamental question: Is Android a single platform, or is it a foundation upon which carriers and handset makers build their own varyingly compatible/consistent platforms?

Blekko: New ‘Slashtag’ Search Engine ★

Competing against Google Search sounds quixotic, but eventually someone’s going to make one that sticks. Blekko’s core premise sounds appealing: they’re working actively, via human-created indexes, to keep “content farm” material out of results for certain very popular categories. Blekko’s results strike me as being pretty good.

But what’s the deal with the name? Blekko? Really?

Update: Another good story on Blekko, from the NYT.

Meet the Resistance ★

Paul Kafasis on TSA:

Let’s find our balls, and then make them touch ’em.

Jean-Louis Gassée on Apple’s Next Macintosh OS ★

Jean-Louis Gassée:

The main cause of OS cancer is backwards compatibility, the need to stay compatible with existing application software. OS designers are caught between yesterday and tomorrow. Customers want the benefit of the future, new features, hardware and software, but without having to jettison their investment in the past, in their applications.

OS architects dream of a pure rebirth, a pristine architecture born of their hard won knowledge without having to accommodate the sins of their fathers. But, in the morning — and in the market — the dream vanishes and backwards compatibility wins.

Enter the iPhone.