Linked List: November 8, 2010

Monday, 8 November 2010

Brent Simmons on what’s new in the latest update to my favorite RSS reader:

64-bit code (on 64-bit Intel systems). This may not have much of an effect, except for one big thing — when Flash crashes, it should no longer take down the app with it. (Flash is the single biggest cause of crashes in NetNewsWire.)

I’m guessing it doesn’t cause many crashes in NetNewsWire for the iPad or iPhone. And, of course, Flash doesn’t even load in NetNewsWire if you disable it system-wide.

Boy Genius Report on the Samsung Galaxy Tab ★

Jonathan Geller:

Browsing the web with Flash on (enabled by default) proved to be a pretty frustrating experience. Scrolling was jittery, slow, and sometimes pages just wouldn’t even finish loading. However, once we changed the browser’s plug-ins setting to on demand (think Click2Flash), the browser popped to life.

Maybe the wrong default setting, no?

Windows Phone 7 Launches in the U.S. ★

Josh Lowensohn and Ina Fried, reporting from San Francisco:

If Microsoft hopes to get back in the smartphone game, it had better hope that Windows Phone 7 makes a bigger impact than it appeared to be having at one AT&T store here.

As of midday Monday, the store had sold less than half of its supply of 20 devices.

Not good. (Via Shawn King.)

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch on Flash’s Effect on Battery Life ★

Austin Carr, writing for Fast Company:

Today, in an interview with Fast Company, Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch answered critics who might say HTML5 is somehow more efficient than Flash.

“It’s a false argument to make, of the power usage,” Lynch explains. “When you’re displaying content, any technology will use more power to display, versus not displaying content. If you used HTML5, for example, to display advertisements, that would use as much or more processing power than what Flash uses.”

That remains to be seen. My money says that on Mac OS X, native HTML5 animation will prove more efficient than Flash. And it’s certainly true for video playback — full-screen video through Flash Player always makes my MacBook Pro’s fan kick in; it seldom does with H.264 through the HTML5 video element.

But, anyway, that’s not what last week’s news was about. Last week’s news was that, right now, today, if you disable Flash Player on a MacBook Air, you can gain two extra hours of battery life while surfing the web. That doesn’t mean you aren’t missing anything while surfing without Flash. It just means you get far longer battery life. No one, including Adobe, is disputing that.

“I just think there’s this negative campaigning going on, and, for whatever reason, Apple is really choosing to incite it, and condone it,” Lynch says. “I think that’s unfortunate. We don’t think it’s good for the web to have aspects closed off — a blockade of certain types of expression.”

So it’s a First Amendment issue now? And how did Apple incite anything? All they did was start shipping Macs without Flash Player pre-installed. They didn’t even mention that fact publicly. It wasn’t mentioned on stage at the announcement event. And their battery life claims for the new MacBook Airs were measured with Flash Player installed. It’s not Apple who’s inciting anything. It’s people who are realizing just how much of a drain on battery life Flash Player is.

37signals Working on New Framework for HTML5 Mobile Apps ★

Ryan Carson, regarding an interview with 37signals’s Ryan Singer:

There is nothing like Rails for mobile web app development, so 37signals are creating a web app MVC framework specifically designed for mobile phone web apps. The code will be comprised of local JavaScript, with the network just being used for data. The apps will work offline, when live data transfer isn’t required.

It’s built in CoffeeScript and Eco, a new templating language created by 37signals.

I don’t know. It’s not like their last app framework went anywhere.

Google Chrome Sponsors Free In-Flight Wi-Fi on Virgin America, Delta, and AirTran ★

Great sponsorship idea.

Calvetica ★

$2.99 calendar app for the iPhone and iPod Touch, with an emphasis on fast, convenient event creation and a very crisp, stylish UI design. Behind the scenes, it’s built on the iOS system level calendaring APIs, so it syncs perfectly with the built-in Calendar app. I have a few niggles, but Mysterious Trousers — the excellently-named developers of the app — are improving it at a very steady clip.