Linked List: December 3, 2010

Friday, 3 December 2010

My thanks to MyNetDiary for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. MyNetDiary is a food diary and calorie counter app, with clients for iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, and Android. It’s also an online service, with both free and paid memberships. Their iOS apps are in the App Store bestseller list for Health and Fitness, and the iPad app was picked by Apple as a staff favorite.

You can sign up for free, or save 50 percent on the first month of a “Maximum” membership using the coupon code “DFBALL”.

FTC Is in Talks With Adobe Regarding Hard-to-Remove Flash Cookies ★

I know an easy way to eliminate Flash cookies.

Layer Tennis Playoffs ★

Lots of great Layer Tennis action today. (I’ll be in the commentary booth next week for the semifinals.)

All Good Things Must Come to an End ★

My back-page column in the new issue of Macworld, on the future of the Mac.

Making the Leap to SSD on a MacBook ★

Remiel:

It used to take 28 seconds for my 13-inch MacBook Pro to load the folders on my desktop after I logged in. Now it takes five seconds. […]

There’s lots of geek-centric commentary out there about whether the time is right yet for SSD (it is), and which of the many available drives on the market will actually give you the benefits the technology promises.

This post is intended for the pseudo-technical, “I’m sold; what do I do?” crowd that doesn’t care about the nuances, and just wants to get cracking with a credit card and a screwdriver.

One More Samsung Galaxy Tab Review ★

Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten:

So does Android suck?

No, not really. But using it on the Tab makes it very clear that this is an OS developed for mobile phones, and not tablets. Some people say that Google will launch a dedicated OS for tablets soon so you shouldn’t judge it based on the current version of its OS. That might all be true and fine, but that doesn’t change the fact that the Tab is on sale NOW with the Android version that is out now. You can’t review a gadget based on some features it might or might not get in the future. And right now, the combination of the Tab and Android sucks.

WikiLeaks’s New Server Home: Bahnhof AB ★

Speaking of James Bond, WikiLeaks’s website is now hosted by Bahnhof AB, located in a positively Blofeldian nuclear bomb-proof Cold War-era facility carved out of a mountain in Sweden.

Update: Great slideshow from TPM of photos from inside the facility.

Google Maps and Label Readability ★

Interesting design analysis by Justin O’Beirne, regarding why city labels are more legible and easier to scan on Google Maps than on Bing or Yahoo Maps.

The Talk Show, Episode 19 ★

Topics this week include the varying appeal of smartphones by gender, Irvin Kershner, and the James Bond movies. One tidbit from this week’s show that’s gained some traction: I call Angry Birds today’s Pac-Man — a game that’s become a pop cultural phenomenon. Jared Newman at Technologizer and Dan Frommer at Alley Insider both took that analogy and ran with it.

Brought to you by two fine sponsors: Rackspace and MailChimp.

Mobile OS Usage Splits the World ★

It’s rather amazing how wildly these numbers vary by continent. iOS is absolutely crushing it in Australia and New Zealand. BlackBerry, once a North American phenomenon, now does well in Europe and Asia, too. Symbian remains the worldwide leader, but only because it dominates in Asia, Africa, and South America.

Tablets ★

Paul Graham, on what to collectively call iPhones, iPads, and Android touchscreen devices:

After a few seconds it struck me that what we’ll end up calling these things is tablets. The only reason we even consider calling them “mobile devices” is that the iPhone preceded the iPad. If the iPad had come first, we wouldn’t think of the iPhone as a phone; we’d think of it as a tablet small enough to hold up to your ear.

The iPhone isn’t so much a phone as a replacement for a phone.

Graham’s piece reminds me of what I consider the central hook to a great app for these tablets: that it should seem, when you’re using it, that the entire device was meant for it. E.g., a good chess game for the iPhone should make the iPhone itself feel like a chess playing device. When you’re in Mobile Safari, it feels like you’re holding a dedicated web browsing device. Only when you’re in the Phone app does the iPhone feel like a phone.

‘Inevitable’, Eh? ★

Jenny Williams, reporting for Computer Weekly:

HTC has spoken out against internet reports that claim HTC HD7 handsets suffer from antenna ‘death grip’ problems, similar to those experienced by Apple’s iPhone 4 users. […]

In a statement, a HTC spokesman said, “Quality in industrial design is of key importance to HTC. To ensure the best possible signal strength, antennas are placed in the area least likely to be covered by a person’s face or hands while the phone is in use. However, it is inevitable that a phone’s signal strength will weaken a little when covered in its entirety by a user’s palm or fingers. “

From The Wall Street Journal, back on July 19:

Taiwan-based HTC said Monday that reception problems aren’t common on smartphones and Apple should address the problem on its own rather than blame competitors.

“The reception problems are certainly not common among smartphones,” HTC Chief Financial Officer Hui-Meng Cheng said. “[Apple] apparently didn’t give operators enough time to test the phone.”

Amazon Responds ★

Amazon Web Services makes a strong argument that government pressure had nothing to do with their decision to boot WikiLeaks, but rather clear violations of their terms of service:

AWS does not pre-screen its customers, but it does have terms of service that must be followed. WikiLeaks was not following them. There were several parts they were violating. For example, our terms of service state that “you represent and warrant that you own or otherwise control all of the rights to the content… that use of the content you supply does not violate this policy and will not cause injury to any person or entity.” It’s clear that WikiLeaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy.

Fair enough. But so would AWS likewise refuse to provide hosting to The New York Times or The Guardian? Will Amazon refuse to sell books containing text from these leaked diplomatic cables?