Linked List: December 6, 2010

Monday, 6 December 2010

Brad W. Allen compares the websites for the Nexus S and the iPhone 4.

A good quarterback for the Dallas Cowboys and a great TV broadcaster:

“I always thought of Don Meredith as Dean Martin,” said the NFL Network’s Joe Theismann, who worked in the booth with Meredith for Super Bowl XIX. “I always pictured him with a highball in one hand and a cigarette in the other, and just cruisin’ along. And, oh by the way, we get to share a little slice of his life with him.”

Monday Night Football was never the same without him and Cosell.

Analysing a Touch-to-Desktop UI Port Using Fitts’s Law ★

Daniel Kennett interrupts the lauding of the Reeder for Mac public beta to point out the ways that it seems optimized for a touchscreen, rather than a mouse pointer.

Update: No one, including Kennett, is saying that Reeder for Mac is a bad app. Nor is anyone saying that typical users know what Fitts’s Law is. Of course they don’t. Just like typical bicycle riders don’t understand the physics behind how a bike works. That doesn’t mean that proper gear design doesn’t make the bike more comfortable to ride. Same with Fitts’s Law. Some of the UI elements in Reeder could be a bit easier to hit, which make the app feel even better.

Android Hardware Button Order ★

The four hardware buttons — back, menu, search, home — are in different orders on different phones. The Nexus S buttons are in a different order than other Samsung Galaxy S phones — and in a different order than the Nexus One.

This is the sort of thing that epitomizes the difference between iOS and Android. Design is about making decisions. Those who prefer Android, I’m sure, don’t see this as a big deal at all — let “the market” determine in what order these buttons should be. Those who prefer iOS find it appalling — Google should have done the work at the outset of determining the one true order for these buttons.

Update: Andrew Wood has an illustration of the differences among Android handsets.

Consumer Reports Trashes AT&T ★

Dead last among U.S. carriers, with bad marks for everything from voice quality and data networking, to customer service.

What’s New in Android 2.3 ★

Keyboard improvements (including multitouch chording), text selection improvements, a better built-in process manager, and more. A bunch of developer-level improvements for games and audio apps, too.

Google eBooks ★

Google’s foray into e-book reading and selling. They speak of “openness”, but what they mean by that, so far as I can tell, is that they’ve built Google Books client apps for a bunch of platforms: iPhone, iPad, Android, and the web, and that all clients sync bookmark data via the cloud. It’s not “open” in the sense that e-books from publishers like O’Reilly and Pragmatic Programmers are, where you can download no-DRM files and read them in the client software of your choice. (Not that Google has a choice in this — surely the publishers insist on the DRM, and I’ll bet Google would sell truly open e-books for popular titles if they could.)

The iPad app seems OK. But you can’t select text, so there’s no copying and no dictionary lookups.

Nexus S, and Android 2.3 ★

New king of the Android hill: a pure “Google experience” (i.e. nothing added or changed by the carrier or Samsung) successor to the Nexus One; will ship with the brand-new Android 2.3 release. Looks good. The curved screen is interesting.

Android 2.3 looks like a nice upgrade. They finally added a UI for text selection that doesn’t require a cursor-placement trackpad or rollerball. It’s meant for T-Mobile’s 3G network, alas, so if you use it on AT&T, you’re stuck with EDGE, just like with the Nexus One. $529 unlocked, $199 with a two-year T-Mobile contract.

Update: One interesting detail: the Nexus S has 16 GB of built-in storage space, and no SD-card expansion.

‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ Promotional Photos ★

Gorgeous. (Via Jim Coudal, who picked a beauty to put atop coudal.com.)

Great set at the same site for The Shining, too. This is probably my favorite shot from any Kubrick film.

MetaFilter Thread on Stacey Armato’s ‘TSA Revenge Screening’ ★

I thought this comment was particularly good:

The thing is, as presented, [Armato is] trying to follow their procedure. The agents clearly don’t want to be bothered do so. It doesn’t matter why she want what she wants, policy has been decided at senior levels in the TSA and it is not the job of the operational folks who run the screen checkpoints to alter or adapt it or do what ever they feel like. It’s their job, and only their job, to follow procedure.

The good functioning of government depends on this. If you’re a public servant who can’t follow rules, you shouldn’t be a public servant. Letting agents get away with arbitrary, ad hoc “policies” is the start of a slippery downward slope that leads to corruption and compromising the security they’re trying to ensure.

Most TSA agents do their jobs professionally, sure. But anyone who travels regularly knows there are a lot of bad ones. I’m not surprised at all by Armato’s story.

TSA Agents Harass and Threaten Mother, Force Her to Miss Flight ★

Stacey Armato:

TSA rules allow for alternate screening (no x-ray) for breast milk and I almost never had a problem… until the week before this screening. I was held for 30 minutes that week while the TSA manager called to find out the rules. I was told to “pump and dump,” and asked why the milk wasn’t clear, also asked where my baby was and if it was really milk (uh traveling, working mom pumping doesn’t usually have the baby with her).

After begging him to figure it out, they finally let me through. I called and complained to TSA and was instructed to travel with the TSA breast milk rules printed out and present them whenever there is a problem.

A week later, she traveled through the same airport and this time, the TSA agents recognized her and retaliated, detaining her in a special screening area for an hour, purposefully making her miss her flight unless she relented and allowed her milk to be X-rayed. She showed them the printed TSA regulations allowing alternative screening for breast milk and they told her those rules don’t apply.

And she got the security tape to prove her story. Minus, curiously, 20 minutes of footage.

The Luma Loop and LoopIt Camera Sling ★

I loved my original Luma Loop, but the new model is even better. The shoulder pad is more comfortable, and the new steel attachment mechanism is way smaller and more secure. It’s this simple: I carry my DSLR with me way more often than I did before I had a Luma Loop.

Also new: the LoopIt, a sibling sling for smaller cameras.

Tumblr Down for 13 Hours and Counting ★

Kind of amazing (and thus, today, frustrating) how many of my favorite sites are on Tumblr. Not sure what Tumblr thinks “shortly” means, but it must be something different than what I think it means.