Linked List: December 14, 2010

Tuesday, 14 December 2010

Art Is Anything You Can Get Away With 

During a Layer Tennis match between Scott Thomas and Mark Weaver back in September, I, commentating on this volley, suggested that Marshall McLuhan would have enjoyed Layer Tennis.

Scott Boms was intrigued, so he asked his father-in-law, Eric McLuhan — Marshall McLuhan’s son and frequent collaborator. This made my day.

Smartphone Browser Landscape 

Comprehensive overview by Peter-Paul Koch.

How Many iPhones Will Verizon Sell in 2011? 

Dan Frommer guesses 10 million:

How did we figure that?

AT&T activated about 14 million new iPhones over the past four quarters on a subscriber base that’s now a little more than 90 million. (Of those activations, about 10 million were by existing AT&T subscribers.)

Verizon’s subscriber base is also about 90 million, and we don’t expect iPhone adoption to be wildly different on Verizon than it has been on AT&T. Maybe somewhat less, because Verizon folks already have high-end Android phones, but not much less.

See, I’d say more. If AT&T can sell 14 million iPhones in four quarters (selling to a base of subscribers who’ve had the iPhone available to them since 2007) why wouldn’t Verizon (selling to a base of subscribers who’ve been starved of the iPhone) be able to sell more? I expect Verizon to sell more iPhones than AT&T does.

The EFF:

In a landmark decision issued today in the criminal appeal of U.S. v. Warshak, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the government must have a search warrant before it can secretly seize and search emails stored by email service providers. Closely tracking arguments made by EFF in its amicus brief, the court found that email users have the same reasonable expectation of privacy in their stored email as they do in their phone calls and postal mail.

Great news. I’m donating to the EFF to celebrate.

Restore Gmail Contacts 

Google engineer Amanda Camp:

We’ve added a new feature to Google Contacts that allows you to revert your contact list and undo any mistakes made up to 30 days in the past. Let’s say you accidentally deleted a bunch of contacts or wiped the contact data from your Gmail account by mistake while syncing to another device. Visit Gmail’s Contacts section, select “Restore contacts” in the “More actions” menu, and choose the time you would like to revert to.

What a great feature — takes all the risk out of syncing. MobileMe should have something like this.

Update: Time Machine works for MobileMe users who wish to restore contact data from a sync disaster (and in fact, the Time Machine interface is integrated into Address Book), but only from your Mac, and only if you have Time Machine configured. I wonder how many Mac users have Time Machine running, and I wonder how many MobileMe users there are who don’t even use a Mac.

Engadget’s Nexus S Review 

Google kindly sent me a Nexus S, including service from T-Mobile, to use for a few weeks for review purposes. I’ve been using it as my main phone since it arrived on Friday. I put off reading Joshua Topolsky’s review of it at Engadget until today so that I could form my own thoughts about it. I plan to write about it in detail eventually, but in short, I agree with Topolsky’s review almost completely. It’s a good device, the best Android phone I’ve seen, and a very solid year-over-year improvement over the Nexus One, both in terms of hardware and software.

But some things are maddening. Yes, Topolsky’s review is largely positive, and I’m going to pull out one tidbit here that’s negative. But it’s a perfect example of the sort of “death by a thousand paper cuts” aspect of Android’s user experience. Topolsky writes:

Well, let’s be clear — Google still has major issues with text selection and editing on Android devices. The first striking problem is that there is not a consistent method of selecting text on the device. None. At all. In the browser, you long press on text to bring up your anchors, then drag and tap the center of your selection — boom, copied text. In text editing fields, however, in order to select a word you must long press on the word, wait for a contextual menu to pop up, and then select “select word” — a completely counterintuitive process. In the message app you can long press to select only the entire message, and in Google Reader? You can’t select any text at all. Even worse, Gmail has a different method for selecting text from an email you’re reading, and it’s far more obnoxious than any of the others. There, selecting text goes from being mildly annoying to downright silly. Want to grab some text out of an email? Here’s your process: hit the menu key, hit “more,” hit “select text,” and then finally drag your anchors out. Funnily enough, a little cursor appears when you start selecting — a holdover from Linux? To have this many options and discrepancies over something as simple as copy and paste should be embarrassing to Google. What it mostly is, however, is a pain to the end user.

And I think about the iPhone, which didn’t get text selection and copy-and-paste until version 3.0, two years after it debuted. It’s hard to get these things right.