Linked List: January 4, 2011

Tuesday, 4 January 2011

Skating to Where the Puck Is Going to Be ★

From John Battelle’s list of predictions for 2011:

Apple will begin to show signs of the same problems that plagued Microsoft in the mid 90s, and Google in the past few years: Getting too big, too full of themselves, and too focused on their own prior success.

Could be. That’s certainly the tendency for companies that reach the sort of height Apple did in 2010. But “too focused on their own prior success” pretty much sounds like the opposite of Steve Jobs. His greatest gift to the company, I suspect, is that his enthusiasm is always on the Next Big Thing, no matter how big the Last Big Thing was.

Picasso’s Influence on the Finder’s Icon ★

Great artists steal.

Update: Fireballed. Cached version here.

Never Said About Restaurant Websites ★

“I enjoy clicking on separate menu links to view the Appetizers, Salads, Meat Entrees, Fish Entrees, Pastas, and Desserts.”

David Carson’s Upcoming ‘Carson’ Magazine ★

Ray Gun was the only magazine I can think of that I enjoyed, but which I didn’t enjoy reading. (Via Jason Santa Maria.)

Hacker News Thread on Charles Ying’s Piece on Android and GPU Acceleration ★

The Hacker News thread on Ying’s article is interesting. There’s an Android user named Jonathan Rockway who first comments:

But the thing is, nobody actually cares about this. I have used an Android phone since the beginning. Touch responsiveness is not something I have ever noticed. Any delay in rendering web pages is due to the network.

But later on in the thread Rockway acknowledges:

I turn animations off. Useless eye candy that just wastes the battery.

Also, is it really fair to compare the N1, a phone that’s over a year old, to brand-new WP7 phones?

So one of the few people in the thread defending Android’s UI performance is someone who admittedly turns off animations.

“Android has a stuttery UI” doesn’t mean “Android is bad” or “Android is useless” or even necessarily “Android is not the best mobile OS”. It just means that Android has a stuttery UI.

Update: What I find fascinating about this is how many Android partisans continue to insist not that the problem doesn’t matter, but that the problem doesn’t exist. That it’s a fabrication made up by iOS (and, now, I suppose, Windows Phone 7) partisans. Tell an iPhone fan that the iOS notification system is kind of lame and they’ll probably agree. Tell an Android fan that their UI rendering is stuttery and they lash out.