Linked List: February 20, 2011

Sunday, 20 February 2011

Isaiah Carew: Apple’s Three Laws of Developers ★

From the Department of Funny Because It’s True.

Marco Arment’s Theory on Verizon iPhone Sales ★

Marco Arment, on the sales figures for Instapaper in the App Store:

The results are fairly obvious: I see huge spikes whenever there’s a new iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad released, whenever they become available in a major new country, or whenever there’s a major reason for people to buy a lot of them (like the holidays).

But he didn’t see a spike for the Verizon iPhone.

‘Dead Island’ Trailer ★

Brutal, haunting, moving trailer for the video game Dead Island. (Via Matt Drance.)

Update: Alternative link, if you can’t get past YouTube’s having flagged the video.

Regarding a Smaller iPhone With the Same Pixel Count ★

Jin Kim:

Picture this: a kid in elementary school wielding an iPhone 4. Kinda big if you ask me. If Apple is building a smaller iPhone, it would be for guys and gals with smaller hands. The physical size matters, which is exactly the reason Apple would build a smaller iPhone. A smaller screen would force app rewrites? No. What if the smaller iPhone had a pixel format of 480×320? The same as the iPhone 3GS, 3G and the original? No rewriting required at all. And guess what? Apple would classify it as a Retina Display. Pure genius.

In theory this would work. You could make iPhone screens of any size, so long as the pixel resolution were either 480 × 320 or 960 × 640. But in practice that’s not how the iPhone was designed. It’s a physical artifact, and the size of the display is what’s important. Nor do I think the existing iPhone 4 is uncomfortably big for small hands. Apple might make the area surrounding the display smaller, and surely they’ll continue making the hardware thinner, but I really don’t think we’ll see screen sizes other than 3.5 inches, unless Apple introduces a new size that developers would need to specifically redesign their apps to properly target — and I just don’t see a need for that.

Update: Good point from reader Andrew MacKenzie, via email:

Ever seen 1st grade pencils? Fatter. Kindergarten crayons? Fatter. Parents intuitively know this. When you buy your kid his first train set, you get him one with large wheels and track, so his little hands can easily get the wheels on the track.

Right. Not that Apple is going to target the primary school demographic, but even if they were, bigger is probably better.

Nokia’s ‘Value-Engineering’ Culture ★

Adam Greenfield on his tenure at Nokia:

As it happens, the value-engineering mindset that’s so crucial to profitability as a commodity trader is fatal as a purveyor of experiences. Of course you still want to produce your offering for the lowest achievable cost — but that cost is bound up in intangible, nondeterministic dimensions of design, in ways that are only partially-at-best quantifiable. It’s just not particularly wise to allow engineers to make decisions about things like product and service nomenclature, interface typography and the graphic design of icons: they’re, I daresay, not even neurocognitively equipped to do so. And yet this is what happened when I was at Nokia and, I would imagine, is happening still.

That’s Two ★

Ross Miller is leaving Engadget:

As for the reasons why, I won’t get too far into it. The AOL Way isn’t the sole reason, but it’s certainly a catalyst, a symptom of concerns I’ve had for a while. I worry about the long-term viability of what I foresee is the future business model.

NYT Pours Cold Water on ‘Smaller iPhone’ Rumors ★

Miguel Helft and Nick Bilton, for the NYT:

Apple has been exploring ways to broaden the appeal of the iPhone by making the popular device less expensive and allowing users to control it with voice commands.

But contrary to published reports, Apple is not currently developing a smaller iPhone, according to people briefed on Apple’s plans who requested anonymity because the plans are confidential.

Translation: Suck it, Yukari Kane, you got it wrong. See, there’s this gentlemen’s agreement where major newspapers like The New York Times and Wall Street Journal will go out of their way not to name each other. “Contrary to published reports”? They know damn well where the “small iPhone” rumor came from: the WSJ.

Anyway, a smaller iPhone would be stupid, if by “smaller” you mean a screen that measures less than 3.5 or so inches. The physical size of the UI matters more than anything else:

More important, a phone with a smaller screen would force many developers to rewrite their apps, which Apple wants to avoid, the person said.