Linked List: April 25, 2011

Monday, 25 April 2011

Deep Green 1.2 

Speaking of putting the “magic” in iOS apps, Joachim Bondo has released a new version of his beautiful Deep Green chess game. Don’t let the 1.2 version number fool you: it’s a major update, including both Retina Display graphics for the iPhone and full support for the iPad. Deep Green was my favorite iOS chess app when it was released in 2008, and it remains my favorite today. (The best part: Deep Green was also my favorite Newton chess game, back in 1998.) $7.99 on the App Store — and existing Deep Green owners get the update for free. Bondo, on his weblog, announcing the update:

From the day the iPad was announced, more than a year ago, I wanted Deep Green to be a universal binary. You should’t have to manage several versions, and you certainly shouldn’t have to pay for it twice.

So great.

RealNetworks Releases Rinse for iTunes 

Peter Kafka:

RealNetworks used to try to compete with Apple. Now it’s in the Apple accessories business. The software company is rolling out Rinse, a $39 program that promises to “seamlessly organize and repair your iTunes music library”.

Remember how fun it was to find the download link for the free version of the RealPlayer plugin? Remember when Real had their own music store? Even better, remember back in 2003, when, regarding the iPod, Real founder and then-CEO Rob Glaser told The New York Times:

“It’s absolutely clear now why five years from now, Apple will have 3 (percent) to 5 percent of the player market. … The history of the world is that hybridization yields better results.”

Good times.

UI Designers as Magicians 

Interesting, introspective piece by UI designer Dave Wiskus on his, and other UI designers’, reactions to Tweetbot. His analogy to stage magicians is quite apt — when you know how the tricks are done, you can lose your sense of perspective when considering how regular people perceive the work of your peers.

Nook Color Updated to Android 2.2, Gets Third-Party Apps 

Harry McCracken on the Barnes and Noble’s just-announced update that turns the Nook Color from a mere reader into an actual tablet computer. Things that are interesting about this:

  • The Nook’s $249 price.
  • The apps are from — and only from — B&N’s own “Nook Apps” store. No access to Android Market, nor, from what I can tell, to any of Google’s closed Android apps, like Google Maps or Gmail. This shows how Android isn’t a single platform — it’s a foundation upon which platforms can be built.
  • I remain convinced that Amazon is going to do something similar.
Andy Ihnatko Reviews the BlackBerry PlayBook and LG G-Slate 

Good (and fair) reviews of the two tablets, but regarding Flash, Ihnatko and I disagree. He writes:

But I think Apple’s completely wrong about Flash. I’ve been watching Conan and Colbert all week long on the PlayBook and the G-Slate; Flash video works perfectly fine. The framerate could be described as “slideshow-esque” until the local buffer fills up, but after no more than thirty seconds, I’m watching an hour of smooth, sound-synced video.

What does Flash video playback do to the battery? It drains down about as much as you’d expect when you play streamed, compressed video for an hour. On both devices, I can watch a couple of hours of video and still have most of the charge left.

Is the Flash plugin stable? Why, my friends, it’s just as stable as the desktop Flash player.

(Yes, thank you; I thought we’d all enjoy a good laugh together. Sorry if you were drinking something when you read that.)

The plugin does crash the mobile browser sometimes. But it rarely happens in the middle of playback and it doesn’t happen frequently enough for any regular desktop Flash user to raise an eyebrow. Hell, I’ve had to restart my desktop browser just while writing this very column.

The quality of desktop Flash Player is not good enough. It’s a reasonable argument to make that any sort of Flash Player support is better than no Flash support — that even with the crashes and lesser-quality playback and the security exploits, it’s better to at least have the option, as a user, to access this content than to be in the position of iOS users and have no say in the matter.

But down this path, we’d never get rid of Flash. The baseline experience for online video would forever remain crashy, lesser-quality, less-power-efficient, insecure, and in the total control of a single company — Adobe — that has shown itself to be incapable of addressing any of these problems.

Apple, by refusing to support Flash on iOS, has done more to motivate publishers and websites to support open-standards-based online video than any other company. And, on the issue of quality, they’ve raised the bar. There are no components in iOS where frequent crashiness is deemed acceptable.