Linked List: June 15, 2011

Wednesday, 15 June 2011

Polaroid’s SX-70: The Art and Science of the Nearly Impossible ★

Terrific piece by Harry McCracken on Polaroid founder Edwin Land, and the SX-70 camera:

“Don’t undertake a project,” an oft-quoted Land maxim goes, “unless it is manifestly important and nearly impossible.” The SX-70 was both.

Storyboarding on the iPad ★

Stu Maschwitz on using the iPad app Penultimate for storyboarding:

I approached the developer, Ben Zotto, about my desire to use Penultimate for storyboarding. The app then offered a selection of three paper styles; plain, lined, and graph. Rather than myopically suggesting he add storyboarding templates, a rather niche use case, I suggested that it might be of general interest to his users to allow custom papers. I must not have been the only one thinking this, because just this May, Ben released a Penultimate 3.0 with exactly that feature. He even used a film storyboard as his example.

Good way to think about making feature requests.

Joanna Stern Reviews the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 ★

She gives it high marks for the hardware — display, camera, build quality — but low marks for battery life and third-party app selection. Not much of the review is about software, period. Nor is any sort of answer to “Why buy this instead of an iPad?” proffered.

Another Salient Difference ★

Merlin Mann:

Google: Thanks for looking at 100s of ads you hate.
Apple: Thanks for buying 100s of dollars of stuff you love.

What We Talk About When We Talk About RSS ★

Brent Simmons:

People sometimes say that “RSS is dead,” that it lost to Twitter and Facebook. They don’t always specify what they’re talking about, so I’ll look at each meaning of “RSS” and figure out which ones are dead.

And then I’ll play you out with a song.

(By the way, Brent’s new gig, Sepia Labs, launched last week at WWDC.)

Next Generation of Android Phones to Lose the Hardware Buttons? ★

Jonathan S. Geller at BGR with leaked info of the purported next-generation Nexus phone:

The display is said to be a 720p HD “monster-sized” screen, and it won’t feature physical Android menu buttons below the screen anymore — everything will be software-based. More after the break.

Those hardware back/home/menu/search buttons were a bad idea from the start.

That, Too, Was Quick ★

2K Games, makers of Duke Nukem Forever:

2K Games does not endorse or condone the comments made by @TheRednerGroup and confirm they no longer represent our products.

Apple Dropping the ‘Mac’ From ‘Mac OS X’? ★

It’s often been referred to colloquially as just plain “OS X” ever since it was announced, but this is the first time Apple has dropped the “Mac” from the name in marketing materials. I have no idea why, but I wouldn’t read too much into this. I think they — where by “they”, feel free to substitute you-know-who — just think it sounds better. And it clarifies that Mac is the hardware, OS X is the software — just like how iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad are hardware, and iOS is the software.

Update: Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure the only reason “Mac” was ever put into the name of the OS was for the ill-considered cloning era. Prior to the clones, it was just called “System 7”, “System 6”, etc. They renamed it “Mac OS” so there’d be some sort of Mac involved on machines that themselves could not be called Macs.

WWDC Wayback Machine: 1999 ★

Mike Silverman found his WWDC 1999 schedule:

Apple was just coming out of their mid-decade tailspin, and new Interim CEO Steve Jobs was presiding over a company on the rebound. The iMac was fresh, colorful and awesome, and the stock was rocketing into the 20s. And yes, there was WWDC so developers could learn about new technologies. Mac OS 8.5 was coming, and Mac OS X was the future. WWDC itself was held in the San Jose convention center. It was smaller, less then a fifth the size of today.

TouchPad to Ship With Flash 10.3 Beta ★

When will the best Flash Player for mobile be out of beta? “Soon”, I’m sure.

I’m Not Sure What There Is to Sigh About ★

John Allsopp:

I’ve long since pointed out the logical fallacy of the assertion of CocoaTouch apps having the best looking UI. All you need to demonstrate the fallacy of the assertion is to point to a single web tech based app that is better looking than a single CocoaTouch App — which is not even worth attempting it is so obviously true.

I certainly never said that. My piece yesterday certainly argued in broad strokes, but the broad strokes are true. Good native iOS (and Android, and WebOS) apps look better and offer a better experience than good mobile web apps. Of course there are excellent mobile web apps, and of course there are crummy native mobile apps. There are also many situations where making a mobile web app instead of a platform-native app is the right way to go. No one is arguing otherwise.

While we typically associate latency in applications with network performance, I’m guessing Gruber is referring to responsiveness to user input. Is this a huge concern for app developers? Not that I’m particularly aware of.

Every good iOS developer I know of is obsessed with user input touch responsiveness and animation frame rates.

Tim Bray on ‘Web’ vs. ‘Native’ Apps ★

Tim Bray:

I’m pedantic enough to be a little irritated by the common “Web vs Native” usage. They’re all Web apps, and this argument is really about client platforms; no more, no less.

That’s not the thrust of his piece, but it’s a good aside. I’ve made a similar argument in the past, that we should perhaps use “web app” to mean any app that is built around HTTP communication, and “browser app” to mean a kind of web app written in HTML/CSS/JavaScript which runs in a web browser. Things like iOS and Android Twitter clients are web apps, in my mind, they’re just written using platform-native toolkits.

Duke Nukem’s PR Firm Threatens to Punish Sites That Run Negative Reviews ★

At least they’re honest, I guess.

Honorary Ohioans of the Day: The Dallas Mavericks ★

Loyalty rewarded and honored.

That Was Quick ★

HTC, one day after saying they’d given up on bringing Android 2.3 to the HTC Desire because “there isn’t enough memory”:

Contrary to what we said earlier, we are going to bring Gingerbread to HTC Desire.