Linked List: October 19, 2011

Wednesday, 19 October 2011

Shawn Blanc:

Two little-known fields in iPhone contact cards are the Phonetic First and Last Names. Fill them in to help Siri understand your requests better and to keep Siri from mispronouncing the names of your friends and family.

The fields aren’t new, but their usefulness for Siri is.

Remember the Milk, Now Integrated With Siri ★

Remember the Milk now works with Siri. How? They added CalDAV server support — add your Remember the Milk account as a CalDAV server on your iPhone, and set that account to be the default for reminders, and boom — new reminders created with Siri will go there. Clever.

China Is Now Apple’s Second-Most Important Market ★

Erica Ogg:

Calling the progress in China “amazing,” Cook said that if you count the greater China region as a whole (which includes Hong Kong and Taiwan) it now accounts for 12 percent of Apple’s full-year revenue for 2011. That’s up from just 2 percent in fiscal year 2009, he said. That makes it Apple’s “fastest-growing region by far.”

Wonder if there’s any room for growth in China.

Yonhap News: ‘Galaxy Nexus Designed to Bypass Apple Patents’ ★

Lee Youkyung, reporting for Yonhap News:

The Galaxy Nexus smartphone, the first handset built using a new version of the Android system called “ice cream sandwich,” is designed to bypass potential legal attacks from Apple Inc., the mobile chief of Samsung Electronics Co. said.

“Now we will avoid everything we can and take patents very seriously,” Shin told reporters Tuesday on the eve of the Galaxy Nexus launch. His comments were embargoed until Wednesday.

As opposed to all their previous phones?

Lytro Camera ★

Speaking of fascinating new imaging technology, Lytro today started taking preorders for their new “light field technology” camera. The result allows you to “focus” the image after it was taken. Sounds amazing, and the examples look good. I’ll let others be the guinea pigs on this, but I’m tempted.

(In another sign of the changing times, their desktop editing software only supports one platform, and that’s the Mac, not Windows.)

Image Deblurring ★

Fascinating new research from Adobe. (Via Scott Beale.)

Buying Coffee and Creating Jobs ★

Joe Nocera on an interesting job creation plan from Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz:

Here’s the idea they came up with: Americans themselves would start lending to small businesses, with Starbucks serving as the middleman. Starbucks would find financial institutions willing to loan to small businesses. Starbucks customers would be able to donate money to the effort when they bought their coffee.

F-Secure: ‘Mac Trojan Disables XProtect Updates’ ★

Speaking of Mac malware:

Recent analysis has revealed to us that Trojan-Downloader:OSX/Flashback.C disables the automatic updater component of XProtect, Apple’s built-in OS X anti-malware application.

Might be worth keeping an eye on. Remember, though, it’s a Trojan — something you need to be tricked into installing manually, including typing your admin password.

The Sandbox Is Not Optional on iOS ★

From a post at ReadWriteWeb by Dan Rowinski on Lookout, a “security” app for the iPhone:

Lookout has created an app that is as simple as the iPhone. It is lightweight, easy to use and works. In terms of malware, Lookout can add its Android-style virus detector if iOS is ever drowned in malware.

No, it can’t. App Store apps can only read and write to the file system within their own sandbox. They can’t examine other apps, nor the data of other apps. There will never be third-party antivirus software in the App Store so long as the sandboxing rules remain in place. And so long as the sandboxing rules remain in place, there shouldn’t need to be.

We can argue about whether you should run anti-malware software on your Mac. But it can’t even exist on non-jailbroken iOS devices.

Acclivity NYC ★

Acquirers of the other two Sofa apps, Checkout and Enstore. Long-time Mac users will recall Acclivity NYC’s parent company by its former name, MYOB. Should be a great home for these apps.

Taking a Call From the Chairman ★

Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son:

I visited Apple for the announcement of the iPhone 4S [at Apple headquarters in Cupertino, California]. When I was having a meeting with Tim Cook, he said, ‘Oh Masa, sorry I have to quit our meeting.’ I said, ‘Where are you going?’ He said, ‘My boss is calling me.’ That was the day of the announcement of the iPhone 4S. He said that Steve is calling me because he wants to talk about their next product. And the next day, he died.

(Let’s not read much into the subject of the call, though.)

‘Way Down Inside’ ★

Michael Winslow gets the Led out.

My Favorite Pen: The Zebra Sarasa 0.4mm ★

Black ink, of course. Been using it for a few years now, nothing else comes close. (Well, the Uni-ball Signo RT 0.38mm comes close.) Anyway, if you’re not buying pens from JetPens, your pen probably sucks.

Andy Rubin: ‘I Don’t Think There Should Be Apps Specific to a Tablet’ ★

Joanna Stern:

“I don’t think there should be apps specific to a tablet,” [Rubin] said. He also added that “if someone makes an [Ice Cream Sandwich] app it’s going to run on phones and it’s going to run on tablets.” Now, that doesn’t mean he doesn’t think there shouldn’t be apps optimized for larger screens, it just means that ICS will continue to work like Honeycomb, with a single app scaling differently to different screen sizes. (He referenced staying away from the Apple iPad / iPhone division in the App Store.) That makes sense to us, but Rubin didn’t seem to be too concerned with those large screened apps: “the Twitter phone app works fine on a tablet.” Indeed it does, but the experience is nowhere near as good as the one tweaked to take advantage of the iPad’s larger screen.

In other words, Google’s grand-unification strategy for Android 4 is basically to treat tablets as big phones. Given how big Android phones are getting, maybe that’s the right strategy.

New Home for Versions and Kaleidoscope: Black Pixel ★

Black Pixel acquires the SVN client and file comparison app from Sofa, after Sofa’s talent acquisition by Facebook.

The Galaxy Nexus Is Big ★

At 4.65 inches diagonally, this isn’t just a little bigger than the iPhone’s 3.5-inch display, it’s way bigger. Here’s a sketch I whipped up in a notebook. I like Kottke’s take:

Ben: That’s no moon. It’s a phone.
Han: It’s too big to be a phone.
Luke: I have a very bad feeling about this.

It’s always hard to judge color reproduction in a photo of a display, but, man, the colors look crazy over-saturated to my eyes. Check out the orange on the side-by-side renderings of This Is My Next’s home page.

Roboto Is a Four-Headed Frankenfont ★

Stephen Coles:

When an alphabet has such unrelated glyphs it can taste completely different depending on the word. “Fudge” is casual and contemporary. “Marshmallow” is rigid and classical. This is not a typeface. It’s a tossed salad. Or a four-headed Frankenstein. You never know which personality you’ll get.

Here’s his graphic showing the four typefaces from which Roboto seems to be derived.

Roboto vs. Helvetica ★

I was too kind last night. Roboto is a Helvetica rip-off. It’s Google’s Arial.

Remembering Steve Jobs ★

New from Apple:

Over a million people from all over the world have shared their memories, thoughts, and feelings about Steve. One thing they all have in common — from personal friends to colleagues to owners of Apple products — is how they’ve been touched by his passion and creativity. You can view some of these messages below.

I’ll Just Cherry-Pick the Negative Part Because I’m a Biased Pro-Apple Shill, Not Because It’s Further Proof That Android Has Endemic Performance Problems or Anything Like That ★

Vlad Savov, hands-on with the just-announced Samsung Galaxy Nexus:

As to overall performance, we saw a good deal of stutter in the Galaxy Nexus before us. Taps were not always recognized and there were occasional delays in performing an instruction, though in Google’s defense, it was a phone fully loaded with running tasks and the software is being continually improved and optimized (i.e. it’s not yet fully baked). That having been said, it unfortunately remains the case that Android isn’t as swift and responsive as iOS or Windows Phone (or even MeeGo Harmattan on the N9). Or at least it wasn’t on the demo phone we got a look at. The subtle, pervasive lag that has characterized the Android UI since it inception is still there, which is not a heartening thing to hear when you’re talking about a super-powered dual-core device like the Galaxy Nexus.