Linked List: November 16, 2011

Wednesday, 16 November 2011

Seems pretty well integrated with Android. No Warner Music, but they’ve got the other three majors, and exclusive content from The Rolling Stones, Coldplay, Busta Rhymes, Shakira, Pearl Jam, and Dave Matthews Band.

I bought this exclusive Stones album, and it went pretty well until it came time to download the album to my Mac. There’s no way to just download the whole album — you’ve got to do it one song a time, three clicks per song. 45 mouse clicks just to download the 15 songs I just bought. (Pretty clear they want you to keep your music on their servers, not on your computer.) Good concert, though.

Update: Apparently it’s a lot simpler to download multiple tracks/entire albums if you install the (arguably misnamed) Google Music Uploader app. Fair enough, given that you can’t buy music from iTunes without installing the iTunes app. But if Google is going to let you buy albums via the website, it seems obvious they should let you download the whole album from the website, no?

Update 2: Google Music is U.S.-only, believe it or not.

Walt Mossberg Reviews the Kindle Fire ★

Walt Mossberg:

To be clear, the Kindle Fire is much less capable and versatile than the entry-level $499 iPad 2. It has a fraction of the apps, a smaller screen, much weaker battery life, a slower Web browser, half the internal storage and no cameras or microphone. It also has a rigid and somewhat frustrating user interface far less fluid than Apple’s.

But other than that, how’d you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln?

EU Bans Airport X-Ray Scanners Over Health Concerns ★

Julia Whitty, reporting for Mother Jones:

Citing health concerns, the European Union banned from European airports this week the same kind of X-ray scanners used by TSA in airports across the US. Here’s the EU’s wording:

In order not to risk jeopardising citizens’ health and safety, only security scanners which do not use X-ray technology are added to the list of authorised methods for passenger screening at EU airports.

Must be nice.

iOS 5.0.2 Coming Soon? ★

John Brownlee, Cult of Mac:

According to German Apple blog Macerkopf, an Apple engineer hard at work in the iOS division tells them that Apple has finally licked the battery problems, and will release the fix no later than the end of next week, bringing all iPhone 4Ses up to a standard 40 hours of standby and 10 hours of use.

Anecdotally, it seems like 5.0.1 was two steps forward, one step back, battery-wise. I’m sure 5.0.1 fixed some of the egregious battery-is-draining-really-fast bugs people saw in 5.0.0, but it seems like battery life under regular conditions — with no glaring bugs — has gotten worse. It’s not dramatic, but I’m getting noticeably worse battery life with 5.0.1, as is my wife, and as is Dan Benjamin.

Windows Forever ★

Matt Rosoff, reporting for Business Insider from Microsoft’s shareholder meeting:

The questioner asked what Microsoft thought about the contention that we’re in the “post PC era.” Ballmer started off in his usual enthusiastic fashion: “We are in the Windows era — we were, we are, and we always will be.”

Is he telling us that, or telling himself?

TPM OS Usage Share ★

Josh Marshall:

Only 56.81% of visits to TPM (November 2011) come from devices or computers using the Windows operating system.

For points of reference that number was 75% in Nov. 2007. And it’s fallen steadily each year since. By most standards that’s a pretty precipitous drop.

Not indicative of the web as a whole, of course, but a trend nonetheless. See also: TPM’s recent browser share numbers. Combined, they tell the story of the dissolution of the Windows/IE hegemony.

HP Envy 15 and 17 Press Photos ★

They got the name right.

Georgia Pro and Verdana Pro ★

May sound funny coming from a typography-obsessive whose website has used Verdana as the text face for its entire nine-year existence, but I just don’t care much for Verdana for anything other than use on relatively low-resolution displays at small sizes. (E.g. Verdana’s uppercase I and J. Ugh.) Interesting expansion of the two families, though.

Tumblr on Internet Censorship Legislation ★

Tumblr:

Congress is considering two well-intentioned but deeply flawed bills, the PROTECT-IP Act and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).

As written, they would betray more than a decade of US policy and advocacy of Internet freedom by establishing a censorship system using the same domain blacklisting technologies pioneered by China and Iran.

That really is an accurate assessment of this legislation. Hats off to Tumblr for bringing so much attention to this — they’ve changed their dashboard interface to direct all Tumblr users to this page.

Stop the Internet Blacklist Legislation ★

The EFF at its very best. If you haven’t been following the saga of this SOPA legislation, here’s some background on just how dreadful it is. It’s a power play from big corporate media companies — the sort of legislation that nearly everyone strenuously opposes but which might pass because the money is on the wrong side.

Dave Winer on Serving Special Layouts to the iPad Browser ★

Dave Winer, on Google’s “tablet”-optimized layout for search results on the iPad:

Designers really need to hear the following, loud and clear: The iPad browser is fully capable. It doesn’t need you to treat it differently. You’re fighting with users when you get fancy. Just stick with what works on the desktop.

I agree, but Google’s search results are not best example here. At least the layout is “tablet”-optimized. The worst are sites that detect the iPad and serve phone-optimized web pages. The iPad display is small by PC standards, yes, but Mobile Safari’s scaling and zooming are so seamless that almost all desktop web layouts work remarkably well — and certainly better than phone layouts meant to look best on 3.5-inch displays. (I suspect the problem with Google’s “tablet” layout is that it’s meant for 7-inch 16:9 aspect-ratio Android tablets — and their not-as-nice-as-Mobile-Safari browsers — just as much as for the iPad.)

Worse than the worst, of course, are sites like the NY Post, that refuse to work on the iPad period, telling you that you need to download their app from the App Store. The iPad is a wonderful web browsing device. To ignore that, or treat it as a crippled browser, is folly.

NPD: iPhone 3GS Outsold Every Android Smartphone in Q3 ★

Let’s be clear though, NPD also shows Android phones, combined, outselling iPhones, combined. What’s interesting here is just how different a game Apple is playing than every other company in the racket. The company with a majority share of the industry’s profits makes just one phone per year — and the gap between the 4 and 4S was 16 months — and yet their model that debuted in June 2009 remained the second-best-selling handset in the country as late as last month.

Sniper rifle versus a bunch of guys running around with shotguns.