Linked List: November 18, 2011

Friday, 18 November 2011

Readable 

My thanks to Readable for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Readable has everything you’d expect in a great reading app for the iPhone and iPad: clean, crisp typography, article layouts that eliminate all the distracting junk, caching for offline reading, and integration with services like Read It Later, Google Reader, Delicious, and more.

And it has a gimmick: face detection. Turn it on and it scrolls the current article automatically, pausing when you are no longer looking at the device. I was skeptical, but in practice it’s damn clever. “Look, don’t touch” is the slogan they used in their sponsorship ad earlier in the week. It’s worth 99 cents just to play with this feature alone.

Speaking of Malcolm Gladwell Losing His Touch 

He’s now working for Bank of America.

About Today’s DF Outage 

A rare bit of downtime for DF today. The site was unavailable for a little over an hour, but seems to be back to normal now. According to Joyent, it was a router problem at their east coast co-location facility.

Sorry about that. My goal is nothing short of 100 percent uptime.

Josh Topolsky’s Year-Old Nexus S Review 

Thinking more about Josh Topolsky’s enthusiastic review of the new Galaxy Nexus, I went back to read his review from last year of the Nexus S. He correctly flagged big problems I saw with the Nexus S and Android 2.3, like this:

Well, let’s be clear — Google still has major issues with text selection and editing on Android devices. The first striking problem is that there is not a consistent method of selecting text on the device. None. At all. In the browser, you long press on text to bring up your anchors, then drag and tap the center of your selection — boom, copied text. In text editing fields, however, in order to select a word you must long press on the word, wait for a contextual menu to pop up, and then select “select word” — a completely counterintuitive process. In the message app you can long press to select only the entire message, and in Google Reader? You can’t select any text at all. Even worse, Gmail has a different method for selecting text from an email you’re reading, and it’s far more obnoxious than any of the others. There, selecting text goes from being mildly annoying to downright silly. Want to grab some text out of an email? Here’s your process: hit the menu key, hit “more,” hit “select text,” and then finally drag your anchors out. Funnily enough, a little cursor appears when you start selecting — a holdover from Linux? To have this many options and discrepancies over something as simple as copy and paste should be embarrassing to Google. What it mostly is, however, is a pain to the end user.

That Topolsky has no major gripes like this about the Galaxy Nexus makes me think Android 4.0 might really be the first good version of Android. Which in turn makes me think Steve Jobs wasn’t far off at the 2007 iPhone introduction when he claimed the iPhone was five years ahead of the competition.

‘The Possibilities Are Calling’ 

Really good commercial from Google for the Galaxy Nexus. Looks good, love the song, and it shows people using cool features on the phone.

Siri Argument 

Truly funny spoof from College Humor.