Linked List: March 27, 2012

Tuesday, 27 March 2012

I did not know Twitter had a patent on this.

Update: Ah, they don’t yet have a patent on this — they have an unissued patent application.

Paul Woods on using Keynote as a general purpose layout and UI design tool:

In fact, when I first started working at ESPI last July, I was very surprised to find out that designers were using Keynote for laying out presentations. My surprise turned to alarm when I found out that they were also using it as a design tool to build UI designs for websites and apps. It turns out that I was absolutely wrong. Keynote is an incredibly powerful design tool. Less then one year later, I now rarely (if ever) use InDesign to layout presentations, and I have started using Keynote almost exclusively for any web layouts I do.

The Mac App Store Needs Paid Upgrades ★

Wil Shipley:

Without paid upgrades developers are strongly dis-incented from writing new major versions of existing products. Which stinks for us, and for customers.

Shipley makes a case that’s hard to argue with. (And it applies equally to iOS apps.)

Counting Clicks to Report Twitter Spam ★

Ryan Irelan:

I’ve used several different Twitter clients on OS X and iOS. Here’s a run-down of some of the clients and how many taps (or clicks) it takes to report spam. Some are better than others as you’ll see. All but one of them fall into either 3 or 4 clicks/taps to report a spammer.

Lobbyists, Guns, and Money ★

Eye-opening column from Paul Krugman:

Think about that: we seem to be turning into a country where crony capitalism doesn’t just waste taxpayer money but warps criminal justice, in which growing incarceration reflects not the need to protect law-abiding citizens but the profits corporations can reap from a larger prison population.

iPad Battery Nonsense ★

Lex Friedman, writing for Macworld:

Your new iPad’s battery is fine. Despite some media reports suggesting that Apple’s newest tablet suffers from a pair of battery-related issues, Macworld’s own research concludes that the third-generation iPad’s battery works as designed, and that customers needn’t fear harming the battery by over-charging it.

Why would anyone believe that Apple, of all companies, would design a product that gets damaged if you do the obvious thing and simply leave it plugged in overnight? Some outfits are so desperate for negative iPad stories that they’ll report allegations that don’t even make sense.

iPad and Android Tablet App Comparison ★

Sasha Segan, PCMag:

Do Android tablet apps really suck? Yes. Yes, they do. We take a close look, and provide examples.

No surprise here, but the difference in quality is eye-opening. I think Mac apps are generally better than Windows apps and that iPhone apps are better than Android phone apps, but the differences there are nothing compared to the differences between iPad and Android tablet apps.

163 ★

A.T. Faust at AppAdvice makes a good argument why, if Apple were to release a smaller iPad, exactly 7.85 inches diagonally makes perfect sense for the display size.