Linked List: September 29, 2012

Saturday, 29 September 2012

My thanks to Shiny Things for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote Sakura Quick Math, a beautiful new app for the iPhone and iPad that helps kids improve their arithmetic and handwriting. Instead of tapping buttons to answer questions, you write the answer on screen. It looks great (kids are never too young to start appreciating the beauty of Futura) and plays great. It’s right up the alley for my third-grade son; he’s been digging it all week.

Best of all, it’s just 99 cents in the App Store. If you’ve got kids ages 6-11, Sakura Quick Math is for you.

Another Slice of Humble Pie ★

Original description on Apple’s iOS Maps web page:

All of which may just make this app the most beautiful, powerful mapping service ever.

Now reads:

All in a beautiful vector-based interface that scales and zooms with ease.

(Via 9to5Mac.)

Old Maps vs. New Maps ★

Marco Tabini was thinking what I was thinking about Jason Matheson’s test of iOS 6 Maps against Ontario city and town names — that it would be useful to compare the results against iOS 5 with the Google-backed Maps:

As far as I can see, the data supports three conclusions:

Given our set of data, old Maps doesn’t fare that much better than new Maps.

There seems to be a significant difference in the way the two companies approach the task of returning search results, with Google doing whatever it takes to get any result out, while Apple seems to prefer accuracy above all.

In the end, this is not really a particularly useful test insofar as determining the accuracy of Maps. At best, we get to see how good Apple is as at finding things, but with targets as big as whole towns we’re unlikely to unearth any information that is really useful.

From Bad to Worse ★

The Macalope:

This offends the tender sensibilities of the artist formerly known as Fake Steve, because the only rational reaction is for us to all lose our foul-word-for-composure because the data on one app on Apple’s latest mobile operating system isn’t accurate in many instances. Someone needs to be frog-marched out of One Infinite Loop!

Looks like I owe The Macalope a beer.

The Atlantic: ‘The Case for Abolishing Patents (Yes, All of Them)’ ★

Jordan Weissmann, writing for The Atlantic:

Critics have suggested plenty of reasonable reforms, from eliminating software patents to clamping down on “trolls” who buy up patent portfolios only so they can file lawsuits. But do we need a more radical solution? Would we be possibly be better off without any patents at all?

That’s the striking suggestion from a Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis working paper by Michele Boldrin and David Levine, professors at Washington University in St. Louis who argue that any patent system, no matter how well conceived, is bound to devolve into the kind of quagmire we’re dealing with today.

Not going to happen here in the U.S., alas, but we can dream. (Via John Siracusa.)

Funny How Things Work Out ★

Interesting tidbit in this report from Nick Wingfield and Brian X. Chen for the NYT:

Including a maps app on the first iPhone was not even part of the company’s original plan as the phone’s unveiling approached in January 2007. Just weeks before the event, Mr. Jobs ordered a mapping app to show off the capabilities of the touch-screen device.

Two engineers put together a maps app for the presentation in three weeks, said a former Apple engineer who worked on iPhone software, and who declined to be named because he did not want to speak publicly about his previous employer. The company hastily cut a deal with Google to use its map data.

At the time, relying on Google, which had introduced its map service a couple of years earlier, made sense. Apple and Google had generally friendly relations, and Google’s chief executive at the time, Eric E. Schmidt, served on Apple’s board.

Putting Schmidt on the board was the single biggest mistake in Jobs’s entire time at the helm. This corner Apple has painted itself into with Maps today might never have happened if Jobs hadn’t misplaced his trust in Schmidt.