Linked List: January 9, 2013

Wednesday, 9 January 2013

Apple Now Locking Screenshots for Submitted Apps, Shutting Down Popular Scam Tactic ★

Juli Clover, reporting for Mac Rumors:

Apple today announced on its Developer Portal that screenshots added to app descriptions will be locked in place once an app has been approved. […] This small but important update shuts down a widely used scam tactic, where developers would upload game screenshots to get an app approved by Apple and then switch them out with screenshots from another popular app.

Panic detailed one of these scam apps a few weeks ago. Worth noting, though, that this change is a pain in the ass for legitimate developers — any change to your app’s screenshots now requires a full submission/review process.

MLB Interview Caps ★

Paul Lukas at Uni Watch:

MLB already has game caps, BP caps, Elmer Fudd caps, St. Paddy’s Day caps, All-Star Game caps, World Series caps, throwback caps, futuristic caps, G.I. Joe caps, flag-desecration caps, wild card winner caps, division champion caps, league champion caps, World Series champion caps, snap-back caps, low-profile caps, distressed caps, and probably a few other caps I can’t think of right now.

Any reasonable person surveying this headwear landscape can only come to one possible conclusion: We need more motherfucking caps.

Fortunately, the folks at MLB have taken heroic steps to alleviate this tragic cap shortage before it reaches Irish Potato Famine-like proportions. Behold what they have magnanimously bestowed upon a cap-benighted world: the interview cap.

Can’t wait to find out what the fine is for a player who conducts an interview while not wearing their special interview cap.

iTunes Turns 12 ★

Jacqui Cheng:

Come reminisce with us over (more than) 12 years of iTunes screenshots.

Good old Brushed Metal.

Qualcomm’s CES Keynote ★

I’m not sure what’s crazier — the keynote presentation itself, or the fact that the theme is “Born Mobile” but the video doesn’t play on iOS. You really do need to watch a few minutes of this — stick with it at least until Ballmer bounds on stage.

Update: They’ve finally added a version that works on mobile devices. Still a terrible presentation, though.

Wired Gadget Lab’s Daily CES Coverage ★

By far, my favorite daily coverage of CES has been Wired Gadget Lab’s. The format is perfect: a series of updates each day, most of them very brief, colored heavily by the personalities of the writers. It’s blogging informed by Twitter and Instagram. Just a series of “this is interesting/funny” updates.

Hands-On With the Imminently-Shipping Pebble Smart Watch ★

I ordered one and am looking forward to trying it. But physically it strikes me as overly clunky compared to regular (i.e. non-smart) watches. And the software seems limited; if I can see a text message, I want to reply to it (which, on a watch, would mean voice dictation).

Vending Machine Dispenses MacBooks for Student Use ★

Interesting idea from my alma mater. You know what would make this really useful? Dropbox.

Dropbox/Samsung Partnership ★

Lucas Mearian, reporting for Computerworld:

Dropbox said the deeper integration includes several new Samsung devices, such as the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Grand smartphone and smart cameras. Samsung cameras will automatically push the photos to Dropbox’s cloud storage service.

Dropbox is available natively on the Samsung Galaxy III, Samsung Galaxy Note II, and Samsung Galaxy Camera. Users configuring the devices will be offered free 50GB of capacity when they activate Dropbox, according to Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen, head of mobile business development.

Sounds like a good deal. Out of the box, you get 50 GB of cloud storage — universally hailed as best-of-breed for simplicity and syncing reliability — that works with whatever other computers or tablets you might own. It’s not an exclusivity advantage for Samsung — again, Dropbox works almost everywhere — but it might be an out-of-the-box advantage, and it may well introduce many people to Dropbox for the first time.

As an aside, the other night my third-grade son saw me okaying the latest update to the Dropbox app on my iPhone. He said his teachers are “always talking about Dropbox”. I asked him what he thought Dropbox was. “It’s how they email files from the school’s computers to their iPads.” Like I wrote a few weeks ago, it’s a linchpin in the iPad experience.

The Changing Face of Computers on Screen ★

Preston de Guise, after examining on-screen computers from various science fiction films and TV shows:

What happened between the movies and TVs of the older era (mid-80s and older) and those of the newer era?

The shift was profound yet entirely subtle, something that a lot of people wouldn’t have really noticed at all — we shifted from portraying computer hardware to portraying computer software.

Pairs well with Mat Honan’s observation the other day about CES.