Linked List: August 1, 2013

Thursday, 1 August 2013

Advertise on The Deck 

The Deck Network is the best ad network on the web. They’re booking ad schedules now for the remainder of 2013, and at the moment, still have a couple ad slots open in August. Talk to Jim Coudal for more information, and get a nice price if you can pull the trigger quick.

The Verge on the Moto X 

David Pierce:

Wicks and his team ended up choosing a 4.7-inch 720p AMOLED display, with whites that look a little pink when examined closely and the same motion-blur problems that plague every similar panel. Compared to the the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4, both of which have 1080p screens, it’s a mid-range panel, but Wicks says it doesn’t matter. “We could go and make a higher-resolution screen,” Wicks says, “but it would just suck battery and nobody would know the difference.”

AMOLED = gross. My hunch is that this phone will be another dud.

The Inside Story of the Moto X 

Steven Levy:

Finally, we have the answer. The Moto X, announced today, marks the arrival, finally, of the Google Phone.

The Moto X is the first in a series of hardware products that Google hopes will supercharge the mother company’s software and services. A svelte slab with smooth curves at its edge, purpose-built to fit in the palm of your hand. It is designed for mass appeal, not just a slice of the population like Star Wars fans. It has its share of features that distinguish it from the pack, particularly in a period where some of the market leaders are reloading their innovation guns. These include persistent notifications, user-customizable design components, instant photo-capture, and hands-free authentication.

Will be fascinating to see how this phone does, and, if it succeeds, who it takes share from.

“We don’t monetize the things we create,” Android creator Andy Rubin once told me. “We monetize users.”

That’s our Google. But it’s not Motorola; Motorola sells phones for a profit. Or at least they did.

(And man, nobody has access to Google like Steven Levy does. I dare say no writer today has access to a major tech company like Levy does with Google. And he deserves it; great piece.)

Android 4.3 Update Fixes Laggy Performance on Nexus 7 Tablets 

Brian Klug, AnandTech:

One of the common complaints late in the life of the original Nexus 7 was slow storage I/O performance, leading to an inconsistent user experience. After a fresh flash, the Nexus 7 was speedy and performant, but after months of installing applications and using the tablet, things began slowing down. This was a friction point that many hoped would be fixed in the new Nexus 7 (2013) model, which it was. There’s even more to the story though, it turns out Google has fixed that storage I/O aging problem on all Nexus devices with the Android 4.3 update.

Here’s a fun game: Search the web for articles about this fix, and try to find one that includes the word “finally” in the headline. Now imagine the headlines if the iPad Mini had shipped with a crippling I/O bug that Apple didn’t fix for a year.

Instagram Deleting Photos Uploaded Using Private APIs 

Including those uploaded from the leading (but unofficial) client for Windows Phone. I sympathize with Windows Phone users, but this is what you get when you rely on private APIs.

Chartbuilder 

David Yanofsky, writing at Nieman Journalism Lab:

Today Quartz is open-sourcing the code behind Chartbuilder, the application we use to make most of our charts. Along with the underlying charting library — called Gneisschart — the tool has given everyone in our worldwide newsroom 24-hour access to simple charts at graphics-desk quality. It has helped all of our reporters and editors become more responsible for their own content and less dependent on others with specialized graphics skills.

Very cool.