Linked List: October 1, 2013

Tuesday, 1 October 2013

iOS 7 Accessibility Improvements for Switch Users ★

Christopher Hills explains the news-to-me accessibility improvements in iOS 7 for users of switches (like this one, from Tecla).

Lifting the Lid on the iOS 7 UIPicker ★

Nice dissection by Sean Woodhouse:

The inset tap area causes real problems when the picker is placed inline within a UITableView. It’s the same old ‘scroll views within scroll views’ conundrum developers have been struggling with since the dawn of graphical user interfaces, but made worse because you can easily miss the tap area within the control’s bounds and end up inadvertently scrolling the whole UITableView.

Field Notes ‘Drink Local’ Edition ★

If I liked notebooks, Futura Bold, and drinking beer, I’d be all over these.

Wait.

Tumult Hype ★

Worth a re-link, in the wake of Google’s free-but-janky Web Designer app. If you’re looking for a great tool that lets you build Flash-style animations based on HTML5, Tumult Hype does it with a terrific native Mac interface. $30, cheap!

Samsung Recruited to Join ‘MobileBench’ Consortium Tasked With Creating New Mobile Benchmarks ★

And in baseball news, Alex Rodriguez and Ryan Braun are collaborating on new tests for performance-enhancing drugs.

Support Lavabit’s Legal Defense Fund ★

Ladar Levison, founder of Lavabit:

To fight for the right to keep private emails private, I’ve created this Rally for my company, Lavabit: the encrypted-email service said to have been used by Edward Snowden.

I’ve shut down Lavabit because I refuse to be complicit in the crimes against the American people and the U.S. Constitution. I wish I could say more about our situation.

What happens now? We at Lavabit have started preparing the paperwork needed to continue fighting for the Constitution in the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals. A favorable decision would allow me to resurrect Lavabit as an American company.

Defending the constitution is expensive! Help us by donating to the Lavabit defense fund.

An American citizen running an American company, and he’s not even allowed to say why he’s been forced to shut down his company. I’ve already donated; if you care about true civil liberties, I encourage you to donate as well.

The Verge: Samsung Galaxy Gear Review ★

Vlad Savov, writing for The Verge:

A smartwatch the Galaxy Gear is not. Frankly, I’m not sure exactly what it’s supposed to be. Samsung describes it as a companion device, and the Gear is indeed chronically dependent on an umbilical link to another Samsung device, but it never left me feeling like it was a helpful companion. The notifications are Orwellian, the media controls are exiguous, and the app selection has no substance to underpin the hype. Samsung’s attempt to turn the Gear into a style icon is also unlikely to succeed, owing to the company’s indecision about its target demographic. Trying to please all tastes has resulted in a predictably charmless and soulless product.

Seems universally panned.

Google Web Designer ★

Visual layout and animation tool for web designers, free from Google. Think: replacement for Flash using HTML5. As a Mac app it’s gross — fake menu bar within the window, and nothing but an Edit menu in the real menu bar. Poking around the .app bundle, it looks like it’s just an embedded Chrome browser running an HTML5 web app. Impressive for a web app; weird for those used to real native Mac apps.

Ars Technica’s Galaxy Note 3 Review ★

Ron Amadeo, reviewing the Galaxy Note 3 hardware:

This time around, Samsung has opted to cover the back in a plastic faux-leather with pretend stitching around the perimeter. It sounds ridiculous, but it actually looks great. Along with the stylus, it really has a “Moleskin Notebook” vibe going. It doesn’t feel like leather at all; it’s just a textured soft-touch plastic. It’s a step up from Samsung’s usual glossy plastic, but the design here is still disappointing when compared to the HTC One, Nexus 4, or anything Apple has made in the last two years.

The S-Pen is still here too. While Samsung is clearly trying to ditch the “cheap-plastic” feeling on the exterior of the phone, they haven’t done anything to help the feel of the S-Pen. It’s made out of the chintziest plastic imaginable. It’s so light that it feels disposable, like something you’re supposed to throw out after every use. I would have preferred something closer to the nice heft of a metal pen, but this is basically a hollow plastic tube with a button on it. It just seems odd using your $700 device with a 25¢ pen.

Sounds about right. The fake stitches are my favorite.

Galaxy Note 3 Cheats on Benchmarks ★

Ron Amadeo, writing for Ars Technica:

We noticed an odd thing while testing the Samsung Galaxy Note 3: it scores really, really well in benchmark tests — puzzlingly well, in fact. A quick comparison of its scores to the similarly specced LG G2 makes it clear that something fishy is going on, because Samsung’s 2.3GHz Snapdragon 800 blows the doors off LG’s 2.3GHz Snapdragon 800. What makes one Snapdragon so different from the other?

After a good bit of sleuthing, we can confidently say that Samsung appears to be artificially boosting the US Note 3’s benchmark scores with a special, high-power CPU mode that kicks in when the device runs a large number of popular benchmarking apps. Samsung did something similar with the international Galaxy S 4’s GPU, but this is the first time we’ve seen the boost on a US device. We also found a way to disable this special CPU mode, so for the first time we can see just how much Samsung’s benchmark optimizations affect benchmark scores.

What a bizarre coincidence that a company as honest and reputable as Samsung would get caught doing this again.