Linked List: November 10, 2014

Monday, 10 November 2014

Apple Now Has a Self-Serve Site to Deregister and Turn Off iMessage for Your Phone Number 

Solves the problem where people who switched from iPhone to another platform were unable to receive SMS messages from iPhone users, because iMessage still considered their phone number tied to their iMessage account. The trick was always to disable iMessage on your iPhone before switching your SIM card, but no one ever thought to do that.

When they were designing the “use iMessage instead of SMS when texting from one iPhone to another” feature, I don’t think it ever occurred to anyone at Apple that someone might eventually want to switch from iPhone to another phone.

Visual Effects Are Not the Answer 

Stu Maschwitz:

We’re back to the trailer embedded at the top of this post. Maybe you think it’s funny, maybe you don’t. But what I love about it is that someone finally realized that this kind of movie would be not one tenth of a percent better with animated cat mouths.

Why Dr. Drang Likes Daylight Saving Time 

Dr. Drang, back in March 2013:

If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle of May through the middle of July. And if you check the times for civil twilight, which is when it’s bright enough to see without artificial light, you’ll find that that starts half an hour earlier.

This is insane and a complete waste of sunlight. Good for a nation of farmers, I suppose, but of no value to anyone in our current urban/suburban society except those people who get up and go running before work. And I see no reason to encourage them.

Good bit of follow-up to the DST discussion on this week’s The Talk Show.

Kindle Design Quality 

Marco Arment:

I was expecting better after years of Kindles being decontented into flimsier, lower-end devices, but I think it’s clear that Amazon just isn’t willing or able to make a premium, high-quality e-reader.

Amazon first made the Kindle in 2007 — it’s not like they’re new at this. The obvious answer is that they just don’t give a shit about making a truly high-quality product.

Jason Snell Reviews the Kindle Voyage 

Jason Snell:

Amazon’s been headed in this direction for a while now. The original Kindle screen was 167 ppi; the Paperwhite upped that all the way to 212 ppi. The Paperwhite’s screen is actually quite good, but the Voyage’s is still noticeably better. To put it in Apple terms, this is really the first Kindle with a Retina display.

Unfortunately, Amazon has invested all of this effort in improved reading technology only to find itself completely at sea when it comes to typography. The Voyage still only offers six typefaces — many of them poor choices for this context — and still force-justifies every line (with no hyphenation!), creating variable-length gaps between words just so the right margin is straight rather than ragged. A device that’s dedicated to words on a page, one with a screen this beautiful, deserves better type options.

It’s depressing that all my typographic complaints from two years ago still stand. Amazon hasn’t improved the typography of Kindles in any way since then, other than by increasing the resolution of the display. I’ll repeat now what I wrote then:

Amazon’s goal should be for Kindle typography to equal print typography. They’re not even close. They get a pass on this only because all their competitors are just as bad or worse. Amazon should hire a world-class book designer to serve as product manager for the Kindle.

They should either devise or license (from Adobe?) a world-class hyphenation-justification algorithm while they’re at it. I’ll never buy another Kindle device until they fix this.

Update: Numerous readers have pointed out that they could just use the excellent open-source hyphenation algorithm from TeX.

President Obama on Net Neutrality 

President Obama:

I believe the FCC should create a new set of rules protecting net neutrality and ensuring that neither the cable company nor the phone company will be able to act as a gatekeeper, restricting what you can do or see online. The rules I am asking for are simple, common-sense steps that reflect the Internet you and I use every day, and that some ISPs already observe. These bright-line rules include:

  • No blocking. If a consumer requests access to a website or service, and the content is legal, your ISP should not be permitted to block it. That way, every player — not just those commercially affiliated with an ISP — gets a fair shot at your business.
  • No throttling. Nor should ISPs be able to intentionally slow down some content or speed up others — through a process often called “throttling” — based on the type of service or your ISP’s preferences.
  • Increased transparency. The connection between consumers and ISPs — the so-called “last mile” — is not the only place some sites might get special treatment. So, I am also asking the FCC to make full use of the transparency authorities the court recently upheld, and if necessary to apply net neutrality rules to points of interconnection between the ISP and the rest of the Internet.
  • No paid prioritization. Simply put: No service should be stuck in a “slow lane” because it does not pay a fee. That kind of gatekeeping would undermine the level playing field essential to the Internet’s growth. So, as I have before, I am asking for an explicit ban on paid prioritization and any other restriction that has a similar effect.

It saddens me, and almost surprises me, that this issue has become so polarized along party lines.

This tweet from Republican senator Ted Cruz is utter nonsense:

“Net Neutrality” is Obamacare for the Internet; the Internet should not operate at the speed of government.

That’s just word soup. The only similarity to the Affordable Care Act is that Obama supports it. There may well be a rational, reasoned argument against Net Neutrality, but Republicans aren’t making it, and neither are the cable companies or cellular providers. Be wary of the side that can’t express their argument in clear, plain, unambiguous language.