Linked List: November 18, 2014

Tuesday, 18 November 2014

Federico Viticci:

Right now, old tweets can be found in search by switching to the All tab of the Twitter app, and Twitter supports a basic syntax to filter down tweets for users and dates. I was able to use two different search operators for usernames and dates:

  • from:username — load all tweets sent from a user;
  • since:2009-04-20 until:2009-04-21 — load tweets from specific days.

Search operators can be used in the Twitter app and combined with hashtags and text to look more precisely in search results and find a tweet you’re looking for. You can even save advanced searches you come up with and reuse them at any time. And this makes for a convenient way to delete old tweets as well: find the tweet, and use the Delete button in the app to remove it.

What a great feature, and great technical achievement. The entire Twitter archive must be incomprehensibly big.

(Sure would be cool if Twitter made this available to third-party clients.)

1922 Cutaway Diagram of the Washington DC Evening Star Building 

Just gorgeous. This is why they made the iMac 5K Retina Display. (Via Kottke.)

Barbie Fucks It Up Again 

Pamela Ribon reviews the children’s book Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer. You know this book is going to be bad. You know it’s going to contain dreadful, harmful gender stereotypes. But it is so much worse than you (probably) expect.

I’ve been waiting to link to this piece all day, but Ribon’s website (the excellent Pamie.com) has been down all day because this has gotten so much attention.

Uber Executive Suggests Digging Up Dirt on Journalists 

Ben Smith, Buzzfeed:

A senior executive at Uber suggested that the company should consider hiring a team of opposition researchers to dig up dirt on its critics in the media — and specifically to spread details of the personal life of a female journalist who has criticized the company.

The executive, Emil Michael, made the comments in a conversation he later said he believed was off the record. In a statement through Uber Monday evening, he said he regretted them and that they didn’t reflect his or the company’s views.

Whose views do they represent then, if not his own or Uber’s?

Over dinner, he outlined the notion of spending “a million dollars” to hire four top opposition researchers and four journalists. That team could, he said, help Uber fight back against the press — they’d look into “your personal lives, your families,” and give the media a taste of its own medicine.

Michael was particularly focused on one journalist, Sarah Lacy, the editor of the Silicon Valley website PandoDaily, a sometimes combative voice inside the industry. Lacy recently accused Uber of “sexism and misogyny.” She wrote that she was deleting her Uber app after BuzzFeed News reported that Uber appeared to be working with a French escort service. “I don’t know how many more signals we need that the company simply doesn’t respect us or prioritize our safety,” she wrote.

I’m sure this will change Lacy’s mind about Uber. She’s probably re-installing the app right now.

At the Waverly Inn dinner, it was suggested that a plan like the one Michael floated could become a problem for Uber.

Michael responded: “Nobody would know it was us.”

There is something very wrong with this company. It’s like Richard Nixon came back from the grave and is running a startup.

Nokia N1 Tablet 

There are shameless rip-offs, and then there are shameless rip-offs. (But my son pointed out that Nokia’s speaker grills at the bottom have three rows of dots, not two, so that’s original.)

WatchKit 

WatchKit has dropped, including the Apple Watch Human Interface Guidelines. There’s much to digest, but a few quick thoughts:

  • The displays of the two watch sizes have different pixel dimensions: 272 × 340 for the 38mm Apple Watch; 312 × 390 for the 42mm.

  • The system font is named San Francisco. That rings a bell. There are two versions: San Francisco Text, for sizes 19pt and smaller, and San Francisco Display, for sizes 20pt and up. Display is set tighter; Text has bigger punctuation marks and larger apertures on glyphs like “a” and “e”.

  • From the Watch HIG: “Avoid using color to show interactivity. Apply color as appropriate for your branding but do not use color solely to indicate interactivity for buttons and other controls.” Can we get this HIG guideline on iOS next year? Update: Neven Mrgan thinks Apple means “use color not just for interactivity”, not that you shouldn’t use color alone to indicate interactivity.

  • A lot of WatchKit is about offloading processing to the iPhone — the Watch is effectively a remote display for an extension running on your iPhone. This should be good for Watch battery life, but limiting when you’re not carrying your iPhone. This is not going to be a “leave your iPhone at home” device; more like “leave your iPhone in your purse or pocket.”