Linked List: July 24, 2015

Friday, 24 July 2015

Apple at Its Most Pompous 

From a new iPhone page, “Why There’s Nothing Quite Like iPhone”:

Also amazing? The fact that there are over a million and a half capable, beautiful, inspiring apps on the App Store. And each and every one was reviewed and approved by a team of real live humans. With great taste. And great suggestions. And great ideas.

Yes, thank goodness for those ideas and suggestions from App Store reviewers that make our apps so great. And thanks even more for their great taste that keeps all but the best 100 or so Flappy Bird ripoffs out of the store.

Update: What irks here, fundamentally, is that Apple is taking credit for the great apps in the App Store, rather than giving credit to the third-party developers who make them. This plays straight into the widespread misconception that everyone who makes iOS apps works for Apple.

Apple at Its Best 

Celebrating the 25th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act, Apple has assembled a new App Store collection, promoting apps with great accessibility support.

Who Said It: Donald Trump or Frank Reynolds? 

“One is an inexplicably wealthy self-obsessed racist with the moral compass of a meth-addled 2-year-old, and the other is a character played by Danny DeVito.”

The Verge’s Web Sucks 

Les Orchard:

A page view on The Verge is a heavy load. I’ve known this for awhile, but it wasn’t until now that I decided to take a peek at what might be wriggling under this log. […]

Holy crap. It took over 30 seconds. In the end, it fetched over 9.5MB across 263 HTTP requests. That’s almost an order of magnitude more data and time than needed for the article itself.

What the hell is all this stuff?

Best part is that Orchard decided to look into this only after Nilay Patel pointed the blame for the crumminess of the mobile web at the browsers.