Linked List: November 5, 2015

Thursday, 5 November 2015

Claim Chowder: Ming-Chi Kuo / iPhone 6S 3D Touch Edition ★

Apple Insider, back in April:

Analyst Ming-Chi Kuo of KGI Securities issued a research note on Thursday, a copy of which was obtained by AppleInsider, in which he reaffirmed that Apple’s next-generation iPhone will indeed feature Force Touch input. […]

According to Kuo, Force Touch on the iPhone will represent “the most significant change” to date in the iPhone user interface. In fact, the change will be so substantial that he believes Apple may decide to call the handset the “iPhone 7,” rather than an “iPhone 6s.”

Wrong, and rather foolish.

“We believe that iPhone’s Force Touch sensor doesn’t directly detect the pressure applied by fingers,” Kuo said. “Instead, it monitors the contact area on which the finger touches the screen to decide how big the pressure is.”

Totally wrong.

Kuo has had some scoops before — he was the first to call the iPhone 6 Plus’s 1920 × 1080 pixel resolution — but his record is far from perfect.

Silicon Valley Business Journal: Apple Considering Massive San Jose Campus ★

Nathan Donato-Weinstein:

Apple Inc. and the city of San Jose are working toward a development agreement that would allow the Cupertino-based juggernaut to build a north San Jose campus of up to 4.15 million square feet, according to city records — an amount larger than Apple’s “spaceship” campus under construction in Cupertino.

Factory?

Ben Carson Believes the Egyptian Pyramids Were Built by the Old Testament Character Joseph for Grain Storage ★

This would be a lot funnier if this lunatic weren’t currently leading most polls in the Republican primary.

Markdown, Strikethrough, and Slack ★

Katie Notopoulos, complaining at BuzzFeed about the way Slack now renders text wrapped in tildes (“~like this~”) as strikethrough:

Ok, so this is almost certainly because of Markdown, a tool that turns text into HTML. In Markdown, putting tildes around a word makes it appear as strikethrough text. Using Markdown makes some sense, I ~guess~, since many of Slack’s clients use it for coding and other technical purposes.

But what about the rest of us? Those of us who don’t know shit about Markdown or coding or who John Gruber is or ~whatever~ man? What about the people who NEED our tildes back so we can actually communicate with each other in the language that is ~native~ to online discussion???? WHAT ABOUT US???????

There is no strikethrough syntax in Markdown. Go ahead and look at the official syntax. Tildes have no meaning, and are passed through as-is by any good Markdown processor. If Slack didn’t have their heads up their asses and actually used Markdown-style formatting syntax, there’d be no problem. (And we’d get italics instead of bold when we did *this*, as we should.)

Adding support for a strikethrough syntax is a longstanding request for Markdown, but I omitted it by design. For one thing, there is no good punctuation to represent strikethrough. Tildes don’t look like strikethrough at all — tildes are squiggly, but a strike is a straight line. The most-requested syntax — wrapping the to-be-struck-through text in hyphens, like -this- — is visually hard to distinguish from dashes used to indicate a pause or parenthetical clause. To me, there is no punctuation that better represents struck-through text than the raw HTML <del> tag. The primary goal of Markdown is to remain readable as plain text.

For another thing, strikethrough isn’t used frequently enough to justify a shortcut. If Markdown provided its own syntax for all of the various HTML tags that people think that they want, it would be a minefield of special cases that you’d need to be aware of at all times while writing. A big part of Markdown’s (still growing) success is that I kept the syntax relatively small.

Update: Tildes-for-strikethrough comes from the GitHub-Flavored Markdown (which is a Markdown variant I like a lot — I just don’t think the syntax for a programmer-oriented variant is applicable to a general-purpose audience like Slack’s). BuzzFeed has updated Notopoulos’s article accordingly.

HTC’s New Ad for the One A9 ★

9to5Mac is calling it a “copy of Apple’s iconic 1984 commercial” for the original Mac. If that’s the intention, they did a terrible job. The phone itself is a great copy of the iPhone 6 — it looks good. The commercial, though, is downright cringe-inducingly bad. The vague and floundering nature of this spot underscores HTC’s institutional helplessness. Nothing they do works to actually sell a meaningful number of phones, they don’t understand why, and they don’t know what to do. So, this.

Thematically, the message is that iPhones are for parents and squares, HTC phones are for kids and rebels. That’s a message HTC started telling themselves four years ago. Meanwhile, in the real world, kids think green text message bubbles are gross.

One last point: is “Android Marshmallow” a selling point for the mass market? How many people know that means “the latest version of Android”? One percent?