Linked List: December 21, 2015

Monday, 21 December 2015

How to Make Icons for Safari’s Pinned Tabs 

Craig Hockenbery:

The recent release of Safari 9.0 brought a great new feature: pinned tabs. These tabs are locked to the lefthand side of your tab bar and stay in place, even when you open a new window or relaunch the browser.

The default behavior is to display the first letter of the site’s name on a color from the site’s theme. If you work on a site with a strong branding element, you’ll want to customize the icon on the pinned tab. Anthony Piraino and I have been working on one for the Iconfactory and would like to share some of the things we learned.

Not coincidentally, DF now has a proper icon when pinned. (Not quite identical to the one Craig created as an example for this article, but close.)

Why Facebook Switched From Flash to HTML5 Video 

Daniel Baulig, Facebook:

We recently switched to HTML5 from a Flash-based video player for all Facebook web video surfaces, including videos in News Feed, on Pages, and in the Facebook embedded video player. We are continuing to work together with Adobe to deliver a reliable and secure Flash experience for games on our platform, but have shipped the change for video to all browsers by default.

From development velocity to accessibility features, HTML5 offers a lot of benefits. Moving to HTML5 best enables us to continue to innovate quickly and at scale, given Facebook’s large size and complex needs.

“Security” isn’t mentioned, but don’t forget that Alex Stamos, Facebook’s new chief security officer, has called on Adobe to announce an end-of-life date for Flash Player.

Disney No Longer Selling Toy Guns in Theme Parks 

Chip and Co.:

Disney is discontinuing the sales of toy guns of any kind at the theme parks, including bubble guns and Buzz Lightyear toy blasters. All of the gun merchandise is being pulled off the shelves and guests are encouraged to leave their own toy guns at home or not being allowed to gain entry to the park. Lightsabers and swords are still for sale as of right now. No word if they will be pulled later.

It’s being framed as a security measure, but there’s clearly a cultural aspect as well — like the candy cigarettes of my childhood.

How to Kill Your MacBook Battery: Leave an iTunes Store Page Open in iTunes 

Kirk McElhearn:

If you use a laptop, and your battery dies quickly, check and see if you accidentally left iTunes open on an iTunes Store page, even in the background. Look how much CPU it uses to simply display a front page, and rotate graphics in the carrousel at the top of the page.

It’s easy to pick on iTunes, but this is pretty egregious.

Bezos Takes Hands-On Role at Washington Post 

Lukas Alpert and Jack Marshall, writing for the WSJ:

When Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos received an email from a reader complaining about the time it took for the mobile app to load, he immediately fired off a note to the newspaper’s chief information officer. The message was simple: fix it.

“We looked at the problem and I told Jeff I thought we could improve the load time to maybe two seconds. He wrote back and said, ‘It needs to be milliseconds,’” said Shailesh Prakash, who heads the Post’s technology team as chief information officer. “He has become our ultimate beta tester.”

Traffic to the website is up:

This year, the Post’s site has registered striking gains in traffic. In October, the Post passed its rival, the New York Times, in unique traffic for the first time. The next month it drew a record 71.6 million unique visitors, putting it right behind digital media giant BuzzFeed, according to comScore Inc. The November figure marks a nearly threefold increase in traffic since Mr. Bezos took over, and he recently boasted that the Post was on its way to becoming “the new paper of record.”

Anecdotally, I feel like I’m reading a lot more articles from the Post than I used to.

Toshiba Predicts $4.5 Billion Loss, Plans to Fire 7,000 Employees 

Charlie Osborne, reporting for ZDNet:

Toshiba’s financial struggles have reached breaking point, leading to a restructuring effort which will see thousands lose their jobs and a loss of $4.5 billion over the fiscal year.[…] In a punishing effort to keep the company afloat, Toshiba executives have revealed plans to shed businesses, streamline corporate practices and bring down operating costs.

Under the “Toshiba Revitalization Action Plan,” the Japanese conglomerate will axe 6,800 jobs in its consumer electronics business, which is roughly 30 percent of the workforce, by 31 March 2016. In addition, “indirect” employees — such as contractors — will be axed, bringing labor costs down further. […]

In September, Toshiba admitted to overstating its profits by almost $2 billion over the past seven years in an accounting scandal which was caused by unit managers overstating profits in order to reach corporate targets.

$2 billion in accounting fraud followed by billions more in losses this year — really does seem like a company on the brink.

Obscura Camera 2.0 

Nice update to my favorite third-party iPhone camera app (and the only one that’s on my first home screen). My favorite new feature: a Photos extension, so you can apply Obscura’s filters to any image in your Photo library.

Apple Music Reportedly Preparing New ‘Hi-Res’ Audio Streaming 

Macotakara:

According to several insiders familiar with Apple, whose products are exhibited at PORTABLE AUDIO FESTIVAL 2015, the company has been developing Hi-Res Audio streaming up to 96kHz/24bit in 2016.

The Lightning terminal with iOS 9 is compatible up to 192kHz/24Bit, but we do not have information on the sampling frequency of Apple Music download music.

Also, many high-end audio manufacturers plan to add audio cables for Lightning to their lineups in 2016, and they apparently are preparing themselves for Apple Music’s Hi-Res Audio.

Yet another indication that the analog headphone jack might be a goner.

Microsoft Lumia 950 XL Review at The Verge 

Tom Warren, The Verge:

Continuum is really the star of the show, however. It lets the phone transform into a low-powered PC, with a few catches. In addition to the phone, you’ll need Microsoft’s $99 Display Dock (or a Miracast adapter), a mouse and keyboard (Bluetooth or USB), and a monitor or TV. You plug the Lumia 950 XL into the dock or connect wirelessly, and the phone simply beams itself to the display. It looks very similar to a Windows 10 desktop PC, minus a few features like app snapping and full multitasking.

Microsoft designed this with universal apps in mind, but most of them don’t support Continuum yet. Microsoft’s own apps all work fine, but third-party ones need to be updated to support the feature, and the vast majority haven’t yet.

Continuum feels like a glimpse into the future, though. Every app developer is focusing their efforts on smartphones right now, not tablets or desktop PCs. If we arrive at a future where phones can be a single computing device, then Microsoft is well positioned to offer this. If Microsoft builds an Intel-powered phone with true desktop apps, Continuum could get very interesting. But that’s not where the 950 XL is at, and it’s little more than a parlor trick in its current state.

I’ve seen Continuum demoed, and technically it is impressive. I’m not sure though that it’s something anyone wants or needs. Philip Greenspun predicted something like this 10 years ago, but one of the things that was hard to foresee before the iPhone was just how good the phone by itself could be as a computer. Why bother plugging it in to a desktop display and keyboard when the phone’s own display and on-screen keyboard are good enough? I could be wrong, because Continuum is so new, but my hunch is that Microsoft has built something technically impressive that very few people have any desire to use.

The rest of Warren’s review is pretty scathing. The dearth of native apps is suffocating the platform.