Linked List: December 21, 2016

Wednesday, 21 December 2016

After writing about how you can verify that Uber is not tracking your location other than within five minutes of ending a ride, Daring Fireball readers on Twitter started sending me screenshots of their Location Services settings, showing that the Uber app is still checking for their location days or even weeks after they last used the app.

I’m not seeing this, and I don’t think most people are, but it’s not good.

What Super Mario Run Would Look Like as a Free-to-Play Game ★

Spoiler: it would look like trash.

Nintendo Share Prices Decline in Reaction to ‘Super Mario Run’ Pricing ★

Mitchel Broussard, writing for MacRumors:

Nintendo and developer DeNA’s shares have declined over the weekend in reaction to negative user reviews facing the new mobile game Super Mario Run, which currently averages a 2.5/5 star rating on the iOS App Store, based on around 54,000 user reviews. Shares in DeNA have gone down 14 percent since Super Mario Run launched on December 15, while Nintendo’s stock has fallen about 13 percent in the same time frame.

Although many of the top reviews for the game remark on Super Mario Run’s better qualities, the harshest criticism remains to be Nintendo’s decision to make the game free-to-download, but $10 to unlock all of its content. Users can play nearly all of World 1 for free, but gaining deeper access to the remaining five Worlds, along with Toad Rally and Kingdom Builder modes, requires the $10 fee.

I looked through the reviews on the App Store — the first 20 or so negative reviews were entirely about the price. It’s an embarrassment that a game this good, and this high profile, has such terrible reviews because it costs $10.

There are legitimate things to complain about, particularly the always-on-internet requirement, but if you look at the reviews, it’s all about the price.

Bloomberg on Apple’s Search for an OLED Display Provider ★

Pavel Alpeyev and Takashi Amano, reporting for Bloomberg:

Now OLED is the big goal. The technology has been included on top-end smartphones for years, including almost all of Samsung Electronics Co.’s high-end phones. While LCDs rely on a backlight panel, OLED pixels can glow on their own, resulting in thinner displays, better battery life and improved contrast. OLED screens can also be made on flexible plastic, allowing for a wider variety of shapes and applications.

“OLEDs aren’t just for flat areas, but can be used on edges, so smartphone makers will challenge themselves by building displays with new shapes,” Tsugami said. “These qualities in OLED will give it an advantage.”

The machines that build OLED screens are almost all made by Canon Tokki, which was founded by the current CEO’s father in 1967 (tokki means “special equipment” in Japanese). The company doesn’t disclose production details and earnings figures. Its current annual output capacity is less than 10 units, according to two people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the information is confidential.

To call Canon Tokki’s product a machine is something of an understatement. Each one is a vacuum production line 100 meters (328 feet) long. Glass panels, roughly the size of a large TV screen, are propelled by robotic arms through several chambers. Red, green and blue pixels are deposited on the surface by evaporating organic materials.

I see the appeal from Apple’s perspective in terms of OLED displays being thinner and flexible, but the thing about this story that has never sat right with me is that OLED displays reproduce colors poorly. Colors look terrible on my Google Pixel, and I don’t think they look good on Apple Watch, either. I’d hate to see a Pixel-caliber display on an iPhone.

Vesper Open Source ★

Brent Simmons:

It’s presented as a historical artifact rather than as a living project. It’s definitely not an example of how to write apps these days — and it’s not even an example of how to write apps in 2013. […]

It was written while iOS 6 was current, and it still looks like an iOS 6 app under the hood. But, at the same time, we were anticipating iOS 7, and so Vesper was an art project — we wanted Vesper to join Letterpress and Twitterrific and a few others as one of the first Modernist apps.

But we hadn’t actually seen iOS 7, and so we invented Vesper’s look and feel from scratch, though with some idea of where the puck was heading. That — combined with wanting to use Ideal Sans everywhere, even in standard things like alerts — meant we had to do a ton of custom UI and animations.

It’s interesting to me that 2013 was about the last time you could plausibly think that that’s the right thing to do. It’s clearly too expensive now — and was too expensive then, too, but we hadn’t realized it yet.

The irony is that we thought Vesper was one of the first apps of a new era — the era that officially kicked-off with iOS 7 — but, in the end, it was one of the last apps of the era where it was not uncommon for developers to spend massive amounts of time in UI invention.

That last point is so true.