Linked List: December 27, 2017

Wednesday, 27 December 2017

WebOS’s Innovative Gesture-Based Navigation 

If we’re going to talk about good ideas from Palm devices in the iPhone X, the mute switch is the least of them. The gesture-based navigation on iPhone X is a lot like that of WebOS on the 2008 Palm Pre — swipe left and right at the bottom to quickly switch between recent apps, swipe up from the bottom to access the card-based multitasking UI (replete with roundrect corners), pull down from the top right to access controls like Wi-Fi and airplane mode. Palm’s demise is probably the greatest tragedy in the industry of the iPhone era. The hardware wasn’t great, and the low-level software was too slow, but the design of WebOS was brilliant, and brilliant design is the most precious commodity in this industry.

Dieter Bohn (of course) wrote a longer look at the WebOS gestures in iOS 11 on iPhone X.

Mute Switches 

In my iPhone X review, I wrote:

And for reasons I’ve never been able to understand, Android handset makers seem willing to copy everything and anything from Apple they can get away with (and even things they can’t get away with), but [almost] none have copied the iPhone’s mute switch, despite the fact that it’s a brilliant idea.

I didn’t mean to imply that the iPhone was the first device or first phone to include a mute switch, but I can see how “it’s a brilliant idea” could be taken that way. I’ve changed that to “despite the fact that it’s extremely useful”.

On Twitter, Dieter Bohn pointed out that nearly every phone Palm ever made included a hardware ringer switch. Seth Weintraub pointed back to the 1985 Trimline — a landline phone that included a ringer switch. (When I was a kid, the only way you could keep a telephone from ringing was to take it off the hook, which prevented any incoming calls from getting through.)

What I think Apple deserves credit for is defining which hardware buttons were necessary for the modern smartphone: home, power, volume up/down, and mute. Every other button moved to software, inside apps on the touchscreen. It was considered somewhat radical that the iPhone omitted the Send/End (green/red) hardware buttons that were present on just about every cell phone ever made prior to the iPhone. If Apple, the most hardware-button-averse company in the industry, has always included a mute switch, why don’t Android handset makers?

Holiday Sales for Amazon Devices 

Amazon:

Amazon Devices also had its best holiday yet, with tens of millions of Alexa-enabled devices sold worldwide. Echo Dot and Fire TV Stick with Alexa Voice Remote were not only the top-selling Amazon devices this holiday season, but they were also the best-selling products from any manufacturer in any category across all of Amazon.

“Tens of millions” is the closest I can remember Amazon ever getting to a real — that is to say, non-Bezos — sales number.

Face ID Can’t Approve Family Purchases 

Samuel Axon, writing for Ars Technica:

iPhone X owners have found that Face ID isn’t available as an authentication method for the “Ask to Buy” feature, which allows parents to approve their kids’ iOS purchases and downloads. Instead, the parent (or any other “family organizer,” as Apple terms it) must enter their entire Apple account password to approve each individual purchase attempt.

Users are frustrated because equivalent functionality was available on Touch ID devices, and that functionality has been lost in the transition to the iPhone X. Face ID can be used as an authentication method for other purchases, just like Touch ID before it — but Touch ID also worked for “Ask to Buy,” and Face ID doesn’t. [...]

Parents of large families with several children, each of whom might have an iOS device available to them, will find that the requests mount up quite quickly — especially right after the holidays. Kids cashing in App Store gift cards add to the requests already coming in from normal use and in-app purchases in games.

I only have one kid, but I noticed this too in the post-holiday gift card bonanza. I can’t really think of a good explanation for why Touch ID can authorize these transactions but Face ID can’t.

OnePlus 5 Has a Mute Switch 

In my iPhone X review published yesterday, I wondered aloud why no Android phones included a hardware mute switch. Turns out the OnePlus 5 does. Here’s Matt Swider, writing for TechRadar:

The OnePlus 5 is a great-value big-on-specs phone that rivals the iPhone 7 Plus and Samsung Galaxy S8, but its smallest hardware feature is my personal highlight. It has a mute switch on the side of the phone, allowing me to instantly silence notifications without ever having to look for an on-screen Do Not Disturb icon.

Yes, a physical mute switch has me excited.

OnePlus calls it the ‘Alert Slider’, and it’s a three-step toggle between ring, do not disturb and completely silent. It’s something that should be on every Android phone, but somehow it’s a rare feature that seems almost exclusive to OnePlus 5 among today’s Androids.