wired.com

The only convincing case the author makes, actually, is: kill the motherfucking password reset systems. And yes, I realize you can’t have passwords without some kind of password reset, but the problem here lies with the implementation more than anything else:

Apple: Can you answer a question from the account? Name of your best friend?

Hacker: I think that is “Kevin” or “Austin” or “Max.”

Apple: None of those answers are correct. Do you think you may have entered last names with the answer?

Hacker: I might have, but I don’t think so. I’ve provided the last 4, is that not enough?

Apple: The last four of the card are incorrect. Do you have another card?

Hacker: Can you check again? I’m looking at my Visa here, the last 4 is “5555.”

Apple: Yes, I have checked again. 5555 is not what is on the account. Did you try to reset online and choose email authentication?

Hacker: Yes, but my email has been hacked. I think the hacker added a credit card to the account, as many of my accounts had the same thing happen to them.

Apple: You want to try the first and last name for the best friend question?

Hacker: Be right back. The chicken is burning, sorry. One second.

Apple: OK.

Hacker: Here, I’m back. I think the answer might be Chris?

He’s a good friend.

Apple: I am sorry, Brian, but that answer is incorrect.

Hacker: Christopher Aylsworth is the full name.

Another possibility is Raymond McAlister.

Apple: Both of those are incorrect as well.

Hacker: I’m just gonna list off some friends that might be haha. Brian Coca. Bryan Yount. Steven May.

Apple: How about this. Give me the name of one of your custom mail folders.

Hacker: “Google” “Gmail” “Apple” I think. I’m a programmer at Google.

Apple: OK, “Apple” is correct. Can I have an alternate email address for you?

Hacker: The alternate email I used when I made the account?

Apple: I will need an email address to send you the password reset.

Hacker: Can you send it to “toe@aol.com”?

Apple: The email has been sent.

“Why, yes, this Apple e-mail account does have a folder named ‘Apple’. Nobody could have guessed that, and our conversation has given me every reason to think you are who you say you are.” Jesus.

arstechnica.com

The most immediately noticeable change to the free games in Windows 8 is that they’re all designed to run primarily in full-screen mode as “Windows 8 style” apps. On the plus side, this helps create some very streamlined interfaces without distracting window borders or menu bars getting in the way. Multitaskers can play some of the available games in "snap mode" by dragging the game to a small sliver on the left or right side of the screen, but the results are mixed—Minesweeper and Wordament work fine in this compressed space, but the card layout in the Solitaire Collection gets so cramped that it’s nearly unplayable. If you want to play Mahjong or Taptiles while you’re on a teleconference, you’re going to need a dual-screen setup.

It is so sad — no, it is revolting, really — that we are abandoning the huge benefits of overlapping windows, proven over thirty years of computing history.

marco.org

And ideally, before resetting a password by phone, they’d send a forced “Find My”-style push alert to all registered devices on the account saying something like, “Apple Customer Service has received a request to reset your iCloud password. Please call 1-800-WHATEVER within 24 hours if this is unauthorized.”

Then make the person call back the next day. If you forget your password and the answers to your security questions, it’s not unreasonable to expect a bit of inconvenience.

I’d even go as far as sending the password reset via snail mail. Your iCloud account is fucking important and, as Arment says, you’ve got no right to expect access to your account within the hour after you’ve lost your password.

wired.com

I never answer security questions because they’re by definition the exact opposite of secure but, hey, turns out that doesn’t matter one bit.

Amazon tech support gave them the ability to see a piece of information — a partial credit card number — that Apple used to release information. In short, the very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification.

Apple tech support confirmed to me twice over the weekend that all you need to access someone’s AppleID is the associated e-mail address, the billing address, and the last four digits of a credit card on file. I was very clear about this. During my second tech support call to AppleCare, the representative confirmed this to me. “That’s really all you have to have to verify something with us,” he said.

First you call Amazon and tell them you are the account holder, and want to add a credit card number to the account. All you need is the name on the account, an associated e-mail address, and the billing address. Next you call back, and tell Amazon that you’ve lost access to your account. Upon providing a name, billing address, and the new credit card number you gave the company on the prior call, Amazon will allow you to add a new e-mail address to the account.

Let’s launch an online service like everybody did, and we’ll figure out the kinks later. What’s the worst that can happen, people’s entire digital lives obliterated? Bah.

arstechnica.com

As of Friday, the company seems to have quietly given or replaced the display e-mail addresses of all of its users [on their profiles] with an @facebook.com address.

I thought, who cares? until I read this comment on Reddit:

Where I see this hurting most users is from automatic phone syncs of contacts. Running through my phone, I see all these @facebook email addresses now.

Remember what’s coming this summer? iOS 6, and automatic Facebook contact sync for everyone (I’m under the impression that it’s an option — haven’t installed the beta myself, but I read something to that effect on Twitter — but you can be sure that most people will enable it, because why wouldn’t they? it beats manually entering the info). It’s not like people use e-mail much these days, but it’s still definitely going to make a noticeable difference in usage, and it is a hijacking of people’s email accounts.

So, yeah, I’m moving this from “benign” to “evil.”

And, as a bonus:

Isn’t it funny how this privacy control doesn’t exist anywhere else in the profile settings, and its title (“Shown on Timeline” / “Hidden from Timeline”) doesn’t make any sense for what it actually does, and it can end up completely contradicting the regular privacy control that’s on its left (oddly enough, at Facebook’s benefit)? Even for Facebook, that’s oddly inefficient and obtuse UI, isn’t it?

david-smith.org

I’ve heard from many people who think that this isn’t possible. That once you pull an app from the store you must essentially abandon it. That is simply not true.

So long as you don’t actually delete the old version of the app within iTunes Connect you can continue submitting updates to apps even while they are in the Developer Removed from Sale state. Whether this is intentional functionality is unclear but I have verified that it does in fact work and the resulting approved updates are available for customers.

Interesting. I assume that "available for customers" means the update won’t be pushed to their devices and they have to use the purchases list to download it “again,” but that’s still better than nothing.

reddit.com

iOS 6 makes it pretty obvious, I think, that Apple has wanted to have turn-by-turn directions on the iPhone for a while, but couldn’t as long as they were using Google. And I would be surprised if Google hadn’t been asking for more and more money — or more and more ad impressions — with each iOS release. (Remember that Reddit post about Maps giving sponsored directions to another fast-food place than what the user asked for, even though it was twice as far? That’s definitely not Apple’s idea.)

I don’t think iOS 6 is Apple getting rid of Google out of pettiness; I’m certain they switched to a new data source in order to offer more functionality, and at the cost of removing less important functionality that TomTom can’t provide. (Turn-by-turn is much more important to the iPhone than transit maps — transit info will be available in free or cheap third-party apps, but turn-by-turn was an expensive App Store purchase and as a third-party app it couldn’t be integrated with Siri. Voice-operated turn-by-turn, included with the phone, is going to be a huge factor for many people hesitating between iPhone and Android.)

highlyscalable.wordpress.com

First, we should note that SQL and relational model in general were designed long time ago to interact with the end user. This user-oriented nature had vast implications: […] No one can expect human users to explicitly control concurrency, integrity, consistency, or data types validity. That’s why SQL pays a lot of attention to transactional guaranties, schemas, and referential integrity.

I had always wondered about that, and it never occurred to me that SQL could have been designed primarily for end users. So it does make sense that, when accessing my database from PHP, I feel no need to use stuff like foreign keys constraints in the schema itself, for instance.

(Can’t vouch for the rest of the article, still haven’t read it. It’s long, and I have to be in a more open and productive state of mind to appreciate what it’s offering.)

ignorethecode.net

I’m always surprised when someone mentions that they use Safari a lot on their iPad — I kinda avoid it like the plague. Not that it’s bad; it’s just that the tab management UI is absolutely not optimized for touch. I always refrain from opening a web link from an iOS app because I know it will result in Safari remembering to keep this tab open for months, even though I only wanted a glance at it once.

On the other hand, managing your open tabs — and managing your open apps, and a lot of other system-level stuff — is a pleasure on webOS. How does it work anyway, now that the system is open source? Does it make it possible for anyone to copy any aspect of the UX, or do the patents still apply to you if you aren’t actually using the code (and contributing your own code in return, by the law of open source)?

pandodaily.com

Under the “theft” conception of copyright law, what, exactly, is the deprivation when someone makes illegal copies?  It really boils down to just one thing:  money.  Copyright infringement – renamed copyright theft — deprives the copyright holder of some of his or her expected profit from exploiting the copyright. […]

Failure to pay expected money under a contract doesn’t trigger a penalty: contract law usually says that a party can recover the money she expected but not punitive damages or attorneys fees (unless parties have specifically bargained to pay attorneys fees for a breach).  Failure to pay rent usually requires payment of rent to cure the default.  Failure to put money in the parking meter prompts a ticket for $60.  In New York City, failure to pay the $2.50 subway fare results in a maximum fine of $100.

That’s an immensely seductive analogy, and I’m sure it’ll be widely linked and tweeted, but it’s also completely incorrect (and I’m rather disappointed that it’s written by a lawyer). People aren’t sentenced to pay astronomical damages because they downloaded a song, but because they uploaded it. The author mentions in passing that Jammie Thomas was found guilty even though it was never proven that anyone had downloaded a file from her, but I’m pretty sure I remember the argument being that she had offered them for download and that was enough — it still wasn’t about her downloading them.

To get back to the author’s analogy: people aren’t found guilty of jumping the turnstile, but distributing fake subway tokens… by the thousands. I don’t expect you’d get away with a $100 fine for that.

On the other hand, the author’s point about how copyright infringement came to be known as “copyright theft” is entirely right, and quite depressing.

tidbits.com

How Siri Disrupts Search – Siri doesn’t replace search, but in many cases it circumvents it by directing users straight to integrated partner services. When you ask for the nearest Indian restaurant there’s still a search taking place, but it’s through Yelp, not a generic search engine that would include Yelp plus various other results.

By skipping the search engine and going straight to a designated source there is no place to insert advertising.

It would be very interesting if that ended up preventing Google from adding Siri-like functionality to Android.

Smartphone users don’t mind that there are ads in Google searches, because that’s the way it is everywhere. They don’t mind the ads in Angry Birds, because that means they get Angry Birds for free. But if Google adds a complete voice interface to Android, and it’s full of ads? The comparison with iOS will be direct and undisputably detrimental. (Because, unlike third-party apps, this is a part of the OS, i.e. something the consumer feels like they’re paying for.) And if it’s not full of ads? Then Google would be killing some of its search engine’s ad revenue without producing anything to make up for it. So the only viable option is for Google to never ever add something as powerful as Siri to their mobile OS.

Considering how popular it’s getting, Siri could be the first really visible differentiator between Apple’s “you’re the customer” and Google’s “you’re the product.” It’ll be interesting to see how that turns out.

allthingsd.com

“I don’t believe that your phone should be an assistant,” the Android chief said. “Your phone is a tool for communicating. You shouldn’t be communicating with the phone; you should be communicating with somebody on the other side of the phone.”

What the hell?

Is he spouting random bullshit just to minimize the importance of Siri, or is he sincerely clueless about what a smartphone actually is?

marco.org

Prior to iOS 5, the system never deleted the contents of Caches and tmp, so they were safe places for apps to put data that should always be available but could be redownloaded if the user did a complete restore or otherwise lost all data, and therefore shouldn’t be taking up space in backups and slowing down syncs. […]

But in iOS 5, there’s an important change: Caches and tmp — the only two directories that aren’t backed up — are “cleaned” out when the device is low on space.

It’s properly ridiculous that this is happening in the version of the OS that introduces the Newsstand. Magazine apps download 300MB issues, are required by the developer guidelines to store them in the Cache folder, and… iOS is going to delete the issue without warning when it’s low on space? Nice forethought, guys. Particularly considering that, as Marco Arment points out, this problem is most likely to manifest itself precisely when you’re stocking up your iPad with media in anticipation for an internet-free trip.

Until it’s fixed, you know what this means: always leave a gig or two free on your device.

appleinsider.com

Karagounis [the group program manager of Microsoft’s Performance team] points out that "minimizing memory usage on low-power platforms can prolong battery life," noting that "In any PC, RAM is constantly consuming power. If an OS uses a lot of memory, it can force device manufacturers to include more physical RAM. The more RAM you have on board, the more power it uses, the less battery life you get.

"Having additional RAM on a tablet device can, in some instances, shave days off the amount of time the tablet can sit on your coffee table looking off but staying fresh and up to date," Karagounis wrote.

I always assumed it had to be negligible.

Actually, in operation, it probably be is — but the writeup specifically mentions battery usage when the tablet is sleeping, and that makes sense: RAM is just about the one and only thing that can’t be turned off at all while the device is idle.

When you see that the iPhone 4S loses one third of its standby battery life and the only reason I can imagine is Siri’s requirement for the gyroscope and accelerometer to stay on at all times (so that it activates when you put the phone to your ear), it makes sense that doubling the number of RAM transistors to power would have a noticeable effect after all.

Steve Jobs, in a 1996 interview about NeXT, reprinted in Wired’s homage edition on the iPad:

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.

shawnblanc.net

Steve said that each of the three user interfaces made possible a revolutionary new type of product. The mouse enabled the Macintosh. The click wheel enabled the iPod. Multi-touch enabled the iPhone. What will Siri enable?

The iPhone nano is coming, isn’t it?

kotaku.com

I’ve heard people say that he has difficulty with things, but the reality is that when I say prickly… Steve did not abide fools gladly. And I think that’s okay. I think we’ve got way too many fools.

Just quoting this for no particular reason. Not for self-serving purposes of any kind.

plus.google.com

Today a guy I know at Facebook told me that Apple just "went dark" this weekend and stopped answering emails and phone calls (they had amazing new iPhone and iPad apps and a new developer platform all ready for announcing). Folks inside Facebook thought they had done something massively wrong. No, they hadn’t. Truth is you had something deeper to deal with.

myglasseye.net

Across the board distinctive elements of each filter have been compromised. Filters that were washed out are now more contrasty. Filters that were contrasty are now more washed out. They’ve all drifted towards the same look.

I did feel like Instagram 2.0’s filters had gotten weaker, but couldn’t be bothered to check, and didn’t really want to believe they had screwed it up so much. Or maybe I didn’t want to find a confirmation because I knew it would piss me off and make me want to stop using the app. Look at the comparisons: basically, the original image’s colors appear in the final image much more than they used to in the most extreme filters.

I’m pretty sure I understand why: when I programmed my own photography app for iPhone, I did have to make choices between speed and filter intensity and richness. Some things can be achieved with GPU-accelerated functions, others can not.

But the problem is, Instagram made the wrong choice. They compromised their best asset, distinctive filters, to solve two problems that nobody cared about: low picture resolution and having to wait for the effects to be applied. Guess what: Instagram wouldn’t have become the success it has if that really bothered the public so much. (Yes, people are impatient, but Instagram was already quite fast. As for the resolution, Joe User definitely doesn’t give a damn that his pictures are now 2000-pixel wide.) Instagram was far from broken, and they tried to fix it.

Oh, and they made the interface worse, too — but I’ve already talked about that, and there’s no need for side-by-side comparisons to realize it. By the way, the article includes a quote from Instagram confirming that, no, you can not change the gradient on the tilt-shift feature (and you probably still won’t in the future, but at least it looks like they’re going to make it softer).

macsparky.com

Then I got home and my wife was really upset about it. My wife is a bit of a nerd too but she travels in circles of electronically connected paper-crafters and they are absolutely up in arms about this. To them, Google Reader is RSS. They don’t know of alternative services and as far as they know, new services will never again exist. They think RSS is going to die on July 1 and that’s that. Now some of them will figure out they can go elsewhere but some won’t. Those people will stop reading blogs via RSS and those blogs will lose readers.

That got me thinking. I’ve spent years building up MacSparky.com. There are thousands of RSS subscribers. How many will bother to sort out a new RSS system and subscribe again? The closing of Google Reader is going to result in the great RSS purge of 2013.

forbes.com

I don’t like to quote analysts (and I don’t like to link to Forbes blogs), but this is an excellent point:

More importantly, we believe AAPL needs to reclaim high-end leadership as that is what its brand is about.

It was okay for Apple not to have a 7-inch tablet because that segment was mostly defined by cheapness until they entered it. It’s okay for Apple’s laptop line to start at $999 because the only advantage competitors have is price — and unprofitable margins.

But there are people out there not buying iPhones (either holding off on their purchase, or moving to Android altogether) because they want a higher-end device, a potentially more expensive device, than anything Apple is willing to offer. That’s just wrong.

(Okay, the Mac Pro hasn’t been a worthy purchase in years, but I don’t think its potential market compares to that of 5-inch smartphones.)

macworld.com

REACT officers found McFarlin with help from Apple security, which tracked where the stolen devices were being used by matching their serial numbers with connections to Apple iTunes servers.

I want to see a regular joe use this precedent to demand in court that Apple help track their stolen MacBook.

coolhunting.com

If using folders or the "snooze" function isn’t for you, the ability to simply move messages up or down in the mailbox timeline allows for creating to-do lists of sorts. And all movements made in Mailbox also effect your accounts in their native formats so you won’t be confused when switching between web clients and Mailbox.

How on earth does that work? How do they manage to reorder messages in your Gmail inbox without changing the timestamps? Or do they actually change the timestamps, making your e-mail archive completely unreliable? I’m guessing the way they implement "snooze" is they move the message to their own servers, then move it back on a timer. (They have to have servers of their own with access to your inbox, since they’re offering push notifications.) Would you trust them with that?

This app looks extremely interesting, but e-mail is too vital for me to risk a third-party app screwing it up, or for that matter to let a completely unknown entity access and mess with my accounts — I’d much rather Google implemented those functionalities on their side.

appadvice.com

Changing hardware button functions has been argued as of recent, and denied to developers like TapTapTap, due to the fact that it’s not “what users expect” and could be confusing. TapTapTap and other camera app creators tried to use the volume buttons as options to activate the camera shutter to improve convenience but were ultimately deflected by Apple’s review team.

daringfireball.net

A world where Kindle hardware sales pale in comparison to the iPad but where there’s a very popular Kindle app for iPad that competes against iBooks is not a bad situation for Amazon. Apple is only selling e-books for use on their own devices; Amazon is willing to sell e-books anywhere they can.

That ought to be updated with “should be” — yes, it would be the smartest strategy for Amazon to focus on selling their e-books on whatever platform can read them, but I don’t think that strategy should include a comparative TV ad that goes head-on against the iPad. This move just makes no sense to me.

I’m guessing they’re afraid that iPad users might stick with iBooks and not bother to download the Kindle app… but the correct answer to that is definitely not to antagonize the iOS fanboys.

(Disclaimer: I’ve only watched the ad with the sound off, so for all I know they say the iPad is awesome and the Kindle is just complementary. But somehow I doubt it. Even though that’s exactly what they should say.)

kara.allthingsd.com

Normally, this API access is open and does not require permission. That is, unless some entity wants to access it a lot. In that case, Facebook requires an agreement for reasons primarily centered on protection of Facebook user data and, of course, infrastructure impact.

It’s hard to blame Facebook here. When Apple brags about having 160 million users, with credit card number on file, and decides to sic all of them (and simultaneously) on a Facebook app that will harvest the social network which Facebook took pains to cultivate for years (and for no other purpose than the harvesting itself — unlike, say, Zynga games which bring a lot of page views back to Facebook), you can’t quite fault Facebook for wanting to get some kind of compensation. Apple isn’t building something on top of the Facebook platform here, they’re trying to piggyback and supplant it.

It’s also easy to imagine Steve Jobs deciding — at the last moment, after long, failed negotiations — that Apple is big enough not to need Facebook at all, that it can just as well construct its social graph from scratch. Because that’s how much Steve Jobs and Apple know about social networking: not very.

If Apple is serious about Ping — and they should be, since music recommendations with inline preview have the potential to push a good deal of product — I wager that they’re the ones who will have to give in. Sure, people are signing up for Ping, but if my “entourage”’s experience is any indication, they’re not making a lot of friendship connections and, on Ping more than anywhere, the social graph is where the money’s at.

(I’m assuming that the provision regarding a compensation for extensive use of the API does exist in Facebook’s terms of use, but I see no reason to doubt it — and I’m too lazy to check — because it just makes sense.)

ilounge.com

According to Apple’s pages, the three-button remotes that were previously integrated into the headphones packaged with the iPod shuffle and iPod touch are now gone; all of the iPods are shown as coming with the same plain old earbuds, which would mean that the iPod touch now needs to rely on its rear-mounted microphone for audio input unless there’s something else hidden inside, or attached as an accessory. Apple’s base model Earphones with Remote + Mic sells for $29 as an upgrade.

Wow, that sucks. It isn’t absurd to make you buy a new set of earphones if you want to use your iPod touch for Skype (although, well, it’s a little absurd in that Apple wants you to use FaceTime), but it’s particularly annoying for the Nano.

In my writeup of the keynote, I was going to say that the new Shuffle had become the only iPod you can conveniently use without looking — whether in your pocket, or while doing something else. Then I edited the words out when I figured that the Nano would have a remote on the earphone cord. Without it, the touch-screen iPods offer terrible UI for real-world usage.

(And I can’t check right now because apple.com is hammered by people who desperately want to play with the new iTunes.)

engadget.com

I like card stacks — navigating both the list of running applications, and the list of open Safari tabs, is pretty much a chore on iOS, and Palm has a big advantage there by treating each web page as a separate open app (um, I think that’s how it works?). Just Type, or Quicksilver for mobile, is very promising if the API is well structured. And Exhibition, which lets apps display ambient information when the phone is docked, is something iPhone users have been dreaming of for years.

Nothing huge so far, but very nice refinements; I can’t wait to see what devices HP proposes to run this OS on. (Is there any chance at all we could be spared the inevitable iPad clone?)

slashgear.com

As for those small square things above the bigger cases, those are supposedly for the sixth-generation iPod Nano. The case seems to be created specifically for a touchscreen device, as the entire back of the gadget would be covered, but the whole front would not be. And considering we’ve heard rumors that the new Nano will lose that trackwheel, we’re beginning to think those earlier leaked images of the iWatch (or whatever) were indeed showing off the iPod Nano.

Oh man, it totally is time for an Apple watch, isn’t it? Just have the iPod nano display the time of day (with an OLED screen — where only the active pixels are lit — it may be possible to make the battery last, like, a whole day!), put interchangeable straps of leather on each side and, boom:  Watch.

And, yes, I’d buy it even though I haven’t worn a wristwatch in a year.

theappleblog.com

I’m reluctant to give my Google account credentials to a third-party app, but having bought an iPhone 4 and iMovie for iPhone in order to make pretty 720p videos [of my cat], I just can’t avoid it.

sfgate.com

"How could this possibly work?" said IDC Financial Insights analyst Aaron McPherson, adding that eliminating a merchant account is akin to dangling fresh meat for criminals. "They are just so overhyped and it seems to be entirely based on Dorsey’s celebrity."

First time I see anyone actually make sense in a Square writeup. (But the rest of the profile on Jack Dorsey is interesting.)

slashgear.com

Truth be told, it can all be summed up in just a few sentences: “I’m the last person on Earth who wanted to believe Steve Jobs when he told Walt Mossberg at D8 that ‘Flash has had its day.’ I’m sad to admit that Steve Jobs was right. Adobe’s offering seems like it’s too little, too late.”

Laughing Out Loud.

valleywag.gawker.com

"Apple’s policy allows for employees to have apps on the App Store if they’re developed and published prior to their start at Apple." But in fact, as Chen shows, three of Shoemaker’s seven apps went onto the app store weeks after his employment began, according to dates gleaned from Shoemaker’s Twitter accounts and from the iTunes profiles of his apps. In one case, a Shoemaker app was published over a month after Shoemaker started work at Apple; in two other cases, they were published nearly three weeks after his work began.[…]

Shoemaker himself is in the fart-app game with his pre-Apple offering Animal Farts

I don’t give a damn that the guy in charge of the App Store follows escorts on Twitter — it is a bit weird, but none of our business. But, really, Apple hired to direct the App Store a guy who made a fart app, a pee simulator, and poetry magnet apps?

Just… why?

jquerymobile.com

Great news! jQuery is updating for mobile platforms, I’ll finally be able to use it everywhere again! Oh, wait…

Note that we’re not releasing a separate “mobile only” build of jQuery. The bug fixes and workarounds that we develop will be included directly in mainline jQuery. You will be able to continue using the single script file containing jQuery and get all the benefits of working across all the new mobile browsers. Thus far these changes are only yielding a minimal increase in file size (no more than a couple hundred bytes) and no appreciable change in performance.

Well, that’s great, isn’t it — because jQuery is already too big to fit in most iPhones’ web cache* (meaning it has to be reloaded with every page, meaning page loads are slow, meaning you just can’t use it on an iPhone site**), so bigger is… better than… a mobile-only version… that would have been smaller… and would have worked.

I used to think that jQuery was the work of geniuses. But it seems that no open-source project can ever escape entropy. (It would be so simple to selectively load a different javascript file depending on the platform you’re running on — you know, if you intended to actually optimize for mobile browsers and mobile networks.)

* In case you want to tell me that jQuery is 24KB when gzipped: The object size limitation in Safari is based on the decompressed file. I just downloaded the latest minified jQuery, and it’s 70KB, so it would be cached on no iOS device except the iPhone 4.

** Unless you make it one single page that loads everything in Ajax, which is… well, I think it’s more acceptable on the mobile web than on the desktop, but it’s still poor form. And if you’re doing a full-on web-app, people want App Store apps instead anyway.

blog.twitter.com

You can very easily transform their branded button into a “Post to Twitter” bookmarklet for you to use anywhere, and it’s silly that they didn’t think to publicize that fact (but then, geeks haven’t been their main target for a while). I’d been looking for an official bookmarklet for a while now, one that wouldn’t need to go through third-party servers, especially since I’ve gotten my iPad: having to copy and paste URLs is a pain when hitting a bookmarklet should work just as well.

So here’s the bookmarklet (which you could conceivably extend to populate the tweet with selected text when appropriate, but I don’t care, and I don’t mind using copy-and-paste for that):

javascript:window.location='http://twitter.com/share?text='+ encodeURIComponent(document.title)+'&url='+ encodeURIComponent(window.location);

If you don’t see anything above, that’ll be because I put it in a textarea so it could easily be copied and pasted on the iPad. You can also drag this link to your bookmarks bar if you’re on a platform that provides such elaborate functionality. (You’d think maybe someday iOS would let users create bookmarklets without jumping through so many hoops?)

macgasm.net

That’s not a bad idea at all.

chipotle.tumblr.com

I’ve noticed the same effect: Mac and iPhone zealots tend to talk up how much they like their devices, while Windows and Android zealots tend to talk up how much they hate Macs and iPhones. This asymmetry has always struck me as odd.

Heh.

beautifulpixels.com

Every evening, at 8 p.m., you get an email asking you what your day was like. Reply, and send.

That’s an excellent idea, and the site looks pretty. Not that I would ever trust a third-party with my diary.

engadget.com

For the first time I can unambiguously write that the Kindle is a nice object. And it’s now quite affordable. Not to the point of having to lug it around in addition to my iPad, but for everyone who isn’t going to buy an Apple tablet, it’s time to get the Kindle.

"Xbox One runs 3 OSes" is like "a Windows 3.1 PC runs 2 OSes: DOS and Windows." Arguably not quite false, but at least pretty meaningless. {@}

Recevez mes tweets dès que je les poste en me suivant sur Twitter : @garoo, @ff00aa et @bewarethefrog.

STOP TRYING TO GUESS WHAT KEY I WANT TO PRESS YOU’RE A FUCKING MORON STOP HELPING. {@}

Recevez mes tweets dès que je les poste en me suivant sur Twitter : @garoo, @ff00aa et @bewarethefrog.

Cette angoisse montante quand ton “rm -rf *” met plus de temps à rendre la main que tu ne t’y attendais. {@}

Recevez mes tweets dès que je les poste en me suivant sur Twitter : @garoo, @ff00aa et @bewarethefrog.

Je comprends que Facebook ait viré la possibilité de commenter une demande d’ami (parce que spam) mais c’est quand même un peu user-hostile. {@}

Recevez mes tweets dès que je les poste en me suivant sur Twitter : @garoo, @ff00aa et @bewarethefrog.

Le site de la banque qui n’accepte la saisie qu’au pavé numérique o_O {@}

Recevez mes tweets dès que je les poste en me suivant sur Twitter : @garoo, @ff00aa et @bewarethefrog.