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.

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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.)

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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.)

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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.)

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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?)

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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?

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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.

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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?)

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macgasm.net

That’s not a bad idea at all.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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engadget.com

The design is clever enough (except I don’t see much in the way of protective padding for the iPad’s front glass) and it includes a battery for when you’re using your iPad literally all day long (as I am), so it’s awesome, right?

Well, if I’m reading the info correctly, they didn’t care to pay Apple the dock connector tax, so… if you want to use the included battery, you’ve got to connect the iPad to the stand with a USB cable. That’s a great deal of inconvenience for no less than $130.

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benward.me

The problem is because people don’t think about what they’re doing. People are infuriating like that, but it’s the truth of the matter. People see the function to pair the FourSquare and Twitter account so they do, and they see the function to broadcast their check-in to Twitter so they do. They’re in an application context of closed friends, and they don’t consider that they’re spreading information into different places.

Several interesting, well thought-out points about developing a social network or any kind of online service that interacts with them.

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news.cnet.com

This is turning into one of those charming cage matches in which wrestlers desperately try to maim each other with chains and chairs and blows to very private regions.

In a new video, posted to both its own Web site and to YouTube, Apple attempts to show that the dazzling new Motorola Droid X, which many seem to rather appreciate, also has something of an issue when it comes to being held in the Death Grip.

What this is turning into is a little kid who shouts "He does it too! And him! And him!" several hours after the matter has been settled by his parents — mostly in his favor.

We got it, Apple feels wrongly singled out in this matter, and at this point I have no idea and don’t really care one way or the other (even if it’s unfair, it still goes with the territory when you have the best, most adored phone on the market — and when you’re an arrogant ass about it); I just can’t believe they’re still updating their comparative page instead of letting the matter die.

(Yes, it’s only been a few days, but won’t you give the tech press a chance to move over already?)

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azarask.in

Way geeky (as in, you will never ever see that in Safari), but nicely done, for power users who live in their browsers.

I don’t ever have more than four tabs open at any given time now (mostly since I started using Reader Helper, and recently replaced it with either Instapaper or Read It Later), but a few years ago I would have had wet dreams after watching this video.

(It would also be nice on an iPad, though. I’m sure someone will post a half-assed, unusable version of this on the App Store soon enough.)

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