November 2011
31 posts
I’ve talked about phones with comically large screens before, and the recent Galaxy S II campaign seems to be asserting that consumers want bigger phones. Says who?
Show me the data that says users want bigger phones. Some people point to overall Android market share and conclude that because it’s “winning”, and because many popular Android phones1 have comically huge...
Cloudy with a Chance of Nurupo
iCloud’s launch probably wasn’t as big of an impact as Apple would have wanted. Everyone had really high expectations for it and that it would radically change how iOS users interact with apps on multiple devices. It didn’t quite turn out that way.
The obvious first things to complain about are sync issues. As mentioned in my earlier post, mine seem to be fairly...
Instacast FAQ: Why is iCloud Sync not working? →
“If you’re deleting the Instacast.icast file and the system is telling you that some changes are pending, this means that the iCloud service is stuck somehow. I couldn’t yet figure out why, but I have reports that deleting everything and starting over solves the problem sometimes.”
When it works1, iCloud is awesome. Problem is, when it doesn’t work, there’s no...
“One posits the argument:
Nothing is better than eternal happiness.
Eating a...”
– Fallacy on Wikipedia. Got a laugh out of that one.
Walking Around Tokyo →
A YouTube playlist of a guy with a camera walking around Tokyo.
Because I really needed something else to make me go OMG LATE MARCH GET HERE NOW
David on Kachingle →
I hadn’t even heard of Kachingle prior to this, but most of this could apply to Readability (which has resurfaced in the media this week) as well. It’s also worth reading the four tweets referenced in this post by Ben Brooks.
The Verge: Is this the first BlackBerry with the... →
The phone is ugly. The status bar font is ugly and too big. Otherwise, this is lovely and it should come out ASAP.
Andy Ihnatko's Photo of Amazon Fire Apps →
The Kindle Fire embargo was lifted last night and reviews have been coming out left and right, more or less saying exactly what I thought they’d say. (It’s the best Android tablet to date by a long shot and definitely the best tablet you can get for that price.)
But… wow. What the hell is up with those third-party developers and their icons? Some are squares, some are round...
r-ch is back. →
I’ve neglected my site since December of 2009. But now it’s back, and powered by another opinionated static site generator I happened to write. I hope to turn it into something more like a personal wiki over time, as it’s kinda bare right now.
AnandTech: Mozilla Developing Open Web Mobile OS →
Gonk.
That’s not an onomatopoeia, it’s the name of their upcoming mobile platform.
The Bygone Bureau: Cafe au Maid →
A piece offering a normal person’s perspective on maid cafés. Tempted to go to one when I’m out in Japan next year just to tick it off the checklist, but I’m not sure maids are really my thing.
The Problem with Batch
A friend of mine worked on Batch, a photo sharing app for the iPhone, and the latest in the horde of apps requiring you have a Facebook account. The app is pretty damn good; it’s pretty, it uploads crazy fast, even on 3G, and it’s better suited for sharing albums (batches) than single pictures of a moment (which Instagram is better at). I told my friend when I first used it that it was...
Evacuate the Dancefloor on Wikipedia →
Having decided the hook line should be “something-something-dancefloor”, they managed to complete the phrase by Googling for “nice words and weird combinations of words”. They then built the story of the song around it.
I hope Google is getting paid royalties.
2 tags
"Gmail app for iPhone vs web" →
In case you weren’t aware the briefly-available Gmail app was just the mobile Web app shoehorned into native navigation bars and toolbars, here’s a set of screenshots comparing the two, courtesy of Matt Gemmell.
The mobile Web app is amazing for a Web app. Shoehorning it into a native app, where expectations are much higher, is setting yourself up for failure.
BBC News: Canadian senator wants polar bear as new... →
You know, this is the first time in my entire life I’ve heard about our senate doing anything at all and it’s about pointless shit like whether polar bears or beavers should be our national emblem.
No wonder everyone was trying to axe the senate during the last election.
I honestly have no idea what Twitter for Mac’s cache is like internally, but it seems to be a mess. Not only does it often take several restarts of the app for it to pick up on avatar changes, but it just behaves weirdly.
Twitter for Mac has two different avatars for halcy in its cache, but neither of them are his current one. One of them (in the timeline) is his previous avatar, and the...
