I wasn’t convinced the tile UI would work, but seeing it in action has changed my mind.
Developer of a basic flashlight app gets almost $1400 from one day of iAds revenue.
Pivot Power is a community-developed power strip that can adapt to bulky plugs and chargers.
It looks like a great design, but its a shame there it can’t take UK plugs.
A short film created entirely with the iPhone 4 camera and iMovie editing app.
Thomas Fuchs with some tips from making his Time Zones app.
Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy discusses the science behind Apple’s claim that you can’t you cannot see the individual pixels on the iPhone 4 Retina display.
Khoi Vinh:
Creating a beautiful display and patting yourself on the back for having good typography is disingenuous, I think. It’s a little like saying a high-definition television set makes for better television shows; an absurd claim at best.
From Jason Garrett-Glaser’s analysis of Google’s VP8 (emphasis mine):
But first, a comment on the spec itself.
AAAAAAAGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!
The spec consists largely of C code copy-pasted from the VP8 source code — up to and including TODOs, “optimizations”, and even C-specific hacks, such as workarounds for the undefined behavior of signed right shift on negative numbers. In many places it is simply outright opaque. Copy-pasted C code is not a spec. I may have complained about the H.264 spec being overly verbose, but at least it’s precise. The VP8 spec, by comparison, is imprecise, unclear, and overly short, leaving many portions of the format very vaguely explained. Some parts even explicitly refuse to fully explain a particular feature, pointing to highly-optimized, nigh-impossible-to-understand reference code for an explanation. There’s no way in hell anyone could write a decoder solely with this spec alone.
And the result of this type of spec?
The encoder and decoder share a staggering amount of code. This means that any bug in the common code will affect both, and thus won’t be spotted because it will affect them both in a matching fashion.
A patch to fix a bug in the decoder has already been removed instead of fixing the same bug in the encoder.
The NEX-5 is Sony’s first attempt at a mirror-less camera with interchangeable lenses. A very good attempt too, and its even smaller than my Panasonic GF1 even though it has a bigger sensor and articulated screen.
Another fourth-generation iPhone has fallen into the wrong hands, this time to a Vietnamese forum. They claim a Vietnamese businessman bought it in the US and bought it back to Vietnam.
This one seems closer to a production model than the one Gizmodo bought; it has a storage capacity marked on the back, the screws on the bottom are gone, and it actually boots. Looking closer at one of the photographs, it does appear that the new iPhone has a much higher resolution than older models.
It’s a distinctive look, although not exactly pretty.
iPad pricing in the UK is out. 16GB: £429, 32GB: £499, 64GB: £599. Plus another £100 if you want 3G.
Removing UK VAT (at 17.5%) and converting the price to USD at $1.47 per GBP, a UK iPad is slightly more expensive than the equivalent US sold model.
| Model | UK Price | US Price | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|
| 16GB WiFi | £429 | $499 | +$35.70 |
| 32GB WiFi | £499 | $599 | +$23.28 |
| 64GB WiFi | £599 | $699 | +$48.38 |
| 16GB WiFi+3G | £529 | $629 | +$32.81 |
| 32GB WiFi+3G | £599 | $729 | +$20.39 |
| 64GB WiFi+3G | £699 | $829 | +$45.49 |
No news yet on the cost of a 3G data plan.
A dog that has been seen at nearly every demonstration in Athens over the last two years has turned up again during the recent protests against new austerity measures.
Steve Jobs on Flash:
Besides the fact that Flash is closed and proprietary, has major technical drawbacks, and doesn’t support touch based devices, there is an even more important reason we do not allow Flash on iPhones, iPods and iPads. We have discussed the downsides of using Flash to play video and interactive content from websites, but Adobe also wants developers to adopt Flash to create apps that run on our mobile devices.
We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform. If developers grow dependent on third party development libraries and tools, they can only take advantage of platform enhancements if and when the third party chooses to adopt the new features. We cannot be at the mercy of a third party deciding if and when they will make our enhancements available to our developers.
