Vox Sylvatici » technology

Getting Things Right

Sylvaticus — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 16:21:59 +0000

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber muses on the preference to toss in every possible ability tool or feature and the opposite preference, waiting until the addition can be implemented well. He asks whether it might not be better to hold off adding a new feature until it can be “done right.”

It’s an important discussion.

Resolving Resolution

Sylvaticus — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 15:52:29 +0000

There’s been much made in the last several days about Apple’s Retina Display on the new iPhone 4. After Wired’s strongly worded article by Raymond Soneira of DisplayMate Technologies, prompted Phil Plait to respond, with what I feel is perhaps the most rational explanation of why Apple isn’t lying, as he concludes:

Still, the headline used by Wired.com was clearly incorrect; Jobs wasn’t falsely advertising the iPhone’s capabilities at all. I’ll note that I like Wired magazine quite a bit, and what we have here is most likely just an overzealous editor. But a lot of people read the headlines and it taints their view; someone reading that article may be more likely to think Jobs, once again, has overblown a product to excite people. He didn’t.

Phil Plait is no stranger to this topic, “having spend a few years calibrating a camera on board Hubble.”

Hindsight being what it is, perhaps Apple could have phrases like “for many,” and “for some,” but I think John Gruber, who has held the new phone and seen the Retina Display in action, have the way of it in his response to Samsung’s criticism

They can say this now, but they won’t be able to say such things and be taken seriously after the iPhone 4 is released and people have seen it in person. Until they figure out a way to make AMOLED visible in daylight, they’re not even in the game.

If Jobs is wrong, or worse, lying, then one has to ask if scientific exactitude is required for every everything we say. If that’s the new canon, there are a lot of liars out there.

Proprietary Standards

Sylvaticus — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 23:08:36 +0000

Earlier, I linked to Apple’s new HTML5 resource page. What I didn’t realize at the time was that the very page that trumpets open standards and purports to demonstrate their value works “only” in Safari (customizations not implemented in the HTML5 or CSS3 standards) and “blocks” other browsers (browser sniffing). You can read Christopher Blizzard’s excellent critique here. (Hat tip Daring Fireball.)

Apple Creates Resource for Open Standards Development

Sylvaticus — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 14:03:08 +0000

Apple has created a new HTML5 and web standards resource page. A link is provided for developers to learn more about HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, and web standards which allow them to create rich website experiences.

Briefs

Sylvaticus — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 13:50:08 +0000

As I mentioned in briefly in the iPhone OS Services post, Briefs is a new iPhone prototyping tool, and hopefully, soon to be an app in the iTunes Store.

If you’re thinking about developing for the iPhone or iPad, take a look.

I can’t close without mentioning that the icon (and demo vid—warning: uses the F-bomb) are hilarious and worth a look on their own merits.

Services for the iPhone?

Sylvaticus — Fri, 04 Jun 2010 13:36:12 +0000

Chris Clark of Release Candidate One makes a brilliant suggest to implement Services (here and here) for the iPhone OS. He explains:

If you’re not familiar, the Mac’s Services menu is something it inherited from NeXTSTEP, and it’s not unlike the Unix command line’s pipe. A Service takes the current selection and sends it to another application to be worked on, which may or may not pass the result back to the original caller. Services are under-utilized on the Mac because we’re so accustomed to copy and paste, drag and drop, and the routine of saving a file to the desktop with one application so you can open it with another. But iPhone OS, lacking two out of three of these options, could foster a Services explosion.

Of note in the post is the use of the excellent iPhone prototyping tool, Briefs.

Dolphins Using iPads

Sylvaticus — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 16:50:06 +0000

TUAW cites an article (PDF) about people training dolphins to use iPads to communicate. Very cool.

“Fa love Apple!”

Remove the OS X OpinionSpy Spyware

Sylvaticus — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 15:34:57 +0000

Mac OS X Hints has a post with a link to an article on the Guardian that shows how to remove this vile bit of code. I like OS X Hint’s advice better for searching in Activity Monitor, but regardless, you should verify if you do or don’t have it and take steps to remove it if you do.

iPad Debuts in Surgery

Sylvaticus — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 17:46:10 +0000

Dailymotion (hat tip CrunchGear via 9 to 5 Mac) has a video showing Japanese doctors using an iPad to display the area upon which they’re operating. I note that it seems the camera operators made a deliberate effort to show the monitors normally used off to one side being ignored.

This can only be a sign of things to come both for technology and medicine.