The second one is worth a mention here:
“Google is having trouble making money from anything but search, which is why, he says, hardly a week goes by without word of another Google innovation. “Last week it was Google broadband. This week it’s Google TV. It’s all a big joke. Even Android is a joke.”
Beautiful.
I was reading Marco’s latest post about Instapaper for iPad last night, and as I saw the screenshots of the new version I realized something: developers seem to see the bigger screen of the new device only as a way to put more information on screen, rather than a way to lay out information in a different way.
Don’t get me wrong, of course with a bigger screen you’d like to insert more interface elements and stuff - the point is, you don’t necessarily have to. Instead of focusing on how to fill that space with elements that would be located in a different window otherwise, why not thinking about how to explore new ways to present information?
We all know Webkit is a fantastic engine, just as we all appreciate its 3D capabilities and css transforms effects when we see a well implemented one. But when I thought I had seen everything Webkit could offer (or at least a good part), there I stumbled upon this article on HplusMagazine, describing the Text 2.0 project, an enhanced reading experience that combines (or should, at last) eye tracking, neat javascript and CSS tricks to create a brand new, revolutionary way of reading web content.
You’ve probably read John Gruber’s post about backups last week, the one where he talked about his experience with a damaged internal hard drive and, luckily for him, the way he managed to save data with Dropbox, Super Duper, Disk Warrior and a couple of external hard disks.
I think John made some strong points in suggesting to purchase not one, but a couple of external hard drives - as you really don’t know when a hard drive is gonna fail. Just as an internal drive can die, so a Firewire one with all your backups can.
Anyway, there are some other practices I’ve gotten used to follow over time I’d like to talk about.
“Don’t think of them as tablets. Think of them as windows that you carry.”
Craig Hockenberry on the problems developers had to face with beta testing, device IDs and Ad Hoc distributions:
”[…] the limitation for Ad Hoc provisioning should be based around individuals, not the devices that they own. It makes more sense to regulate Apple IDs rather than UDIDs. I want John Gruber to be able to run my apps on whatever devices he currently owns. I want to put my own name on the provisioning list and enable the five iPhone OS devices sitting on my desk. All that Apple cares about is that are only 98 other people besides Gruber and me.”
Jim Dalrymple, at The Loop:
“What Amazon has going for it is a strong, existing customer base. For the same reason Apple’s competitors find it hard to compete in the music and video space, Apple will find it hard to compete against Amazon.
However, I don’t think that will last long. Apple has one of the best mobile delivery systems ever built in iTunes. That is going to be key to e-book distribution for Apple and they have a proven track record. They can get it done.”
That of Mozilla’s Firefox not supporting the de-facto standard H264 video format is a well known problem many people wrote about recently. I think John made the best analysis of the situation, depicting the absurd situation Mozilla is throwing itself into by supporting the .ogg format, together with Opera. From the post:
“So, even those using the latest version of Firefox will be treated like they’re using a legacy browser. Mozilla’s intransigence in the name of “openness” will result in Firefox users being served video using the closed Flash Player plugin, and behind the scenes the video is likely to be encoded using H.264 anyway.”
Whether Mozilla will finally understand that H264 is the format to support it’s unknown to us, but - technically speaking - there are some problems that Philip Hutchison over at Pipwerks tried to fix with a simple script. Indeed, Firefox does support the HTML5 <video> tag, but the linked video file should be encoded in .ogg rather than H264. As Philip writes:
“Firefox is essentially forcing people to offer two versions of each video: an Ogg version and an MP4 version. In my opinion — and the opinion of many others — this simply will not do. Providing two different video files is not realistic, Ogg’s quality is inferior to H.264, and many computers and mobile devices have direct hardware support for H.264 but not Ogg. Firefox’s HTML5 video is rendered useless.”
The problem is, Firefox 3.6 knows it can’t play an MP4 file but it loads the <video> element anyway, just because it’s a supported tag. This script will detect if HTML5 is supported, see if it’s Firefox who tries to open it and if so, the video element is deleted and the flash fallback stays there.
But all in all, if Mozilla really wants to stay in the market and keep a good slice of the market share, they need to accept standards and stop rambling about openness with unsupported, inferior formats. I think openness is when you support something widely accepted as a high quality standard, and not when you stick with license-free but unpopular or even closed formats.
