‘After the Honeymoon’

iPhone developer Phil Dhingra bought a Droid, and initially liked it. A lot.

A month later, he’s written a follow-up piece titled “After the Honeymoon,” outlining 20 things he dislikes about the device.

I love stuff like this — showing how people feel about their gadgets after the OMG IT IS SO DAMN SHINY AND NEW phase wears off.

Google’s ‘Open Manfiesto’

It’s a good read.

NES Emulator Slips into App Store

Sweet Moses, I’ve been waiting for this:

Kick it old school with games for the original Nintendo Entertainment System. Nescaline allows you to play a wide range of NES games on your iPhone and includes five public domain games developed as freeware. You may also use the download feature to add games to your library from any URL. Nescaline is not crippled; it will play a large number of games, both homebrew and commercial; it is up to the user to determine whether they have appropriate licensing to download and play any licensed titles.

Emulators are banned from the App Store, so I went ahead and dropped the $7 before Apple yanks it from iTunes. I added a few games easily — including Super Mario, which consumed several childhood years for my brother and I.

Sadly, the play is laggy, even on my 3GS. Sadly, I don’t think there will be many updates for Nescaline.

[iTunes link]

Apple Fixes 27-inch iMac Displays with Firmware

Apple Support:

Updates the graphics firmware on ATI Radeon HD 4670 and 4850 graphics cards to address issues that may cause image corruption or display flickering.

The iMac Graphics Firmware Update will update the graphics firmware on your iMac.

Now they just need to get the glass-breaking-in-shipping issue resolved.

iPhone on SNL

Touch Users Not Upgrading to OS 3 Quickly

Chitika:

Yes, we know it now costs $5, but looking at the numbers, it appears that users of devices with iPhone OS on them aren’t willing to pay for it. iPhone users, who have always been able to upgrade to OS 3.0 for free, use the more recent versions 94.4% of the time. iPod Touch users, who are required to pay between $5 and $10 depending on timing, only use 3.x 55.24% of the time.

[...]

If you take into account the number of iPod Touches purchased between iPhone OS 3.0’s release (June 17th, 2009) and the time of this report, the 55% becomes even more indicative of iPod users’ unwillingness to pay for OS updates. All iPod Touches over the past six months have had OS 3.x pre-installed on them already. Perhaps it’s time for Apple to give iPod Touch users the latest OS for free.

‘As Necessary as a 73-wheeled Bicycle’

John Welch on Adobe Reader and Apple’s Preview:

I don’t think that Adobe understands that there is a market for a lightweight application that does a minimum beyond viewing, and does so with a clean UI.

It’s not like all Preview does is let you view. You can do annotations, notes, add links, simple shapes, bookmarks, etc. You can combine PDFs or add pages from another file, (something you can’t do in Adobe Reader) delete pages, (can’t in Reader), etc. You can even add files in other formats that Preview supports, such as PNG, JPEG, etc., again, something Reader doesn’t support. (At least not in a generic not-tied-to-an-Adobe-server-farm configuration. You know. The way normal people would use it.)

Preview doesn’t support the collaboration or Adobe server tricks that Reader does, but again, if you’re that big of an Adobe customer, why aren’t you just licensing Pro or Standard? (On Windows at least. Mac users only get Acrobat Pro.) Preview doesn’t support PDF portfolios, but so what? For one thing, PDF Portfolios are rather counter to the idea that PDF should be a universal format. Right now, even the ‘big’ alternative to Acrobat, FoxIt, is still working on integrating Portfolio support, so if you use Portfolios, you’re requiring everyone who wants to read your work to ONLY use Adobe Reader 9.

So much for PDF as a pseudo open standard. So much for Adobe not trying to make PDF an Adobe-only standard. Pull the other one guys.

‘Will the Mobile Web Kill Off the App Store?’

I’m going to say no on this one.

AP Stylebook for iPhone Gets Reviewed

Macworld:

Unfortunately, the AP left some of the stylebook out of this mobile edition: some entries are less complete than those found in the paper version, and at least one refers to the stylebook’s Briefing on Media Law, which is not included here. Some entries with tables or graphics didn’t translate well, and URLs are not hyperlinked.

It’s not a full replacement for the printed version, but for quick things, I find myself opening it before I hunt down my Stylebook.

Mail Services Update 1.0

According to Apple, fixes include:

• Allows the Mail service to recover from an interruption in Directory Services

• Reduces Mail service memory usage

Now, if they’d just add push mail to the iPhone.

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