Day: 7 February 2012

Pears ⇥

Dan Cederholm has created a public tool to exchange common patterns in markup, especially with regard to WordPress themes. As he explains:

I wanted to create my own database repository of commonly used patterns and figured the tool might be useful for others as well. Breaking interfaces down into patterns has been immensely helpful in learning and reevaluating the best possible code to implement them. I’ve just gotten started and will be adding more as I create them.

But Pears isn’t about how I code these patterns—it’s a tool for creating your own.

Very clever. I should probably rebuild this theme using markup that conforms to pesky patterns and what I hear are “best practices”.

Regarding Path’s Mass-Uploading of User Data ⇥

Peter Clark:

This is why developers need explicit guidelines, because as they just demonstrated if there are no guidelines companies default to the thing that exploits the end user!

In response to Path’s CEO:

This is currently the industry best practice and the App Store guidelines do not specifically discuss contact information. However, as mentioned, we believe users need further transparency on how this works, so we’ve been proactively addressing this.

Translation: “we got caught doing something we didn’t tell anyone about, but nobody told us not to so we assumed it was okay.”

Chrome For Android ⇥

A curious omission from Android is finally complete. M.G. Siegler points out:

One other bit of intrigue: Chrome for Android will be a part of the Google Apps package. This means that once Chrome fully replaces Browser on Android, there will no longer be a browser that’s a part of the open source Android.

Another interesting choice by Google. They point out that Chromium will still be open source, but Chrome for Android will not. My guess is that they did this to prevent Amazon, et. al. from benefiting too much with their otherwise-diverged tablets.

Finally, Google has confirmed that Chrome for Android will not support Flash. This is in direct contrast to the move they made last year on the desktop browser. Reviews mention that the Android browser supports “HTML 5 video”, but do not specify which codecs.

Path Uploads Your Entire iPhone Address Book to Its Servers ⇥

Arun Thampi:

Upon inspecting closer, I noticed that my entire address book (including full names, emails and phone numbers) was being sent as a plist to Path. Now I don’t remember having given permission to Path to access my address book and send its contents to its servers, so I created a completely new “Path” and repeated the experiment and I got the same result – my address book was in Path’s hands.

I assumed this would be covered in Path’s privacy policy, but this is the only reference I could find:

We actively collect certain information you voluntarily provide to us, such as when you create an account and profile, send us an email or post information or other content to our site.

[…]

For example, we may use personal information we collect:

[…]

• for any other purpose for which the information was collected.

Despicable.