Day: 5 March 2012

Is Ice Cream Sandwich Out Yet? ⇥

Vlad Savov:

[W]e’re sat watching as a two-stage software update roadmap develops. One is for Google’s own, the Xooms and the Nexuses of the world, and the other is for everyone else, leaving Android phone owners at the mercy of quixotic phone makers and myopic carriers.

Carriers are aren’t worried, manufactures can’t be bothered, and Google is too busy to care, so the user loses. They’re not just losing out on new APIs and the new user interface, but also on important bug and security fixes. Rooting simply isn’t a viable option for most users. Everyone needs to step up and deliver here.

Proview Fights for iPad Trademark All the Way to Bankruptcy ⇥

It’s a lot harder to pursue a trademark case when you’re bankrupt. And that could soon be the scenario faced by Proview, the Taiwanese company that is asserting that it—and not Apple—owns the iPad trademark in China.

That went well.

24/192 Music Downloads are Very Silly Indeed ⇥

Christoper Montgomery clears up the many misconceptions of digital audio. He cites a study that compared a variety of audio formats and qualities:

In 554 trials, listeners chose correctly 49.8% of the time. In other words, they were guessing.

Precisely. And this was only with 16-bit audio. Virtually nobody can tell the difference, and almost no consumer-grade equipment can replicate it.

Submit a Radar, or GTFO ⇥

Daniel Pasco notes that filing radars is a great thing (duh), and that duplicating existing radars is even better:

Frequently, at least one other person will have reported the issue that you did. A lot of people get frustrated by this, because they think that their report has been summarily dismissed […]

Filing a duplicate bug is your way of up-voting, or bumping, a reported issue. The more duplicates that show up for a specific issue, the higher priority that issue becomes.

Well said. If you want to encourage people to duplicate your radar and ensure that something gets fixed, OpenRadarHelper is a great Safari extension by Guillaume Campagna. It posts radars filed through Apple’s Bug Reporter to OpenRadar, and vice-versa, so you can link people to the OpenRadar copy. Smart.

Frequent, Intense Mature and Suggestive Themes ⇥

Of course the App Store is inconsistent. We all know this. Marco Arment points out yet another instance of this, and one that forces developers into an awkward spot with any app that accesses user-generated content.