Melded Thought: the Links

IE9 Will Support Html5’s Video Element but Only with H.264 ➚

2010-04-30T15:39:12-06:00

From the official IEBlog:

The future of the web is HTML5. Microsoft is deeply engaged in the HTML5 process with the W3C. HTML5 will be very important in advancing rich, interactive web applications and site design. The HTML5 specification describes video support without specifying a particular video format. We think H.264 is an excellent format. In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only.

Merge Late ➚

2010-04-13T13:52:30-06:00

Brandon Loomis, reporting in The Salt Lake Tribune about research by Tom Vanderbilt that merging late when faced with a lane closure is best:

But one day, as his wife sat shamed in the passenger seat, the New Yorker decided to stay in the far-left lane till the very end, zipping past the queue of crawling cars until the barricade ahead forced him over. Bothered by the glares he got the one time he decided to be selfish on that New Jersey highway, he decided to find out what was the “right” approach to the imminent ending of a lane.

Merge early, with all of the decent citizens who put the common good ahead of themselves?

Nope. It turns out, Vanderbilt found, that those selfish buzzards who fly past on your left and then slide into line at the last possible second are doing everyone a favor. His research took him to states such as Pennsylvania, where traffic flowed 15 percent better after transportation officials encouraged late merging through electronic signs. It’s better to use the highway’s full capacity by going to the end of a lane, he said.

I think it worth pointing out that if more people recognized how merging late benefits the overall traffic flow, the soon-to-be-closed lane wouldn’t be left empty and therefore using it wouldn’t seem so rude.

“Its All About the Framework…” ➚

2010-04-12T11:10:36-06:00

Louis Gerbarg on Apple’s change in the iPhone OS developer agreement that prohibits apps written in third-party development environments, including Adobe’s Flash CS5 which includes an iPhone cross-compiler:

It is easy to blame all this on Apple, and you will find no end of blogs screaming about their monopolistic power-hungry tendencies. I certainly agree that Apple should probably be more open, and that they are the party with the power to resolve this. If people want to complain about that, you will not hear me defending Apple. The developers using Flash, Unity3D, and MonoTouch have my sympathy, and I understand their anger with Apple. The Adobe evangelists writing screeds get none though.

The reason is that I think Adobe holds much more of the blame. Adobe is a large company with a significant, and complicated, relationship with Apple. They have frequent high level contacts and meetings. Adobe has known for quite some time about Apple’s desire not to have Flash on the iPhone. There is no doubt in my mind that if they asked Apple to bless this they were rebuffed, and if they didn’t ask the only reason they didn’t was because they knew Apple would say no. In either event, they announced the product to their customers and sold them on an idea they were not in a position to deliver, hoping Apple would be unwilling to piss off developers by not fulfilling Adobe’s promises. They tried to force Apple’s hand by putting Apple in a position where in order stop the Flash they would have to do it publicly in front of Adobe’s users. That was a bad call on Adobe’s part.

Palm Said to Be Seeking a Buyer ➚

2010-04-12T05:06:51-06:00

Bloomberg reports that Palm, Inc. is putting itself up for sale:

Palm Inc., creator of the Pre smartphone, put itself up for sale and is seeking bids for the company as early as this week, according to three people familiar with the situation.

The company is working with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Frank Quattrone’s Qatalyst Partners to find a buyer, said the people, who declined to be identified because the sale isn’t public. Taiwan’s HTC Corp. and China’s Lenovo Group Ltd. have looked at the company and may make offers, said the people.

Not long ago, I would have thought that Palm would be a good acquisition target for Research in Motion, the maker of the famous BlackBerry mobile devices. The BlackBerry has a large and loyal following but the technology it runs on has not made the move to iPhone-style touch screens with much success, as evidenced by the lackluster Storm and Storm2. Palm is in the opposite position, with only a small user base but with a touch screen based OS (webOS) that has been well-received by critics. Alas, if RIM was looking to buy a new OS through acquisition, it may have already done so.

@Font-Face Support on the iPad ➚

2010-04-06T11:05:20-06:00

The TypeKit team has been experimenting with embedded web fonts on the iPad, and on Mobile Safari in general, and it looks like its not quite there yet:

We’re excited to roll out Typekit support for the iPad, and it looks like we should be able to do that in the next couple of days. However, because of these quirks in Mobile Safari’s support for @font-face, we’ll release this as an experimental feature that will be disabled by default — you’ll be able to enable support per kit in Kit Settings. We’ll post about it here as soon as it’s available, and we encourage you to experiment with it.

“The Mobile Web vs. the Objective-C Web” ➚

2010-04-05T23:47:31-06:00

Cameron Moll:

At one point in time, J2ME (now Java ME) and WAP were the starting points for a discussion on mobile strategy and the web. Then, for a brief period of time, you talked about HTML/CSS. Now, for a growing majority of mobile strategies that don’t require a global presence on widely varying devices, the discussion begins with iPhone. Smart client is now iPhone app, and in many cases, the app is primary to the experience, not secondary to the browser. And iPad app may soon replace iPhone app as the starting point.

New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. ➚

2010-04-05T23:27:12-06:00

This American Life is a radio series on NPR (National Public Radio) which recently aired an episode exploring the joint-venture between General Motors and Toyota called New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. or NUMMI. The venture started in 1984 with General Motors providing a recently closed plant in California and Toyota providing its now legendary manufacturing process. NPR Automotive Correspondent Frank Langfitt tells how Toyota’s processes turned one of the worst automobile plants in the world into one of the best and how GM’s stagnant corporate culture utterly failed to embrace change and copy this success to its other plants.

“The Kids are All Right” ➚

2010-04-03T16:01:24-06:00

John Gruber on the iPad’s impact on the rising generation of tinkerers (anecdotal but illustrative):

The iPad and iPhone are closed compared to personal computers, yes. But they are remarkably open compared to so many kinds of computing devices. Here’s an email I received today from Sam Kaplan:

I am 13 years old and a big fan of your site. I just made an app called iChalkboard. This is my second app, but my first iPad app. It allows you to simply sketch things out. Check it out: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/ichalkboard/id322491414?mt=8. If you need any more info or a promo code, feel free to ask.

I hope you like it as much as I do.

He’s 13 years old and he has created (with the help of his friend, 14-year-old designer Louis Harboe) and is selling an iPad app in the same store where companies like EA, Google, and even Apple itself distribute iPad apps. His app is ready to go on the first day the product is available. Not a fake app. Not a junior app. A real honest-to-god iPad app. Imagine a 13-year-old in 1978 who could produce and sell his own Atari 2600 cartridges.

Somehow I don’t think young Mr. Kaplan sees the iPad as hurting his sense of wonder or entrepreneurism.

Joel Johnson Responds to Cory Doctorow About the iPad ➚

2010-04-03T15:51:35-06:00

There is absolutely nothing about the iPad that portends the end of innovation, tinkering, programming, design. If that were the case, there wouldn’t be 150,000 applications on the App Store right this second. So what if you can’t make iPad programs on an iPad. I don’t complain I can’t make new dishwashers with my dishwasher.

The old guard has The Fear. They see the iPad and the excitement it has engendered and realize that they’ve made themselves inessential—or at least invisible. They’ve realized that it’s possible to make a computer that doesn’t break, doesn’t stop working, doesn’t need constant tinkering. Unlike a car, it’s possible to design a computer that is bulletproof. It just turns out that one of the ways to make that work is to lock it down. That sucks, but it certainly appears to be a better solution than design by committee gave us for the last couple of decades.

“Why I Won’t Buy an iPad (And Think You Shouldn’t, Either)” ➚

2010-04-03T16:00:48-06:00

Cory Doctorow:

Then there’s the device itself: clearly there’s a lot of thoughtfulness and smarts that went into the design. But there’s also a palpable contempt for the owner. I believe — really believe — in the stirring words of the Maker Manifesto: if you can’t open it, you don’t own it. Screws not glue. The original Apple ][+ came with schematics for the circuit boards, and birthed a generation of hardware and software hackers who upended the world for the better. If you wanted your kid to grow up to be a confident, entrepreneurial, and firmly in the camp that believes that you should forever be rearranging the world to make it better, you bought her an Apple ][+.

But with the iPad, it seems like Apple’s model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as appears in a billion renditions of “that’s too complicated for my mom” (listen to the pundits extol the virtues of the iPad and time how long it takes for them to explain that here, finally, is something that isn’t too complicated for their poor old mothers).