The Hopp Stop

• Cut the Rope, a very fun iPhone/iPad game, has a free holiday version out. Recommended.
• Marco the Tumblr gets to use an enduring rotary phone with his Verizon FiOS connection.
• Spencer Hall with another hilarious column at Every Day Should Be Saturday, this time centering on the West Virginia hiring of a football coach-in-waiting.
• The Times has been running a series over the last week on the 1960 plane collision over NYC that resulted in a plane crashing in Park Slope. This article on the state of the neighborhood in 1960 is a great read if you’ve seen the vitality of the neighborhood today, or are interested in urban planning and post-war urban decay in US cities. It’s remarkable how much of urban decay was caused by a combination of lending practices (encouraging a move to suburbs by middle-class whites) and racism.
• This post, another in the Park Slope crash series, has a great 1960/2010 matched photo of the wreckage.
• I love the National, so I really enjoyed this Pitchfork interview with Aaron Dressner, one of the musical forces behind the band.

• Published just before this week’s US State Dept. leaks from WikiLeaks, Forbes has an in-depth look at WikiLeaks and the future of data security.
• This NY Times article on port (and the recent decline in consumption) reminds me that it has been too long since I’ve had a nice glass of port after dinner. I used to regularly get a glass at Garçon on 22nd and Guerrero in SF when V and I would pop in for dessert on a weekend evening.
• Carcassone is coming for the iPad this month. This should make Vanessa very happy.
• This is the first detailed story I’ve seen on the Stuxnet virus that someone (the article proposes a consortium of Western intelligence agencies) created and deployed to cripple Iranian centrifuges used in their nuclear program. Fascinating story. Hat tip to Daring Fireball for the link.
• A new life form has been discovered in Mono Lake (by Yosemite) that ”is made of arsenic, something that was thought to be completely impossible.”
• Via Daring Fireball, a great overview of using Google Voice on the iPhone. I’m still holding back from jumping in with both feet on a move to using my GVoice # as my primary number, in part because there are still advantages to the native apps. Also, I tried to start texting via Google Voice and ran into problems receiving replies.
• Is this a joke? Qatar was awarded the 2022 World Cup over the US? WTF. Moving beyond my disappointment that the Cup won’t be here in the States, I don’t think I’ll travel to Qatar for the games. 118 degree temps and no social life in the country? Sign me up. I imagine ticket sales will be really strong, given that US fans bought more tickets than anyone outside of South Africa for the most recent Cup. [/sarcasm] Final complaint: in a warming world, how is it socially conscious for FIFA to endorse a plan that makes the oppressive heat tolerable by air-conditioning outdoor stadium?

• Earlier this year GQ magazine ran a great oral history of the making of GoodFellas. Lots of fun tidbits therein. I find these oral histories to almost always be total winners. E.g., previously GQ had an oral history of the making of Dazed and Confused (my Googling is coming up empty on that, sorry).
• Fluxblog, a great music blog, has its year-end “survey mix” of material from 2010. Eight discs worth of MP3s to download and check out.
• Very fun new tower defense game for iPhone/iPad (universal app): iBomber Defense. I’ve been enjoying it over the last couple days. Here’s the Touch Arcade review.

Earlier this year, I shifted my daily links to the sidebar (Links of Interest?). The downside of the move is that I can’t add any commentary–or rather, it doesn’t show up in the sidebar. I’m going to reverse that move starting today and add some additional thoughts.

• James Fallows summarizes the state of security thinking in the US, in light of the recent TSA kerfluffle. As I was telling Vanessa last night, my big issue with the “nude” x-ray machine, enhanced patdowns, etc., is that they don’t make me any safer than under prior security measures, but instead are part of security theater. Fallows touches on this in his post. If I felt that these measures represented a change in thinking in the TSA, a move away from responding to the last near-miss (in this case, the Christmas 2009 underwear bomber), I would be willing to give up some convenience and some dignity. Until then, the TSA is just another source of frustration in my life.
• Photos of the long-closed City Hall Station on NYC’s 6 subway line. Spectacular station, complete with skylights.
• Another great essay on the TSA.
• Robot Unicorn Attack, Christmas Edition! Phil Kong introduced me to this amusing iPhone game from Adult Swim.
• Loving Coffee Without Being a Drip: amusing story from NY Times food critic Frank Bruni on his search for a better coffee experience than Mr. Coffee and the French press. He mentions the Japanese V60 system, which Ritual in SF switched to from French presses earlier this year. I’ve been using the Bialetti stovetop espresso maker lately, as the chalkiness of French press coffee is getting tiresome, and may give the V60 system a try.

A nice feature add by Apple in iOS 4 (the latest software rev for iPhones and iPod touches) is enhanced Gmail support. Beyond the threaded conversation feature, which supports all types of mail accounts, the Gmail account type (found when you go to set up a new account in Settings) now supports archiving under Gmail, such that “deleting” a message (air quotes because the icon in Mail has not changed) now removes the Inbox label from the message and leaves it in the All Mail folder. In addition, a horizontal swipe of a message or bulk editing of messages has a revised “Archive” text label, rather than saying “Delete.” Note that this archiving feature can be turned off.

You also get a nifty Gmail icon for your inbox now. Macworld has a nice article up on these revisions.

I previously set up this behavior myself using an “Other”-type mail account (as the prior Gmail preset available when you created a new account did not support IMAP), combined with a few tweaks of the trash can location.

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A few smartphone notes (or rather, a few app phone notes, as David Pogue calls the latest wave “app phones”):

I have been frustrated with the AT&T network failings, with the most recent issues occurring down at Stanford, where it’s impossible to make a call or use data on football Saturdays. Presumably this is a similar issue to being at Coachella or South by Southwest, where the iPhone has such a high market penetration that it overwhelms AT&T’s cell towers. In addition, Apple’s App Store review and approval process continues to frustrate both end users like me as well as app developers. The Droid has received excellent reviews, the Android platform is open and allows such niceties as superior Gmail access and multitasking, the Droid has a physical keyboard and, perhaps most importantly, it runs on the Verizon network. So I picked up a Droid and decided to test it out for some part of the 30-day return period.

After about ten days, I have returned my Droid. There is much to like about it, and if I was not coming from an iPhone 3GS, I would love the Droid. But in the end, there is one minor failing and one major failing that prevents it from being the home run that would cause me to make it my primary pocket companion.

The minor failing? A miserable physical keyboard. The keys, as they must be on a smartphone, are very tightly packed, but these keys have no almost no vertical differentiation, just a slight doming, and very little key travel. Compare this to the Palm Treos, such as my dear old Treo 650. While those keys existed in an even smaller area, they had nicely domed keys that allowed you to tell when you were on a different key and a key action that provided a satisfying click when you successfully pressed a key. Perhaps such domed keys are more difficult to achieve on a hideaway keyboard because the keyboard must fit within a smaller vertical space, but the T-Mobile G1 (the first Android phone) has a better keyboard than the Droid, so improvement is possible.

The Droid’s keyboard is also too close to the left side of the device (when held with horizontal orientation) and too far away from the right side, so one’s thumbs soon grow tired of the necessary contortions. These location problems stem from the inclusion of a 4-way + button pad on the right side of the keyboard, which slides the keyboard to the left. Given that the Droid has a touch-screen, I’m not sure what function the 4-way pad serves. It doesn’t save much time to toggle a physical button compared to reaching up to the screen with your thumb to select, say, the next text-entry box, and removing it would allow for a much more satisfying keyboard location.

The saving grace for the Droid is a good on-screen keyboard (although not as good as the iPhone’s), but it means that the physical keyboard does not provide an advantage over the iPhone and just adds some bulk–the Droid is a bit thicker than the iPhone.

Can anyone guess the Droid’s major failing? Yep, it is application support from third-party software companies. Despite frustrations with the iPhone App Store, developers have great economic incentive to write software for the iPhone, because Apple’s early-mover status among app phones and the superior hardware and software platform gave it market penetration and momentum. At this point, there are so many iPhones and iPod Touches out there compared to any competing app phone that most developers create an iPhone version, then  maybe, maybe they will write an Android or Palm WebOS version. The Mac-centric developers (those coming over from writing actual Mac OS X apps) have both an advantage over other, non-Mac developers in making the transition due to coding familiarity and an affinity for OS X as a coding platform. Take Things, the wonderfully designed and coded task manager on the Mac, unfortunately graced with a less than spectacular name. There is an iPhone version that, as much as possible, shares aesthetic commonalities with the Mac version. How likely are its developers at Cultured Code to make an Android version? Beyond issues of moving to a new development platform for an app phone that they are unlikely to use themselves, there are economic issues of market size and app sell-through rates within markets. It just doesn’t pay as much to develop on non-iPhone platforms, at least at this point.

I found myself time and again using an iPhone app in the last ten days that 1) requires a data connection, thus requiring use as a cell phone (rather than WiFi) and 2) was unavailable on the Android, with neither the actual iPhone app or a comparable substitute offered.

Here’s to the Android succeeding to the extent that it becomes a viable alternative to the iPhone, providing real competition and choice for app phone users. At this point, however, I think there is only one choice, and that is still the iPhone 3GS.

After tasting some of the joys of the Android, such as running apps in the background (something currently prohibited on the iPhone), I decided to take another look at jailbreaking my iPhone. There are a few cool new programs out there for jailbreakers, including an app that tricks programs like Skype and Slingplayer into thinking they are on a WiFi network when they are actually on a 3G cell network. That matters because AT&T has forced those programs to run only on WiFi, presumably to prevent network overload. You can also install a tethering program to let your laptop use your iPhone’s 3G connection–something promised by AT&T for most of this year, but with no signs of delivery yet. (And based on my recent Stanford experience, something that’s unlikely to be realized soon.) The coolest thing, though, is the combination of Backgrounder (free app) and a background windows manager (some free, some pay). These let you designate, on the fly, a program or programs to run in the background until you change that designation, and allow you to easily switch between the running programs. The implementation is very slick and works quite well, with little performance degradation on my iPhone 3GS. Battery life does go down a bit, and performance would be degraded more on a slower iPhone or iPhone 3G, but I’m very satisfied so far.