venomous porridge

Jul
8th

Thu

What if Apple made an iPad with the same pixel density as the iPhone 4?

I’ve had my iPhone 4 for two weeks now, and I’m still not used to the Retina Display. It’s so much sharper and clearer than any display I’ve ever used that just reading text on it is an amazing experience. The difference is so striking that I almost can’t stand to use my iPad anymore: what the hell are all these dots doing here? Why can’t every screen be as good as my iPhone 4?

So for today’s experiment, let’s consider what next year’s iPad might be like if Apple manages to squeeze the iPhone 4’s pixel density into it.

By my calculations, moving to 326 DPI from the iPad’s current 132, the resolution would go from 1024×768 to an insane, unheard-of 2529×1897. (I know, I know: they’ll probably just double it, and at any rate you’d never have odd-numbered dimensions. Just work with me here.) That’s 4.8 megapixels — more pixels than the 27” iMac; more than Apple’s 30” Cinema Display. I don’t know if there’s a display in existence with a resolution of that magnitude.

For comparison, here’s what a hypothetical 2529×1897 display would look like overlaid on the 27” iMac screen (2560×1440) and scaled to the same pixel density:

And here it is on the largest screen Apple currently makes, the 30” Cinema Display (2560×1600):

And the 17” MacBook Pro (1900×1200):

And just for laughs, here’s an “iPad HD” screen compared with my first Mac, the beloved Macintosh Plus (512×342):

Remember, all of this is made up, and it’s just a thought experiment. There is no such thing as an iPad HD, and screens of this size and density at the iPad price point will probably not be feasible for several years.

But what’s clear is that the iPhone 4 screen isn’t just an incremental improvement over the previous generation: it’s an entirely new class of display.

And I can dream.

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Jul
6th

Tue

I’m not faulting Tumblr for running a daily photo contest. I haven’t participated, and I don’t know if I will, but I think it’s a fun idea, and this—yesterday’s winner—is an interesting photo. And as long as the judges are impartial, maybe it’s OK that this person has won on two out of the five days it’s been held so far.

I’d just like to point out, however, that yesterday’s theme was “Staring at the sun.” The young lady in this photo is facing 90° away from the sun, and she has her eyes closed.

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Jul
5th

Mon

I really do enjoy the threaded email feature in iOS 4.0.

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Jul
2nd

Fri

This particular way of holding a deck of cards has become known among magicians and card sharps — you know, cheaters — as the Mechanic’s Grip. It’s a good way of keeping control of the deck while still being able to deal seconds, or off the bottom, both useful techniques if you’ve switched in a cooler. So skilled card cheats will avoid using the Mechanic’s Grip because it might give them away. But it’s also a very comfortable way to hold a deck of cards, and it’s one that many novice players adopt by coincidence.¹

This means that, if you’re playing poker with someone who holds the cards in the Mechanic’s Grip, you immediately know one of the following is true:

They’re cheating.
They’re not cheating.

In the left hand, however — and substituting an iPhone 4 for the deck of cards — the Mechanic’s Grip is also known as the iPhone Death Grip. It’s a good way of keeping control of the phone while still appearing to lose about 30% of your 3G signal. So skilled iPhone users will avoid using the Death Grip because it might fuck up their reception. But it’s also a very comfortable way to hold an iPhone 4, and it’s one that many novice users adopt by coincidence.

This means that, if you’re playing poker with someone who always complains about the signal strength of their iPhone 4, then they may or may not be a big fat cheater.

Hope this helps.

Maybe a really advanced cheat could outsmart really advanced cheat-spotters by using the Mechanic’s Grip but pretending to do so naïvely, as a form of Sicilian reasoning. ↩

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Jun
29th

Tue

What, you want a protocol now?

bananacasts:

I opined a few months ago that printing from iOS won’t happen until we see some bare bones protocol to print a PDF (easily generated by iOS as it is in MacOS) with some additional instructions for thinks like ink usage, etc. I doubt we’ll see anything like this until adoption of iOS devices — namely, iPads — reaches a critical mass to prompt the rather aloof printer makers to work with Apple on such a protocol.

It’s funny you should put it that way, because guess what: PDF is that protocol. Or PostScript is, anyway, and PostScript is the basis of PDF.

I have an HP LaserJet 1200 that I’ve been using since 2003. It speaks PostScript natively, and it understands PDF as well. Every eighteen months or so I go to Costco and buy a new high-capacity cartridge for about $75. The drum — the consumable part that rolls the toner onto the paper — is part of the cartridge, and it’s good for, I don’t know, 6000 pages or something. No other part of this printer has ever needed to be replaced in over seven years. It just sits there, silently, in power-saving mode, until I need it, then it does its job perfectly and goes back to sleep. It’s one of the finest pieces of equipment I’ve ever owned.

Anyway, I used to run Linux, and when I needed to print a PDF, I could just type

cat mydocument.pdf > /dev/lp0

and the OS would send the PDF data over the USB port, directly to the printer. There was no fucking around with drivers, ink levels, quality sliders, or any of that frou-frou bullshit. It was a printer. It printed.

Nowadays I use Macs full-time, and the printer is plugged into my AirPort Extreme II: Pornograffitti and shared over my wi-fi network, so there are more convenient ways of printing. But almost no consumer printers support PostScript anymore, so we’re stuck with hundreds or even thousands of incompatible proprietary printing protocols. The amazing open-source CUPS project has gone a long way toward solving this, and Apple bought CUPS a few years ago and made it part of Mac OS, so when printing finally comes to iOS, that’s probably how it will happen.

But with my good old LaserJet, I can still get cat mydocument.pdf > /dev/lp0 to work if I want to, and that’s pretty great.

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Jun
28th

Mon

We drive 20% less than cities of comparable size, and because we don’t manufacture cars, produce oil, or have car insurance companies, every dollar that we don’t spend elsewhere, will stay in Portland’s economy. There’s about $850 million that stays in Portlanders’s pockets because we drive less.

Holy shit: a politician making a rational economic argument about a polarizing environmental issue. Maybe I should move to Portland.

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Jun
26th

Sat

Self-reblog bookmarklet updated

Remember this thing I made? Turns out there was a bug: if your blog had Descriptive URLs — the feature where Tumblr appends five or six words to each post URL so you can tell which is which — turned off, it wouldn’t recognize that you were on a post page.

Well, that’s fixed now. Thanks to distantheartbeats for spotting it.

To update your copy, delete the bookmarklet the same way you would delete any other bookmark, and then click through and follow the instructions to reinstall.

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Jun
22nd

Tue

Unbelievable

My mom is in town, and she brought with her a TomTom GPS navigator thing. It’s about twice the size of an iPhone and cost several hundred dollars. She’s leaving tomorrow, so she asked me to help her program it to direct her to the airport.

The touch screen on this thing is nearly impossible to use, but never mind. After a few tries I figured out how to find the airport in its list of Points of Interest, so I selected it and hit the “Route” button.

A new screen appeared with the legend “Analyzing Roads” and a counter. It analyzed over a hundred thousand roads, or pretended to. I have some idea of what it should have been doing, but it seemed like it was going through a big alphabetical list of every road it knew and crossing them off one by one if they didn’t have an airport or my house on them.

After almost half a minute, it announced the result: No Route Found.

What.

Here’s how you get to the airport from my house: Go to the end of the street and turn left. Take the next left onto the highway. Exit when you see the airport signs.

The TomTom could not figure this out, despite having pinpointed both our location and the airport’s location on its map. And when it said “No route found,” that was all it said. It just sat there, dumb and unapologetic. It wouldn’t even try to give approximate directions, perhaps to a nearby interchange or even just to the destination city.

This was the first and only time in my life that I’ve used a portable satnav. It’s a dedicated device that’s supposed to be good at precisely one thing: giving directions. The task I gave it couldn’t possibly have been simpler, and yet it failed horribly.

If Apple and Google put these GPS guys out of business, it will be their own damn fault.

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Well, I guess we own a one-year-old now.

(I wish I could eat cake this neatly. I’ve had 34 birthdays and I still get crumbs all over my frock.)

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Background Audio in iOS 4.0

A post I wrote for the Rogue Amoeba company blog, about an update to Airfoil Speakers Touch that I’ve been working on.

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