06.29.12 |
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At least on a hardware level, this is pretty crazy stuff. Quoting from the review on its build quality:
The Nexus 7’s construction is downright impressive. While I haven’t been doing regular tablet reviews (that has become Anand’s domain largely), I have handled a number of recent tablets big and small, and some feel downright cheap to me thanks to the back plastic. I would not have guessed that the Nexus 7 is a $199 device based on how it feels. There’s no flex or creaking at all, it feels absolutely rigid.
and on the display:
ASUS notes that the panel is an LED backlit IPS panel with 10 point multitouch and 400 nits maximum brightness. Resolution is of course WXGA (1280 x 800) at 7″. If you do the math out, that’s a pretty high PPI, and in person it looks great – I can’t see pixels unless I look very closely.
Speed tests on the browser benchmark are very impressive, occasionally even beating the iPad 3rd gen.
06.29.12 |
Miscellany |
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Dave Methvin:
jQuery was conceived specifically to address the differences in browsers, so we’re not going to abandon the essence of our philosophy and simply disregard the millions of active Internet users who (for whatever reasons) still use oldIE. Yet we also want to move ahead and take advantage of modern browsers, especially the growing mobile market.
This is huge news. Great move by the jQuery team here.
06.28.12 |
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I’m a bit intrigued by this new paid venture by music journalist David Greenwald, the founder of Rawkblog. For three bucks a month you get two recommended albums sent to your Spotify inbox every week, along with a “custom made personal mixtape” that’s curated for you by a human being based off your Spotify or last.fm profile.
In this era of digital curation based on complex algorithms, there’s something refreshing about Mercury’s endeavor. I might give it a try.
06.28.12 |
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The New York Times’ David Segal:
By the standards of retailing, Apple offers above average pay — well above the minimum wage of $7.25 and better than the Gap, though slightly less than Lululemon, the yoga and athletic apparel chain, where sales staff earn about $12 an hour. The company also offers very good benefits for a retailer, including health care, 401(k) contributions and the chance to buy company stock, as well as Apple products, at a discount.
But Apple is not selling polo shirts or yoga pants. Divide revenue by total number of employees and you find that last year, each Apple store employee — that includes non-sales staff like technicians and people stocking shelves — brought in $473,000.
“These are sales rates for a consulting company,” said Horace Dediu, an analyst who blogged about the calculation on the site Asymco. Electronics and appliance stores typically post $206,000 in revenue per employee, according to the latest figures from the National Retail Federation.
Excellent article. It’s pleasing to see how treating your customers like decent human beings can double revenue per employee. Yet, as the article suggests, a lot more could be done for Apple Store employees. This problem is really more political than technical; Apple is far from alone on keeping their employee wages fairly low. Yet as with the Foxconn workers, I hold Apple to a higher standard. They can do more
06.27.12 |
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Pretty excited to see Sublime Text 2 graduate out of beta yesterday. I use Sublime every day at work. It’s fast, stable, and constantly adding new features. This release saw retina display support for OS X, quick skip next keyboard shortcuts, new CSS completion methods, and much more.
If you’re a developer and haven’t given it a try, download a trial now.
06.27.12 |
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I can’t really agree with Jacob Penderworth much at all here – I’ve found Twitter’s web client enhancements heavy on the discovery side, which isn’t high on my priority list. Compare that with what Osfoora for Mac already has – super quick list switching, Instapaper native support, Tweet Marker – it’s already heads and above more useful than the default web experience.
That said, Jacob’s article is interesting. I completely agree that a simple Fluid app could be a solid solution for many, especially for more casual Twitter users.
06.26.12 |
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I’ve done a lot of research into various responsive imagery solutions. We’re in a clearly changing browser landscape, so picking just one option can be hard. Yet I currently lean on Scott Jehl’s Picturefill the most. The code is straightforward, well refined, and updated frequently (at the time of this writing, the Github was updated five days prior.)
06.26.12 |
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The Macdrifter:
Twitter is great. I funnel a lot of stuff from Twitter into Instapaper and Pinboard. But Twitter is a flowing river. I am not on Twitter all day so I miss the clever banter and people complaining about Twitter. RSS is time-shifted.
He’s dead on here. I get so sick of people deeming RSS “worthless.” At least a third of the links I post here derive from RSS, along with much of my Instapaper queue. I find scanning through a long (occasionally 300 plus) single list of unread RSS items still the most efficient way to keep up with tech and film news. Flipboard, Pulse and every other alternative out there can’t come close to its speed.
06.25.12 |
Miscellany |
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Writer/blogger Kyle Baxter on the ideal newspaper for the future:
Here’s what it is: an organization whose goal is to be the only place readers need to go to find out what’s going on that’s important (coverage) and what’s meaningful about news events and relevant issues (insight and context). Go deep on certain subjects (politics, technology, sports) and make their writing on it so good that anyone interested in the subject has no choice but to read it.
I use to read The New York Times obsessively – the headlines every morning, usually at least fifteen articles out of the Saturday and Sunday edition when I had more time. No more. I rely on Reuters and BBC more for headlines, RSS, blogs and Twitter for deep dives in subjects like tech, politics, gaming and film. If I could somehow segment off just the NYT politics and film section for a reduced price, I would.
06.25.12 |
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Web developer Le Roux Bodenstein:
I propose a fifth option [to handle responsive images.]
Use a progressive image format and HTTP range requests. Ideally the image metadata at the start of the file would include some hints about how many bytes to download to get an exact image size. The browser can then download the smallest size equal to or greater than the dimensions it needs based on the layout’s width as specified in CSS. If the user zooms or resizes the window, the browser can request more bytes as needed.
One image, one file, one URL, one resource.
Ballsy. Yet even as the author points out, there are significant legacy browser compatibility issues.