drifkin

Apple marketed the Gorilla Glass strength pretty hard. And phone cases seem really popular: (random link I dug up) https://www.npd.com/wps/portal/npd/us/news/press-releases/pr...

But yeah, I'm not sure that people care very much, they'll probably just get a case for whichever phone instead of caring that much about how strong the screen is.

Also check out gitit (http://gitit.net), written by the same author as pandoc. It's a git-backed wiki that uses pandoc to let you write in a variety of formats. Markdown + latex for math works well for taking notes in a wiki format. The content is stored as flat files in the repo that you can just export as pdfs using pandoc if you wanted to.

Border images are great for making resizable buttons. I've used them often in places where support is guaranteed (e.g., Chrome extensions).

On physical keyboards Qwerty isn't very good, but it turns out that touch screen devices have different keyboard layout needs. Since autocorrect finds potential mistypes by looking at adjacent keys to the one tapped, clustering high frequency keys all together isn't a good idea. The two most popular alternative keyboard layouts (Colemak and Dvorak) do this clustering to try to minimize the distance your fingers need to travel.

Typing on a touch screen and on a physical keyboard are so different (at least for smaller devices like phones) that you can use an alternative layout on your computer and stick with Qwerty on your touch device.

Various Coursera courses have a self study option, which lets you go through the videos & assignments, but there's no certificate at the end.

I believe that all Udacity courses are now self-paced. You can go through the lectures/quizzes/assignments whenever you want to.

Whether or not it was scrapped when he first came back, R&D doesn't seem like a new thing for Apple.

For example, I remember coming across someone working on touch R&D for Apple: http://murderandcreate.com/

From the page:

"In 2007 I started working in research and development at Apple on multitouch hardware. There I spent my time inventing and patenting new touch technologies. Now I lead the Human Interface Device Software Prototype group at Apple."

iPhone 4 doesn't have turn by turn, only iPhone 4S and iPhone 5 has that feature

Ben Sandofsky of Twitter wrote a well-reasoned take on the whole HTML5 vs. native apps debate: http://sandofsky.com/blog/shell-apps.html

I've had very similar experiences working on both HTML5 and native apps.

"Indeterminate" seems more like "don't know" instead of "don't care"

Do other languages have a word for this?

They look good, particularly the grouped buttons. The shadows from the neighboring grouped buttons are a nice touch.

I think it might look a little bit better if the noise pattern didn't disappear on the buttons' down states. The noise pattern is essentially simulating a rough surface, so it seems a little odd that pressing a button would cause its material to change.

Try zooming into the play button in iTunes. It's a good example of a button with noise, even in the down state.

Lowering the brightness helps, but there's more to it than that. Changing the color temperature is one of the cool features of both f.lux and this bulb. The idea is a warmer color temperature at night acts less like the sun.

It turns out the header file actually has a pretty nice explanation of the algorithm:

http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/ui/gfx/color_analysis....

Google uses k-means clustering in Chrome on their new tab page (though they use RGB). The most visited section shows a color strip below each site, with a color chosen from the site's favicon.

Here's the code: http://src.chromium.org/svn/trunk/src/ui/gfx/color_analysis....

JS static analysis tools can help you find mistakes that are often more serious than a missing semicolon.

I've run into something like this before:

  for (var i = 0, len = items.length; i < len; i++)
  {
    var item = items[i];
    // ...maybe some more code here...
    var subItems = item.subItems;
    for (var i = 0, len = subItems.length; i < len; i++) {
      // whoops
    }
  }

The inner for loop's i & len variables are really the same as the outer for loop's i & len variables (there's no shadowing going on here because they're all in the same scope in JS). Depending on the order of things and how many subItems there are, you could end up with an infinite loop, iterating over the same items multiple times, or skipping certain items. It seems like it'd be an obvious problem to see, but if there's a significant amount of code above the inner for loop, you might miss it. It also seems like it'd result in very obvious bugs, but if subItems are rare, most of the time this code will run just fine.

Most of the JS static analysis tools will complain about redeclaring i and len, which makes spotting this kind of problem much easier.

Viral strategies have been pretty intriguing lately, especially what Trent Reznor did with his latest CD. I see viral marketing becoming a lot more prevalent in the near future though, which will dilute its effect quite a bit. I think I'll be pretty sick of viral marketing soon, as large corporations turn it into another standard marketing technique.

I'm sorry, I read the title very quickly and misread it. My opinion on the actual question is that I generally like it when the log in is the email address and there is a separate display name. This way the username is easy to remember, but the email address remains private.

Requiring it is more convenient for the users. I know that I'm always trying to be safer by using different passwords for different sites. However, if I stop using a site and come back a year later, I probably won't remember my password and it's also possible that I won't remember my user name. Not being able to retrieve this information would discourage me from using the service.