Sometimes building software can feel like being on a long polar expedition, which is why we on the Tumblr mobile team recently acquired a bottle of MacKinlay’s Scotch—a painstaking replica of the bottles British explorer Ernest Shackleton brought (and then left behind preserved in ice) on his 1907 Antarctic expedition. The verdict: top notch stuff—highly recommended. To endurance!
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From the desk of Justin Ouellette.
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A Plea for Better iOS Text Facilities
Awhile back, Jacqui Cheng from Ars Technica contacted a bunch of folks (including me) for a story she was putting together about what iOS devs would most like to see from Apple in 2012. Unfortunately I never got around to responding (sorry Jacqui—the holidays were crazy), but if I had, one item would have stood an order of magnitude above everything else on my list: better rich text formatting support in the middle layers of Apple’s development frameworks.
Now this may sound like a surprisingly mundane request considering the number of whiz bang things people are expecting from Apple in 2012, but if you’ve ever tried to develop a native iOS applications that present textual content downloaded from the Internet, you probably share my frustration. For a device that is generally taken for granted as the future of media, it’s surprising that the iPad offers app developers only two real options for displaying runs of styled text (e.g. text that contains sections of bold text, italic text, hyperlinks, different fonts, inline images, etc.): use CoreText, a very low level framework that essentially invites engineers to build their own text formatting engine; or resort to UIWebView, a heavyweight, almost completely opaque black box of a text view. It’s hard to go too far down the former path without essentially reinventing the web browser rendering engine, and if you choose the latter (more reasonable) path, you will likely end up spending a lot of your time trying to bend UIWebView to your vision.
Some (e.g. Facebook and Instagram) have dealt with this problem by abandoning fully native apps and instead building hybrid apps that rely on UIWebView for all but the simplest content presentation. Other, less ambitious companies have punted on the issue by essentially distributing 200 MB PDFs disguised as general purpose software. The really crazy ones, like Joe Hewitt with his Three20 framework, have essentially reimplemented their own rich text rendering frameworks, complete with CSS-like style functionality, but while I’ve certainly never been one to shy away from a megalomaniacal engineering challenge, I’m pretty sure that way lies madness for anyone without Apple-level engineering resources (it’s telling that Three20 was created by Facebook and even they are now relying on UIWebView).
What we really need is a facility that provides access to at least some subset of WebKit HTML rendering capabilities at a level between CoreText and UIWebView—something that doesn’t require developers to essentially re-invent HTML and CSS but allows them to render at least some level of HTML formatted text to a native view or layer without the overhead and inflexibility of UIWebView—basically, a next generation version of Mac OS X Cocoa’s NSAttributedString. I’m sure providing such a facility in the limited environment of the iOS presents significant engineering challenges, but Android has such an API, and I think the absence of such an API on iOS is holding the platform back as a media platform more than almost anything else I can think of.
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Wired UK did a great job of making David look like Noel Gallagher that one time he met Tony Blair. (Wired cover photo via prostheticknowledge)
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Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3? →
(via eyepool)
This is probably the best, most accessible analogy for the difficulty of software project planning that I’ve ever come across.
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Path is pretty in the same designy way as our modern museums…These museums are very exciting when they open. You show up and marvel along with all of the other fans of architecture. Maybe you return for one of those nights where they stay open late and there is a band and drinking. “A great space,” you think. Maybe one day you’ll be rich and rent out the atrium for a private party. The art doesn’t get talked about so much at these museums. The museum itself is the “social object,” as it were. Eventually the particulars around which the museum was designed fall out of fashion. A fresh crop of architects finds it to be too flashy, or too dull, or to have been guided by faulty principles. There is congestion where there should be flow. Certain rooms are simply exhausting. Maybe it is even an eyesore. This is good for the museum. Now they can really fuck up the place…Path is a monument to Path. It is no place to scribble in. I wish it longevity so that it might find shabbiness.
This is the best thing I’ve read about Path, and it perfectly articulates something I’ve thought not only about Path, but also a lot of other exemplars of the fussy, post-Apple wave of “high design” in tech products. Khoi Vinh has written about the same phenomenon, arguing that the obsessive design polish we in the industry have come to fetishize can lead to products without the “breathing room” to feel truly lived in by users.
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And because, unlike Google, Baidu did not have objections to turning over the names of users to the Chinese government, it could run services that let Chinese citizens express themselves. Its bulletin boards promulgated discussion of popular cultural issues.
Steven Levy, “In the Plex”
I haven’t really been following the Twitter censorship drama this past week, mainly because I knew that what my friend Marc Hedlund calls “the magic 8 ball of Internet outrage” was about to select its next victim. But when Twitter announced that they had implemented the ability to “reactively withhold content from users in a specific country” I thought of the above quote, which made an impression on me.
One of the things that struck me as interesting about Google’s difficult and ultimately abortive adventure in China was that their goal of being an uncompromising force for free expression in the region ironically made them less able than their Chinese competitors to act as a vehicle for any kind of expression. I’d never argue, of course, that Internet companies should collaborate with oppressive regimes, and Google was probably wise to finally exit China entirely, but for Twitter to truly be a worldwide mass communication platform they’re going to need to acknowledge the reality of different standards of free speech around the world. The approach they’re using (e.g. notifying people when content is being withheld and why) seems nuanced and on the mark to me.
I think Google was naive in their approach to China, and perhaps a bit arrogant to think they would transform Chinese society through the power of the web and their own good intentions, but on the whole I still think the Internet is a force for free speech and transparency in the world. In my opinion, it’s better for Twitter to be available in a potentially compromised way in more sensitive parts of the world than for it to be restricted entirely.
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F. Scott Fitzgerald: Things to worry about →
From a letter to his 11-year-old daughter.
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My girlfriend commissioned some Photoshop work from me tonight as part of a gag. I’m pretty pleased with the results, if I do say so myself.
