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The History of the Scroll Bar
(via this isn’t happiness)
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Dog Days of Summer
A lonely train platform in the dog days of summer
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Apps in Canada: Android vs iOS
As I noted in an earlier post, for whatever reason Google has been relatively slow to move many of its media-related offerings outside of the U.S., and it appears this won’t change with the release of the new Nexus 7 tablet.
However, this got me thinking about another category of content: Apps. Presumably app developers have control over which countries their apps are distributed in, yet for whatever reason, international availability of Android apps is almost always more restricted — or at least delayed — than their iOS counterparts.
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U.K. Nexus 7 Won't Feature Music, Magazines, or TV Shows
John Gruber, Daring Fireball:
Carly Page, The Inquirer:
Speaking with The Inquirer, a Google spokesperson confirmed that the Nexus 7 won’t feature these three categories, which will remain an exclusive in US for the time being. They said, “The UK version will feature all of the options currently available in the UK Play store”, which means users of the Nexus 7 will be limited in their choices movies, apps, games and books.
I wonder if the iPad Mini will have music, magazines, and TV shows in the U.K.?
Obviously Gruber is asking a completely rhetorical question here, but the truth is that this sort of thing has been Apple’s biggest strength … Regardless of who is to blame, Google and Amazon remain almost completely U.S. centric with many of their media-related services.
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Improving Mail Push Notifications on Lion Server
One of the things that I have always found annoying about using iCloud Mail (and MobileMe before it) with iOS is that the push notification implementation is actually somewhat “incomplete” — at least for those of us who are used to Exchange ActiveSync, Blackberry Enterprise Server or even a desktop mail client such as Apple Mail.
What I mean by this is that iCloud will happily notify your iOS device of new e-mail messages as they come in, complete with an updated badge count on the Mail icon and even a banner and entry in the Notification Center in iOS 5. However, that’s about as far as it goes; read or file a message on another device, and the notification remains, stuck there seemingly forever. The count will adjust itself as more new mail comes in, but it will never actually disappear unless you open the Mail app, often only to see that you actually don’t have any new messages.