Jason Clarke

Patrick McKenzie:

At present, in terms of radiation risk, the tsunami appears to be a wash: on the one hand there’s a near nuclear meltdown, on the other hand the tsunami disrupted something really dangerous: international flights.  (One does not ordinarily associate flying commercial airlines with elevated radiation risks.  Then again, one doesn’t normally associate eating bananas with it, either.  When you hear news reports of people exposed to radiation, keep in mind, at the moment we’re talking a level of severity somewhere between “ate a banana” and “carries a Delta Skymiles platinum membership card”.)

The level of preparedness in Japan is incredible, and saved thousands if not millions of lives.

Ryan Sarver:

Twitter will provide the primary mainstream consumer client experience on phones, computers, and other devices by which millions of people access Twitter content (tweets, trends, profiles, etc.), and send tweets.  If there are too many ways to use Twitter that are inconsistent with one another, we risk diffusing the user experience. [...]

As we point out above, we need to move to a less fragmented world, where every user can experience Twitter in a consistent way.  This is already happening organically – the number and market share of consumer client apps that are not owned or operated by Twitter has been shrinking.  According to our data, 90% of active Twitter users use official Twitter apps on a monthly basis.

After gaining popularity in large part due to 3rd party clients built on the API that Twitter built for that purpose, Twitter is now changing directions and basically telling 3rd party client developers to go away.

Nice.

Samuel Gibbs at Download Squad:

Apple have just released an update to the iOS version of iMovie to support the iPad 2, but what about the original iPad? Well, currently you can’t install iMovie on an original iPad using iTunes directly, but iMovie will run on your previous generation device as long as it’s running iOS 4.3. Hit the break for a quick two-minute guide to getting iMovie onto your original iPad without a jailbreak.

To get iMovie onto the original iPad you’re going to need the iPhone configuration utility, which is available for Mac OS X and Windows. Once that’s installed, fire up the program and follow this step-by-step guide.

Clever.

Radek Burkat:

When I first heard of DNS prefetching I thought it was a great idea and assumed it was an optimization that had absolutely no negative issues. I did not fully understand the mechanics and impact that it may cause on an organization. If 350 million queries cost $1600/month, then saving a few billion queries per month starts to be something to consider carefully.

Setting a site up with hundreds or thousands of subdomains is a bag of hurt waiting to happen.

Ben Brooks:

I think that everyone can agree though that all notifications systems fall short of being great (even WebOS). Every single mock-up of a different notification system that I have seen solves only a subset of the problems — they certainly are better than what we currently have on iOS, but these “solutions” are in no way a real solution.

Ben might be right that there’s no complete solution, but there definitely has to be something better than what we’ve got now. I currently use an app called LockInfo (requires jailbreaking your iPhone) which puts PIM style information on your lock screen, like your calendar, emails, etc.

LockInfo can optionally be configured to intercept iOS notifications and block the popup. Instead it adds them to a list on your lock screen so that you can easily scan them and choose to deal with them in the order you prefer. It’s not a complete solution, but it’s better than iOS’s current method.

Whatever solution Apple comes up with to fix notifications, I hope it differentiates somehow between Alerts, which I consider “nice to have” information, and Alarms, which I consider essential information. Notifications should have configurable priority levels. Maybe some quietly get added to your list of unacknowledged notifications, while others make noises and maybe even pop up.

Shawn Blanc’s point that the current way iOS handles text message notifications (deal with it immediately, or dismiss it and mark it as read) is about the worst possible way that it could be handled.

Clearly the handling of notifications in iOS needs to be at the top of Apple’s list of things to fix for iOS 5.