Shawn Blanc, reviewing Tweetbot for iPad:

Great design is often polarizing. When opinions about your design work seem to be either extremely positive or extremely negative then it’s likely that you’ve hit a home run.

My wife will tell you that I often obsess over purchases to the point of great annoyance. The best compliment I can offer Tweetbot for iPad is that, once available, I immediately deleted the official Twitter client and bought the app. I did this without reading a single review or list of features. That is the trust that Tapbots has earned. If you are a power Twitter user, but this - now.

Randy Murray on customer service surveys:

You can learn nothing from perfect marks. You can only learn when you get honest appraisal.

Bingo. I hate getting these surveys because they are alway presented with a hint of if-we-don’t-get-10s-then-I-am-in-trouble guilt.

Tito Bottitta, on making the Boston Globe’s new responsive design:

So I’ve got a confession to make: When we started working on the new Boston Globe website, we had never designed a responsive site before.

Bottitta offers an in depth walkthrough of the process involved in such a redesign. This site was recently updated to a responsive design. While not as complicated as the Boston Globe’s, it was a fun exercise. I firmly believe responsive layouts are a must for modern sites given the plethora of devices the can access the web. If you are thinking about making a new site or redesigning an existing one, I would highly recommend reading Bottitta’s article.

Check out the photo of Leo Laporte holding a Samsung Galaxy Note next to an iPhone 4S. If you want to make additional side-by-side comparisons, use this tool.

I guess at least it has a pen.

Tanner Stokes’ awesome browser extension that creatively blocks YouTube comments.

I loathe YouTube comments. Here’s a simple browser extension to convert them to ‘herp derp’. If you insist on reading the original (which is highly discouraged), click the comment.

Arun Thampi:

Upon inspecting closer, I noticed that my entire address book (including full names, emails and phone numbers) was being sent as a plist to Path. Now I don’t remember having given permission to Path to access my address book and send its contents to its servers, so I created a completely new “Path” and repeated the experiment and I got the same result – my address book was in Path’s hands.

In short, Path has been uploading the entire contents of your Address Book to its servers. They did this without your permission.

The CEO, Dave Morin, actually responded in the comments section:

We upload the address book to our servers in order to help the user find and connect to their friends and family on Path quickly and efficiently as well as to notify them when friends and family join Path. Nothing more.

Actual use or intentions are irrelevant. The company took data without asking for it.

This is currently the industry best practice and the App Store guidelines do not specifically discuss contact information. However, as mentioned, we believe users need further transparency on how this works, so we’ve been proactively addressing this.

The following is from the App Store guidelines:

17 Privacy

17.1 Apps cannot transmit data about a user without obtaining the user’s prior permission and providing the user with access to information about how and where the data will be used

17.2 Apps that require users to share personal information, such as email address and date of birth, in order to function will be rejected

While the wording may be vague enough for Mr. Morin’s conscience, it is clear that Apple intends for any personal data transmission to require opt-in permission. It is disingenuous at best to claim proactive involvement. Had they truly been proactive, such behavior never would have existed.

Users can ask for this data to be deleted, which I intend to do. It isn’t that I am worried about Path’s use of my data, rather, it is their blatant disregard of my ownership that bothers me. That is a shame, because the app itself is wonderful.

Trust is a major component to convince customers to use a particular social media service. Path blew it.

MG Siegler on Chrome for Android and the very cool tabbed browsing feature.

Say I have 5 tabs open in Chrome on my iMac and I get up to leave my home. I can see all 5 in Chrome for Android. And if I have 3 other tabs open on my MacBook Air, I can see those as well, all labeled and separated

One of the best things about iOS-vs-Android is that increased competition drives innovation. This means that customers of either platform win. Chrome for Android is a great choice because it offers a more integrated Google experience. Plus, the tabbed browsing looks pretty cool. Maybe Apple will finally be forced to offer the same - much like they do on iPad.

Biologist Alex Wild recounts how Twitter helped bring scientists together in order to identify a rare wasp.

Twitter got the wasp in front of the right set of eyeballs within a day after I posted the photo. Now we not only know what the insect is, but we know- after some additional sleuthing- these may be the only live photographs ever taken of this species, genus, and subfamily.

NPD Group (release date information mine):

Led by continued steady sales for Apple’s iPhones, the top five best-selling mobile phone handsets in Q4 were as follows:

1. Apple iPhone 4S (October 14, 2011)
2. Apple iPhone 4 (June 24, 2010)
3. Apple iPhone 3GS (June 19, 2009)
4. Samsung GALAXY S II (May 1, 2011)
5. Samsung GALAXY S 4G (February 23, 2011)

The dates alone are rather amazing. The third top-selling device was around two-and-half years old during last quarter. That seems to indicate that customers were willing to sacrifice specifications for price. Furthermore, they chose the Apple brand over similar deals on Android devices.

Also from NPD:

The iPhone 4S outsold the iPhone 4 by 75 percent, and outsold the iPhone 3GS, available for free on AT&T, five to one.

That means that the top U.S. Android smartphone was outsold by the iPhone 4S at least 5-to-1.¹

This isn’t exactly an apples-to-apples comparison since Android is offered on a wide variety of devices, while the iPhone is a single device with three available models. That’s the point thought, isn’t it? The direct comparison of iPhone to Android is stupid. The logical comparisons are either between specific devices or between iOS and Android. We see that Apple is winning the device battle. For what it’s worth, Apple is also winning the operating system battle.

Some inspiration for your next Super Bowl party.