The Daring Fireball Linked List

Saturday, 6 Sep 2008

New iPhone Nano Picture Leaks to Engadget ★: Apple seems to have some leaks in the iPod division. The iPhone news, however — which the iPod division doesn’t know about — hasn’t leaked.
Hi, I’m a Mac… Beep, Beep! ★: Insightful analogy from Charles Miller: John Hodgman’s PC character is like Wile E. Coyote.

Friday, 5 Sep 2008

Preventing Paranoia: When Does Google Chrome Talk to Google.com? ★

Good summary of Chrome’s phone-home integration from Matt Cutts.

Nokia Lowers Third Quarter 2008 Market Share Outlook ★

Key phrase: “certain aggressive pricing of some competitors”.

Sandvox 1.5 ★

Major update to Karelia’s $49 ($79 for Pro version) web site creation app.

Drobo ★

My thanks to Data Robotics for once again sponsoring the DF RSS feed. I’ve praised Drobo before and I’ll do it again: it’s a terrific data storage device. It acts like a single volume, but uses up to four physical hard disks for storage. Data is stored redundantly, so if one disk goes bad your data is OK. You can instantly expand to more storage by adding another disk or replacing an existing disk with a larger one. And the new second-generation Drobo offers FireWire 800 (in addition to USB 2) for faster performance. It’s a terrific product.

Dan Frakes Reviews PCalc 1.0.2 for iPhone ★

Dan Frakes:

PCalc also takes advantage of the iPhone’s touchscreen and accelerometer. When performing calculations, a swipe of the LCD to the right invokes the Undo feature; a swipe to the left invokes Redo. (Multiple levels of undo and redo are supported.) And if pressing the Clear and Clear All buttons is too pedestrian for your iPhone-loving hands, give the phone a left-right shake; two shakes equates to Clear, three to Clear All.

Bustin’ Makes Me Feel Good ★

Variety:

Columbia Pictures is getting serious about scaring up a new installment of its blockbuster “Ghostbusters” franchise. The studio has set “The Office” co-exec producers Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky to write a script for a film designed to bring back together the original cast of Harold Ramis, Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd and Ernie Hudson.

Ray Parker Jr. is going to plotz.

Dell Inspiron Mini 9 Offers Built-In 3G ★

Sure would be nice to have an option like this for MacBooks.

Document Startups in Chaos as Adobe Discontinues Flashpaper ★

Hard to believe anyone was dumb enough to base their business around this technology — or that they kept going with it after Adobe acquired Macromedia.

Thursday, 4 Sep 2008

Shoe Circus ★

The first Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gates commercial for Microsoft. Not a bad skit, but I’m not sure how this does anything for the Microsoft brand. Makes Gates seem cool, though.

USB Hub Slows Down iPhone Syncing? ★

With both my original iPhone after upgrading to the 2.0 OS and with my iPhone 3G, syncing with iTunes has been a lugubrious affair, typically taking an hour or more. After quipping about it on Twitter today, Scott Paterson directed me to this write-up of his, describing how his hours-long syncs were reduced to 5 minutes after switching from plugging his iPod into a USB hub to a direct connection on his Mac.

I use a USB hub, too. I tried the direct connection, and damn if it didn’t complete a full sync in five minutes.

Update: A lot of readers are reporting that even without a hub, they still get hour-plus iPhone sync times. Could be that my fast syncs yesterday were the result of having just completed a full sync and backup earlier in the evening.

The Story Behind Google Chrome ★

Niall Kennedy’s comprehensive look at the people and the teams Google has assembled to build Chrome.

Steven Levy: Inside Chrome ★

Good line from Steven Levy’s behind-the-scenes look at Google’s Chrome project:

Speed may be Chrome’s most significant advance. When you improve things by an order of magnitude, you haven’t made something better — you’ve made something new.

iPhone Stencils for OmniGraffle ★

Along the lines of this library of iPhone UI elements for use mocking up interfaces in Photoshop, Patrick Crowley has released a comprehensive set of stencils for use with OmniGraffle.

Objective-J and Cappuccino Released ★

JavaScript library and web app framework modeled after Objective-C and Cocoa released as open source. See them in action in the Keynote-esque 280 Slides.

‘MLB At Bat’ Adds Gameday ★

One of my favorite iPhone apps gets even better.

Nikon D3 Shutter Release in Super Slow Motion ★

Nice frame-by-frame animation from Jeffrey Friedl and Marianne Oelund illustrating how an SLR works. (Thanks to Jacob Rus.)

Apple Rejects Fart-Joke iPhone App ★

MacRumors has a story on Pull My Finger, an iPhone App that plays a variety of fart sounds. The demo video shows that the app is clearly well done for what it is — it even vibrates the phone while it toots — but Apple rejected it:

We’ve reviewed your application Pull My Finger. We have determined that this application is of limited utility to the broad iPhone and iPod touch user community, and will not be published to the App Store.

With all the absolute crap that has made it into the store, which includes apps based on nothing more than sample code from Apple’s SDK, it seems ridiculous for Pull My Finger to be rejected on these grounds. The current number one app in the store is Koi Pond, which is utterly useless but extremely well-done.

I’ve already heard from a top-tier developer this morning who, in response to this story, is dropping an idea for a very cool iPhone app out of fear that the work to create it would be for naught as Apple might reject it.

Google Chrome’s Full List of Special about: Pages ★

If Apple did this, the pages would feature good graphic design.

jParallax ★

Stephen Band:

Parallax turns a selected element into a ‘window’, or viewport, and all its children into absolutely positioned layers that can be seen through the viewport. These layers move in response to the mouse, and, depending on their dimensions (and options for layer initialisation), they move by different amounts, in a parallaxy kind of way.

Very cool. Try the demo and you’ll be impressed. (Thanks to Daniel Bogan.)

The Torrances ★

Art by Kirk Demarais. (Via Coudal.)

Wednesday, 3 Sep 2008

Straight Out of Compton ★

John Siracusa:

It’s not that any particular feature of Chrome is so wonderful, or even that the sum of those features puts Safari back on its heels in the browser wars. It’s the idea that someone other than Apple has taken such clear leadership in this area. Google Chrome makes Safari’s user interface look conservative; it makes Apple look timid.

Tilt Scrolling in Instapaper Pro ★

Adam Lisagor on the innovative “tilt scrolling” feature in Instapaper Pro.

The Future of the Instapaper iPhone App ★

Marco Arment, developer of the terrific Instapaper iPhone app (and the Instapaper web site):

I compiled a feature list for what I want in Instapaper.app 2.0, and it’s huge. It’s easily 6 months of work. I can’t do this and anything else — it has to just be this. I can only devote a few hours per week to Instapaper as it is. But if I can pull off the product I want for 2.0, I’ll really have something amazing.

Instapaper (and, now, the new $10 Instapaper Pro) is one of my very favorite iPhone apps. In a nut, you set up a free account (super quick setup!), then use a bookmarklet in MobileSafari (or any desktop browser) to flag web pages you wish to read later. The Instapaper iPhone app stores local versions of these web pages, so you can read them (a) offline; and (b) in a text-only iPhone-optimized format.

If you like to read and haven’t at least tried the free version of Instapaper, you’re missing out.

Being the Platform ★

David Weiss, reacting to Chrome:

Today, it’s clear to me why I’ve felt this way: Google isn’t interested at all in “being a citizen” or part of a platform, they are interested in being the platform. If you look at the way Chrome is designed, it’s not so much designed to be a good browser, as much as it is a good operating system for web applications. Google’s desire is very much the same as Microsoft’s, except abstracted a little higher up the stack. They want to own the platform upon which web applications are built, just like Microsoft wants to own the platform upon which desktop applications are built.

Hence the “each tab is a separate process” architecture behind Chrome. The idea is that it makes every web app an independent citizen. It turns Chrome into a meta platform that sits atop a traditional “OS”. Chrome is to web apps what preemptive multitasking is to an operating system — a way to keep one wedged or crashed task from bringing down the whole environment.

NFL TV Distribution Maps ★

Via Kottke, a terrific resource for NFL fans wondering which games will be available on their local TV stations.

McCain’s Voice Mail to Palin ★

“Is this some sort of joke? Am I getting punked here?” (Via Scott Simpson.)

Pinkerton ★

Mike Pinkerton, long-time Mac web browser developer, and one of the leaders behind the Gecko-based Camino, is also involved in Google’s efforts to create a Mac browser based on Chromium.

Tuesday, 2 Sep 2008

Advice From James Baker on Selecting a Vice Presidential Nominee ★

James Baker, former secretary of state and long-time Bush family counselor, on the lesson to be learned from Bush 41’s selection of Dan Quayle:

The best way to handle a proposed vice presidential nominee who has not been tested in national or big-state politics or high appointive office — and I have the obvious benefit of hindsight — is to float the name a few weeks before the convention and let the games begin. By opening gavel, the candidate will have run the gauntlet of press scrutiny or opposition research, or have dropped out. This approach wouldn’t necessarily work in a contested convention, and, unfortunately, it eliminates the drama of dropping the name at the convention. But it would pretty well guarantee that the news from the convention would not be dominated by questions about the vice presidential selection.

Jesper on Chrome ★

“Google Chrome is a funny creature.”

How Far Along Is Chrome for Mac? ★

Google engineer Amanda Walker on the status of Mac (and Linux) versions of Chrome:

Right now, both are in the “pieces build and pass tests, but there’s no Chromium application yet.” While we’re working hard and fast on catching up to the Windows version, we’re not setting an artificial date for when they’ll be ready—we simply can’t predict enough to make a solid estimate, and we expect to learn a lot from the Windows public beta as well.

In other words, not very far along.

Chrome UI Notes ★

I don’t have a copy of Windows handy, so I haven’t used Chrome yet. Just gleaning from the screenshots and from notes John Siracusa (who is using it) sent me via IM:

Overall, the UI takes minimalism much further than Safari. Google has rethought far more of the standard “web browser” conventions that we’ve been saddled with since Netscape 1.0.
No menu bar. Just two pop-up menus in the toolbar: a “document” and a “wrench”.
No persistent status bar. Just a “status bubble” that pops up contextually.
Tab dragging works the way I wish Safari’s did: you can drag a tab out of a window no matter which direction you initially drag, but there are 40 pixels of vertical slop space before it switches from “rearrange tabs within window” to “move to another window” mode.
No bookmarks menu or window. You create bookmarks by clicking the “star” button in the toolbar; after that, you retrieve them by typing their name, URL, or text from the page content in the location field.

Chromium Developer Documentation ★

Developer documentation for Google’s new Chrome browser. Most interesting to me is the User Experience section:

In the long term, we think of Chromium as a tabbed window manager or shell for the web rather than a browser application. We avoid putting things into our UI in the same way you would hope that Apple and Microsoft would avoid putting things into the standard window frames of applications on their operating systems.

Google Chrome vs. Safari 3.1 Rendering Comparison ★

Faruk Ates compares the just-released Google Chrome to Safari 3.1 for Windows:

Sadly, it seems the WebKit build that Google Chrome uses has been mutilated to an extent: the text-shadow property has been stripped out (Why?!) and, worse, the CSS border-radius rendering is not anti-aliased (Why?!?!).

Gmail Account Hacking Tool ★

This is why it matters that MobileMe’s web apps don’t use SSL.

PleaseDressMe ★

New t-shirt search engine.

Annual New iPod Event: Next Week ★

“Let’s Rock” is the invitation theme.

Getting Closure With Objective-C ★

Drew McCormack on the new “blocks” feature Apple is adding to C and Objective-C.

Killer Kowalski, Wrestler, Dies at 81 ★

One of the original stars of professional wrestling.

Monday, 1 Sep 2008

Indexed: Or Just Pray It Doesn’t Happen to You ★

Jessica Hagy draws the correlation.

Google Chrome — Upcoming New Web Browser ★

Introduced in the form of a comic by Scott McCloud. Based on WebKit, not Gecko. Sounds more like an application runtime than a web browser, though.

Juno in Juneau ★

Sarah Palin’s 17-year-old daughter Bristol is five months pregnant. McCain campaign claims he was aware of this before selecting Palin as his VP, despite evidence and rampant speculation that Palin was not seriously vetted. Governor Palin is a strong supporter of abstinence-only sex education.

Tom Eagleton lasted 18 days before withdrawing from the McGovern ticket in 1972. My money says Palin doesn’t last that long.

Sunday, 31 Aug 2008

Ideas That Will Never Die ★: It doesn’t matter how well Apple is doing, how remarkably profitable the Mac has become, how remarkably fast Mac sales are growing — the idea that Apple “must” or “should” license Mac OS X to other computer makers will never die.
‘Lucky Star’ ★: Adam Lisagor on Lucky Star, a cool-as-shit fake trailer Michael Mann shot as a promotion for Mercedes-Benz in 2002.
Eric Wijngaard, Winner of Android Developer Challenge, in His Own Words ★: Eric Wijngaard, objecting to the English translation of his remarks to a Dutch newspaper I ran Friday:

Then a follow-up question about what’s next and if there will be an iPhone version. This was my reply:

“Right now, I am focusing on Android and I want to make sure that PicSay will run on the actual Android-based phone when it is launched. It is possible to create an iPhone version of PicSay, and I would like to do that some day, but there is no time for that now.”

Even more miraculous the above ended up as:

“I guess I could invest it in my software company, but first I want to port PicSay to the iPhone.”

Saturday, 30 Aug 2008

Mozilla Labs: Ubiquity ★

Aza Raskin introducing Ubiquity, a research project from Mozilla Labs to add natural language mashups to the web browser. The simple examples make me think it’s LaunchBar or Quicksilver (or Enso) but only for the web. The more ambitious examples (which don’t work yet), make me think it’s trying to do what AppleScript tried but failed to do. E.g.:

Book a flight to Chicago next Monday to Thursday, no red-eyes, the cheapest. Then email my Chicago friends the itinerary, and add it to my calendar.

That’d be incredible. I’m not holding my breath.

Nikon D90 ‘D-Movie’ Sample Footage ★

Impressive quality.

CNet Cans the Macalope ★

Moving back to his old digs, at least for now.

Friday, 29 Aug 2008

Matt Haughey on Weblog Comments ★: Matt Haughey:

I have a feeling that if you’ve only seen blogs in the past five years (which is probably 95+ percent of people reading blogs today) you consider comments to be de rigueur and they are entirely divorced from the original concept of a conversation between the reader and the author of the original post. It’s not an intimate conversation, it’s just another content management feature available to you on the web.