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Linked List: April 12, 2006

Wednesday, 12 April 2006

Bug fix update to the popular file-transfer client. There was a 3.5.2 released earlier today, but if you blinked you missed it. Kudos to Panic for revving the version number even just to fix a build goof, though — I don’t like it when quick fixes are rolled out with the same version number.

The State of OmniWeb 5.5 ★

OmniWeb 5.5 — the long-awaited update that switches from Omni’s custom WebCore fork to using Apple’s Web Kit for rendering — is in private beta.

Bare Feats Benchmarks 5400 RPM vs. 7200 RPM MacBooks ★

Also shows just how much faster FireWire 800 is than FireWire 400 (MacBook Pros only come with FireWire 400).

Acquisition and NAT Port Mapping Protocol ★

David Watanabe’s excellent Acquisition P2P/BitTorrent client now supports NAT Port Mapping Protocol (and for non-Apple Wi-Fi routers, UPNP) which allows things to “just work” even when they require non-standard port configurations.

John C. Welch Reviews Apple Remote Desktop 3 ★

I love a detailed software review from someone writing about a tool they actually depend upon, and Welch obviously depends on ARD. Welch likes version 3.0, he likes it a lot, and he’s particularly happy about the new AppleScript support:

You can now, finally, automate the Apple Remote Desktop application itself. This is a major one, because quite honestly, even if I can copy a file or install something to multiple computers via Apple Remote Desktop, prior to AppleScript, I had to do this manually. Select the computers, select the file, create the task, run the task. If I had to do multiple client management tasks a day, I had to sit there and make with the clickey-clickey for each thing.

A manual administration tool kind of blows.

Well, the suck level of Apple Remote Desktop has dropped like a rock.

Hixie: Content-Type Is Dead ★

Hixie:

I think it may be time to retire the Content-Type header, putting to sleep the myth that it is in any way authoritative, and instead have well-defined content-sniffing rules for Web content.

The problem is that too many web servers are administered by incompetents, which in turn led all the major browser and aggregator developers to assume that all web servers are administered by incompetents. (Via Mark Pilgrim.)

Cocoa Smart Quotes ★

David Dunham’s NSTextView smart quotes implementation, based on an algorithm he developed almost 20 years ago and which was used in both PageMaker and WriteNow. His algorithm looks good to me, and I very like his distinction regarding the term “smart quotes”: that it refers to the automatic replacement of straight quotes with correct quotes, not to the curly quote characters themselves. A subject near and dear to my heart. (Via Rentzsch.)

Scumbags at Jigsaw Raise $12M in Funding ★

Mike Arrington:

Jigsaw isn’t the most evil company on the Internet by far, but it is the most evil company funded by well known and respected venture investors. There should be more to an investment decision than the bottom line profitability potential of a company. Its cost to society should be factored in as well.