Linked List: December 20, 2006

Wednesday, 20 December 2006

Wired News on MacHeist Developer Fees 

Scott Gilbertson, reporting for Wired News:

How does a sales event that triples its expectations and donates an estimated $200,000 to charity become controversial? The promotion was wildly profitable for Ryu and his partners, but shafted the developers, who were paid relatively low fees for participating.

According to several sources, the shareware developers were paid a flat fee ranging from $5,000 to $15,000 for their shareware apps — approximately $100,000 total — leaving an estimated $400,000 to $500,000 for Ryu and his partners after costs.

Just to be clear, these numbers, which roughly match what I’ve reported, are based on Gilbertson’s own reporting, not mine.

Today Is the Ten-Year Anniversary of Apple’s Acquisition of Next 

Apple’s PR archive doesn’t go back that far, but the Internet Archive’s does. This letter to Apple’s customers from then-CEO Gil Amelio is worth a read, too:

It also means that our co-founder Steven P. Jobs, will rejoin Apple, reporting to me. I know I speak for everyone at Apple in welcoming Steve home.

Reporting to Amelio, eh?

Free Audiobook Version of John Hodgman’s ‘The Areas of My Expertise’ at iTunes Store 

Very cool, very funny, and very free. At least if you’re in the U.S.

Hodgman, of course, plays the PC in Apple’s Get a Mac campaign. Might be worth checking out the rest of Hodgman’s weblog while you’re over there. (Via Kottke.)

Security Update 2006-008 

According to the release notes, it fixes one specific issue related to QuickTime for Java and Quartz Compositor. Maybe something that would have allowed a Java applet to grab images from an iSight camera? It’s hard to tell from the (as-usual) vague description.

MacSanta Now up to 83 Developers 

Just in case you haven’t checked back at MacSanta since Monday, there are now 83 Mac developers participating, all of them offering a 20 percent discount through December 25.

EvilAPI: Google SOAP Search API Replacement 

Third-party unofficial replacement for the now-deprecated Google SOAP API, based on screen-scraped results from Google web search. I wouldn’t count on this being around for long.