Linked List: September 2007

Sunday, 30 Sep 2007

Regarding movie trailers and the iPhone 1.1.1 update. I sleep better now that we have such a good-looking web site for the show.

Apple’s Insomnia Film Festival ★

Student filmmaking contest from Apple: You get 24 hours to make a three-minute film.

Richard Sprague, iPhone Doubter ★

Richard Sprague, back in January:

So please mark this post and come back in two years to see the results of my prediction: I predict they will not sell anywhere near the 10M Jobs predicts for 2008.

Consider it marked. As of earlier this month, Sprague still thinks his prediction is looking good. Perhaps Sprague would like to make it an actual wager.

Okay, it’s possible there are enough Apple religious people to buy a lot of them at first, but even the most diehard Mac fans who buy one of these will secretly carry two phones. One to prove how loyal and “cool” they are, and the other to actually make and receive calls.

Looks like Apple made a smart move shipping this guy from their marketing department to Microsoft’s.

Technical Stupidity ★

The Times of London claims the price of the iPhone in the U.K. as £899 — £269 for the phone, and the rest from the minimum monthly contract with O2. Do they compute the price for other phones this way? (Let me guess: No.)

Phillies Win First NL East Title Since 1993 ★

I love the Phillies and hate the Mets, so this is pretty sweet. The Mets had a 7.5-game division lead just a few weeks ago. Hard to believe, really, given just how bad the Phillies have been since ’93.

iPhone Human Interface Guidelines ★

Note the note:

Note: Currently, developers create web applications for iPhone, not native applications. Therefore, this document focuses solely on the presentation of web applications and other web content on iPhone.

Interesting word, “currently”.

Saturday, 29 Sep 2007

Inman on Layer Tennis ★: Perceptive criticism and analysis from Shaun Inman on his Layer Tennis match against Kevin Cornell yesterday.
Examples of High-ISO Photos Taken With Nikon D3 ★: Stunning low-light performance. (Thanks to Raj Premkumar.)

Friday, 28 Sep 2007

Inman vs. Cornell ★

Layer Tennis is live.

BusySync for iCal ★

This sounds damn cool:

BusySync lets you share iCal calendars with family and coworkers on a local area network without a dedicated server and with full read/write access.

(Via Gus Mueller.)

iPhone Update Tip: Plug Directly Into Your Mac’s USB Port ★

MacJournals asks “Did the 1.1.1 update ‘brick’ your iPhone?”:

Even if, like ours, it wasn’t hacked in any way?

We promise nothing, but here’s a tip: make sure the iPhone dock is plugged directly into the USB 2.0 port on your computer, not into a hub or keyboard (even a USB 2.0 keyboard).

Acorn Scripting Using Python ★

Frederik De Bleser adds an embedded Python scripting panel to Acorn.

Thieves Steal New Coppola Script ★

Daniel Schweimler, BBC News:

It was reported that five armed robbers raided Coppola’s house in a wealthy neighbourhood of Buenos Aires, and took computers and camera equipment. Saved on one of the computers was the script and pre-production work for his forthcoming film, Tetro.

Layer Tennis Match Preview ★

From my match preview at the Layer Tennis site:

All-American baseliner Chris Evert Lloyd vs. Czechoslovakian net-rusher Martina Navratilova. Graceful, dancing Muhammad Ali vs. power-puncher Joe Frazier. Bird vs. Magic. Nicklaus vs. Palmer. Contrasting styles, which, when brought together in head-to-head competition, snap together like puzzle pieces and produce spectacular, unpredictable results.

We now add to that list Shaun Inman vs. Kevin Cornell.

FileSpot ★

My thanks to FileSpot for sponsoring the DF RSS feed this week. FileSpot is a nice searching and organizing utility that provides its own interface to the underlying power of Spotlight, allowing far more complex queries than the system’s built-in search UI. Buy FileSpot this week and get $1 off using the coupon code “DARINGFIREBALL”.

iPhone 1.1.1 Breaks iPod Hi-Fi Integration ★

Todd Ditchendorf:

Before updating to iPhone software 1.1.1 (which was released today), my iPhone basically worked with my iPod Hi-Fi…

Thursday, 27 Sep 2007

Wired: Ridley Scott Has Finally Created the Blade Runner He Always Imagined ★

Ted Greenwald interviews Ridley Scott regarding Blade Runner.

iPhone Central: Bricking my iPhone ★

Macworld’s Jonathan Seff:

I decided to try the 1.1.1 iPhone update on my unlocked and hacked phone. The process went along just fine until the iPhone restarted. Then I got a message on the screen that I had an incorrect SIM.

He went to an AT&T store, got a new SIM, and still no dice — his iPhone won’t work.

The One Ill Building ★

Jonathan Hoefler:

Suddenly, intercaps have a genuine purpose: invisible to machines, they aid human comprehension, which is ultimately the goal of all typography.

SIM-Unlocked iPhones No Longer Work With Non-AT&T SIM Cards ★

iPhoneSimFree is reporting that there’s nothing “bricked” about an iPhoneSimFree-unlocked iPhone updated with 1.1.1 software — but, of course, they no longer activate with non-AT&T SIM cards.

Oskar Blues’s New Brewery ★

Oskar Blues — brewers of my favorite beer, Dale’s Pale Ale — is opening a new brewery. (Via Jim Ray.)

Say Hello to Web Standards ★

Jeffrey Zeldman:

There’s something new at Apple’s online store: web standards and accessibility.

FastScripts 2.3.4 ★

Daniel Jalkut:

So let me try to summarize some of FastScripts’s selling points more effectively than the current product page does.

Lightroom Journal: Personality as a Conscious Part of Software Design ★

Mark Hamburg, Adobe software architect and project lead for Lightroom:

All products have a personality of one sort or another. That personality is at the heart of how the product works, what it feels like to use, etc. Sometimes that personality is relatively muted and/or buried behind other conventions. Sometimes it is directly in one’s face. Very often it is something that happens more or less by accident, but that accidental nature doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.

Michael Tsai on Pixelmator 1.0 ★

“It feels a lot like older, less Windowsy, versions of Photoshop.”

Layer Tennis Tomorrow ★

Keep your afternoon clear.

The Reason It’s Called the Wi-Fi Music Store ★

Just in case you had any doubt, the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store doesn’t work via EDGE.

iPhone Update: September ’07 ★

QuickTime movie from Apple showing off the new features in the 1.1.1 iPhone update.

iWork Updates: Pages, Keynote, Numbers ★

Available now via Software Update: Keynote 4.0.1, Pages 3.0.1, and Numbers 1.0.1. Love these detailed release notes displays in Software Update:

(Keynote:) This update primarily addresses issues with builds and performance.

(Pages:) This update primarily addresses issues with change tracking and performance.

(Numbers:) This update primarily addresses issues with tables and performance.

Macworld: Apple Releases iPhone Update 1.1.1 ★

Jim Dalrymple has the run-down on what’s new:

New for the iPhone with software update 1.1.1 is loud speaker and receiver volume; Home button double-click shortcut to phone favorites or music controls; Space bar double-tap shortcut to intelligently insert period and space; Mail attachments are now viewable in portrait and landscape modes; Stocks and cities can be reordered; Apple Bluetooth Headset battery status is now in the Status Bar; support has been added for TV Out; Preference to turn EDGE/GPRS off when roaming internationally has been added; Passcode lock time intervals; and adjustable volume alerts.

Security Fixes in iPhone 1.1.1 Update ★

Mostly in MobileSafari.

iPhone Software Version 1.1.1 ★

Best new feature: double-tapping Home button to jump to your phone favorites. (It’s configurable in Settings → General → Home Button.) Unsurprisingly, it breaks all known methods for adding third-party software, as well as breaking Ambrosia’s iToner.

I installed 1.1.1 directly on top of my hacked 1.0.2 system. All my custom apps were wiped out, of course (because the restore process that installs the 1.1.1 upgrade installs the entire OS from scratch), but all my data is intact. Worth pointing out that I’d only “hacked” my phone with custom software — no diddling with the SIM unlocking.

The Histogram as the Image ★

Clever.

Tracking Twitter ★

Wonder why this is SMS/IM only? When I use Twitter from my phone, it’s via the web.

Hotel Chevalier ★

Now available from the iTunes Store: Hotel Chevalier, a free 13-minute short film by Wes Anderson, starring Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman. It’s a prequel to Anderson’s soon-to-be-released The Darjeeling Limited. (Might not be work-safe, depending on your workplace’s policies toward nudity, profanity, and Futura.)

Update: Alas, it’s apparently only available from the U.S. iTunes Store. Anyone knows of a workaround for our non-U.S. friends, let me know. Update 2: What works, at least for some people, is changing your store to the U.S. and creating a new account with a bogus U.S. address. You won’t be able to buy anything, but you can download free stuff.

Wednesday, 26 Sep 2007

Apple Store Redesign ★

Nice job from the Apple Store design team, bringing the look-and-feel in line with the recent apple.com redesign.

The Intersection of Cool and Awesome ★

Speaking of Acorn, Jonathan Wight’s plugin for using the 3Dconnexion SpaceNavigator in Acorn looks cool as shit. (Via Gus Mueller.)

Brief Acorn/Pixelmator/Photoshop/Graphic Converter/iPhoto Comparison ★

Jon Whipple:

Pixelmator has arrived, and just when I was processing cover art, scans and stuff to add to my iTunes collection. Here are some rushed first impressions, where I compare it to Acorn, the venerable Graphic Converter, iPhoto, and of course Photoshop.

Correct Me If I’m Mshtakan ★

Andrew Watt revisits the case of the ugly Unicode Black Star in the Mshtakan font. Love the pun.

Per-Folder Settings in Path Finder 4.8 ★

Cocoatech Blog:

Unlike the Finder (with its notorious .DS_Store files) we use no hidden files, we do not require files scattered around in every directory, and no helper files will ever silently appear on your network shares or external hard drives.

Path Finder 4.8 will store its visual per-folder settings in a centralized SQLite database located in ~/Library/Application Support/Path Finder/CoreData. Its size is very small - mine currently weighs just about 150 KB.

Mac News Junkie Bundle ★

Good deal from C-Command and Cynical Peak: $55 for a bundle with both EagleFiler and Cyndicate.

On Browsing eMusic ★

So it ends up you can browse eMusic without signing up for an account; still, I don’t like their “you can’t just buy a song and that’s it” business model.

Paul Thurrott, Unimpressed by Amazon MP3 Store ★

Paul Thurrott:

Amazon’s previously announced MP3 music download service is live. Dubbed amazonmp3, the service offers DRM-free MP3 music downloads. Nothing exceptional yet, and sort of the lame selection found on Wal-Mart’s similar store. Still, a step in the right direction.

I think offering the largest library of DRM-free downloadable music is quite exceptional. I predict a year from now, Amazon’s store will be a solid #2 to iTunes — and that Wal-Mart’s, assuming it’s still peddling DRM-ware, will remain in nowheresville. Any store selling music that won’t play on iPods is doomed.

Tuesday, 25 Sep 2007

Jeebus Car Emblem ★

If I were going to stick something on my car, this would be it. It ought to be “Jebus”, though. (Thanks to Nat Irons.)

15 Billion More Reasons to Worry About Facebook ★

Kara Swisher:

More laughable still is that Facebook, according to the Journal story, might be holding out for a $15 billion valuation.

Why? Because I believe Silicon Valley can now be considered to be at Delusional Level Red. Or green, given all the cash that is being shoved in Facebook’s direction now.

Amazon MP3 Files Don’t Contain User-Identifying Metadata ★

The Associated Press:

Bill Carr, Amazon’s vice president for digital music, said it will be up to customers to use the music they buy legally.

To help stop music piracy, Carr said some record labels add a digital watermark to MP3 files that indicate what company sold the song, and Amazon adds its own name and the item number of the song, for customer service purposes. He added that no details about the buyer or the transaction are added to the downloaded music file.

Apple’s DRM-free iTunes Plus files contain your name and email address (well, your iTunes user account ID, which is generally an email address).

Pixelmator 1.0 ★

Pixelmator, the HUD-a-riffic $59 bitmap image editor, ships:

Pixelmator supports more than 100 different file formats, including Photoshop images with layers, and it comes with more than 15 color correction tools and 50 Core Image-powered filters, transform tools, fill and stroke, Gradients, QuickMask mode, full-screen editing mode, Automator support, ColorSync support, Spotlight support, and much more.

I don’t mind that all the palettes are HUD-style, but it seems gratuitous that the document windows are too.

Scott McNulty Reviews Amazon MP3 ★

“I am not an audiophile, so both files sounded the same to me, but in my heart of hearts the Amazon track sounded better only because it has no DRM and it cost me 10 cents less.”

Macworld: Adobe to Release Mac Version of Photoshop Elements 6 in ‘Early 2008’ ★

“There is no indication if the Mac version will include these same features.”

Helvetica Coffee Mug ★

“Coffee, like Helvetica, is an acquired taste.” (Via Swissmiss.)

Amazon Launches ‘Public Beta’ of DRM-Free Music Download Store ★

Very cool: Amazon has launched a “public beta” of Amazon MP3, a DRM-free music download store. Compares well against iTunes: singles cost $.89 or $.99, albums cost $5.99 to $9.99, and, because the format is DRM-free MP3 (encoded at a respectable 256 kbps), the files are compatible with all digital music players, as well as all operating systems. The only downside is that with just two million songs, it offers far fewer songs than iTunes. The problem there, surely, is with music labels that refuse to sell DRM-free tracks. The music labels should get their heads out of the sand and get on board with this, because unlike Amazon’s Unbox, this looks like a terrific iTunes rival.

Griffin Technology: Radio Shark 2 ★

I don’t know how I missed it, but I wasn’t aware that Griffin had come out with a second generation Radio Shark until I saw it mentioned as a supported input device for Rogue Amoeba’s new Radioshift app. Radio Shark is a $50 USB AM/FM radio tuner — the only one I know of that works on the Mac.

Virgin Digital Music Store to Shut Down ★

Exhibit #44731 in the case against DRM:

The site now advises its customers who have purchased tracks to back them up, as they will not be able to download them again once Virgin Digital has closed. It’s unclear whether the purchasers of individual tracks will be able to access their songs without burning them to CD and reimporting them as MP3s, but it’s better to be safe than sorry if you’re one of those customers. And naturally, subscribing members will lose access altogether once their subscriptions lapse.

Monday, 24 Sep 2007

Photoshop Elements 6 ★

Looks like a dumbed-down (and homely) version of Lightroom. Windows-only.

Another AppleScript for Getting the Size of the Main Display ★

Mike Byrne with a multiple-monitor-aware alternative to this script I posted last year.

Phil Schiller on Unlocked iPhones Warning ★

The Associated Press:

“This has nothing to do with proactively disabling a phone that is unlocked or hacked,” Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, said in an interview. “It’s unfortunate that some of these programs have caused damage to the iPhone software, but Apple cannot be responsible for … those consequences.”

Apple: iPhone Unlocking Apps May Render iPhones ‘Permanently Inoperable’ After Upcoming Software Update ★

Warning from Apple regarding unlocked iPhones:

Apple has discovered that many of the unauthorized iPhone unlocking programs available on the Internet cause irreparable damage to the iPhone’s software, which will likely result in the modified iPhone becoming permanently inoperable when a future Apple-supplied iPhone software update is installed. Apple plans to release the next iPhone software update, containing many new features including the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store, later this week.

To be clear, it seems as though Apple is specifically talking about SIM unlocking — the hacks that allow iPhones to be used on networks other than AT&T’s — not iPhone hacking in general. Assuming some unlocked iPhones really will be rendered inoperable by the upcoming update, the innocent explanation is that the unlocking tools diddled where they ought not to have diddled and Apple isn’t going to, or isn’t able to, undo the damage while still closing the holes that allowed these unlocks to work. “Irreparable” is a strong word, though. What exactly is it that can’t be reset to factory conditions?

(Via Nik Fletcher.)

Rogue Amoeba: Radioshift 1.0 ★

Like TiVo for radio.

I repeat: like TiVo for radio. Not only does Radioshift record streaming audio in all popular formats — RealAudio, Windows Media, QuickTime, even AM/FM if you have a Griffin Radio Shark — but it also offers 50,000 schedules for programs and radio stations, so, like with TiVo, you can simply subscribe to the shows you want to follow and they’ll be recorded automatically. But unlike TiVo, the programming schedules are free — you pay $32 for Radioshift and the program schedules are just there.

This is a killer product.

Seed Conference: Chicago: 29 October 2007 ★

One-day conference on design, entrepeneurship, and inspiration. Sounds like a good way to spend a Monday to me.

Starbucks to Give Away 50 Million Songs on iTunes ★

Free songs to be given out at Starbucks stores across the country, starting October 2:

Thirty-seven artists with featured songs include Paul McCartney and Joni Mitchell — the first two to sign on with Starbucks’ Hear Music label — along with Joss Stone, Dave Matthews, John Mayer, Annie Lennox and Band of Horses. The first song will be Bob Dylan’s “Joker Man.”

(Via Jacqui Cheng.)

Someecards ★

Best e-cards ever. (Via Merlin Mann’s newly-redesigned 43 Folders.)

‘Hotel Chevalier’ ★

Director Wes Anderson is releasing Hotel Chevalier, a 13-minute short film prequel to The Darjeeling Limited. Hotel Chevalier stars Jason Schwartzman and Natalie Portman, and is premiering Tuesday night at Apple Stores in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and Santa Monica — then will be made available as a free download from iTunes.

Cowboys Rout Bears 34-10 ★

Cheer up Chicago: Your quarterback is a complete disaster, but (a) the Cubs are looking good to win the division, and (b) Homer Simpson visited town during the The Simpsons season premiere.

Sunday, 23 Sep 2007

Darth Vader Blues ★

Now we know the power of the Dark Side. Via CP.

New York Times Magazine Profile of Justice John Paul Stevens ★

Inspiring profile of 87-year-old Supreme Court justice John Paul Stevens, by Jeffrey Rosen:

Since Stevens joined the court, he has also been the only justice routinely to write the first drafts of his own opinions — the other justices have generally relied on clerks to write their first drafts and then rewritten (or at least edited) the drafts to various degrees. “Sometimes the draft is pretty short,” Stevens told me, “but at least I write enough so that I’ve had a chance to think it through.” Stevens said writing a first draft was “terribly important” because “you often don’t understand a case until you’ve tried to write it out.”

The man’s 87, but fit as a fiddle: he plays tennis three times a week and swims every day.

Saturday, 22 Sep 2007

Douglas Coupland: I Luv Helvetica ★: Newly freed from behind The Times’s pay wall, author Douglas Coupland on Helvetica:

In the world of type, Helvetica was the supposed endpoint of design. It was designed to be 100-percent emotionally neutral (yes, how Swiss, the same country that brought us sleeping pills — Helvetica is the Latin name for Switzerland), and when it was marketed in 1961, it caused a revolution, because everything the font touched it modernized. Helvetica essentially takes any word or phrase and pressure-washes it into sterility. I love it.
Hahlo 2.0 ★: New version of Dean Robinson’s iPhone web app client for Twitter. Very nice.

Friday, 21 Sep 2007

‘He Gets His Social Skills From His Father’ ★: My wife with the funny on Twitter.
A Better Analogy ★: The Macalope:

A better analogy would be someone who claimed they had something you knew existed but just hadn’t seen before. Like maybe an Indian Head nickel. And when you asked to see it they said, oh, they’d love to show you but you wouldn’t understand it because you’re not a coin collector. And you were like huh? C’mon, stop being a jerk and show it to me. And they said they couldn’t because the U.S. Mint might sue them.
‘A Singular, Unparalleled, Variety Extravaganza’ ★: Splendid work from the crackerjacks at Airbag Industries.
Photos From iPhone Event in Berlin ★: Great photos from Thorsten Wulff from the iPhone announcement in Berlin. There are a few more that aren’t in the photoset in his Flickr stream.
‘Unlimited’ Means ‘Limited’? What a Country! ★: Glenn Fleishman on O2’s iPhone data plans:

The data plans for EDGE and Wi-Fi are “unlimited” not unlimited. The footnote on O2’s information page says that unlimited “fair usage” is included. But that’s just garbage.
iPod Touch: State of the Jailbreak ★: Hackers still haven’t figured out how to “jailbreak” the iPod Touch to access the underlying file system. Strikes me as a good bet that the next iPhone update will be locked similarly — so get your iPhone hacking ya-yas out now, or be prepared to stick to the soon-to-be-outdated 1.0.2 iPhone software.
Macs Really Do Run Windows Better ★: Steven Frank:

Ever since Boot Camp appeared on the scene, there have been several comments about Macs being better Windows machines than Windows machines. The weird thing is it’s actually true.
From Boys of Summer to Men of Steel ★: A brief message from Paul Lukas on sports uniform design trends.
iLounge: Is Apple Going Rotten? ★: iLounge on the rash of recent “Boy, that sucks” decisions from Apple. I think Apple is going to do the right thing with crummy iPod Touch displays, but the other three issues are spot-on: new iPods don’t work with existing video-out docks and cables, instead requiring expensive new cables from Apple; if you bought games for your video iPod last year, you have to re-purchase the same games to play them on the new Nanos; and the whole ringtones racket.
Zengobi Curio 4 ★: My thanks to Zengobi for sponsoring this week’s RSS feed. Zengobi’s Curio combines mind-mapping, brainstorming, and project management. And it looks good, too. Through the end of September, use the coupon code “DARING” when purchasing and you’ll save 10 percent.
Bottled Drinks ★: Izze Sparkling Clementine Juice FTW.

Thursday, 20 Sep 2007

Walt Mossberg’s iPod Touch Review ★

Complains about battery life — it’s not bad, but it wasn’t as good as what Apple claims — and gets confirmation from Apple that the display problems reported by many Touch owners are, in fact, a hardware problem affecting some units. (Mossberg reports that the displays on his two demo units both look great.)

VoodooPad and Acorn Updates ★

Gus Mueller:

Both have bug fixes, and a couple of new features. Acorn’s update is mostly to fix a handful of crashers and a couple of new features that lots of people have been asking for. VoodooPad’s “wiki markup engine” (vroom vroom?) has had some minor tweaks so that it won’t wipe out custom links pasted from other apps, among other things.

MacJournals: On Ringtones and Copyrights ★

MDJ’s scrupulously detailed look at the intersection of ringtones and copyright law. Part of the argument here is that making a ringtone necessitates making an additional copy of the song file, whether it’s truncated or not. That’s just a matter of implementation, though — Apple could easily allow the iPhone’s phone app to play the same song files in your regular music library.

Also, this is interesting:

You can peek behind the curtain just a little bit by looking at the FAQ page from TuneCore, a company that takes a flat fee for putting digital music to which you own the copyright onto online stores such as the iTunes Store, Napster, eMusic, Rhapsody, MusicNet, GroupieTunes, and others, both in the United States and internationally. TuneCore swears up, down, and sideways that it does not keep even the tiniest percentage of the royalties from any online store, instead taking a flat fee per year and per album to get your tunes listed. As part of this, TuneCore discloses the royalty rates paid to artists on the various systems.

Playlist Reviews the iPod Touch ★

Christopher Breen: “Among my list of concerns only one is a deal-killer—the quality of the video.”

Dr. Copperplate and Mr. Gothic ★

Armin Vit on Copperplate Gothic.

Mint: Year Two in Review ★

Shaun Inman:

Two years ago this past Labor Day I launched Mint. No, not that “inspired” third-party finance aggregator the VCs are going gaga over. The original Mint, the only (to my knowledge) self-hosted, real-time, extensible web stats app. So what’s happened since the first yearly review (for posterity and those who are just now joining us)?

I count Mint as one of my essential tools for running DF.

Canadian Dollar Reaches Parity With Staggering U.S. Greenback ★

The dollar also hit an all-time low against the Euro. Heck of a job, Bushie.

Carl Howe on Apple’s iPhone Marketing Strategy ★

Carl Howe is a very smart dude:

Consumers value what they pay for. They don’t value things the perceive as free. And that’s the marketing blunder the US mobile phone market has bought into over the last 10 to 15 years. By bundling “free” and generic phones with cell phone service, mobile carriers have devalued both the brand values of the handset makers and their own services.

Put Your Content in my Pocket, Part II ★

Second part of Craig Hockenberry’s outstanding guide to MobileSafari-optimized web development for A List Apart.

iPhone and iPod: Contain or Disengage? ★

Terrific essay from Wil Shipley on Apple’s growing hubris:

Apple’s emulating the most pernicious qualities of Nintendo and the Microsoft XBox — you pay us a tax or you don’t work with our systems.

But Apple’s “approval” just comes from Apple getting a cut. It’s a measure of greed, not quality. We’re not talking about THX-certification here, we’re talking about extortion. This kind of lock-in seems very appealing for the company doing the locking early on, but it always, ALWAYS ends up biting the company in the butt. Ask IBM with their ubiquitous 970 servers and their extortionist service contracts. Oh, wait, those don’t exist any more.

The best thing that could happen to Apple this year would be for Microsoft’s Zune 2.0 to be a kick-ass product, both technologically and in terms of being designed to make customers happy, not entertainment conglomerates. Apple needs competition.

More on JetPens ★

After I linked to their wonderful Japanese imported .38mm Pilot G2 pens, they sold out. Good news: the black ones are back in stock.

Number One Priority ★

One more thing regarding Bill Carter’s New York Times report on NBC’s idiotic new “free TV show downloads that only work on Windows, expire in a week, and have commercials you’re not allowed to fast forward through” initiative:

But, Mr. Gaspin said, “piracy was and is our No. 1 priority.” He said that the music industry had been devastated by the free exchange of music, much of it facilitated by iTunes.

That’s Jeff Gaspin, the president of the NBC Universal Television Group. So his number-one priority is piracy. Not making high-quality shows. Not forging a sponsorship or advertising model that is less annoying and distracting to viewers, such that they (the viewers) would be less likely to want to fast-forward the advertising messages. No, piracy, that’s his top priority.

And shame on Bill Carter for letting Gaspin’s statement regarding iTunes being a facilitator of music piracy stand undisputed. What Gaspin means is simply that iTunes allows you to play non-DRM-protected music (and video). In the entertainment industry’s mind, anything that can be used to play bootlegged copyrighted material is deemed problematic. It’s despicable.

What To Do With 756 ★

Mike Monteiro on Bonds’s home run ball: “I voted to send it to the Hall. It’s history; and not all history is pretty.”

Vote756.com ★

Designer Marc Ecko paid $750,000 for Barry Bonds’s record-breaking home run ball; he’s now holding an online poll to determine whether to (a) send it to Cooperstown; (b) brand it with an asterisk and then send it to Cooperstown; or (c) banish the ball.

I give Bonds shit because I do believe he cheated by using illegal performance-enhancing drugs. But I voted for (a), if for no other reason than that he’s been proven guilty of no such thing. The fact is he hit every one of those home runs, and every one of them is in the books.

Mint.com: Refreshing Money Management ★

(a) A web app that, at least at a glance, looks like an arch-rival to the year-old Wesabe; (b) the “winner” of the TechCrunch 40, a depressingly uninspired collection of (in many cases laughably-named) startups competing at a conference organized by Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis; and (c) a name that was already taken.

Regarding the Idea That Maybe You Can Make a Copy of the Helvetica Font Files on an iPhone and Just Give Them Marker Felt’s File Names ★

Dozens of readers emailed to suggest this; I tried it, it doesn’t work. In short, font names are embedded within the data of the font file, they don’t come from the font’s file name.

It wasn’t a bad idea to try it, though.

NBC to Offer Crappy Windows-Only Downloads of Its Shows ★

Bill Carter, reporting for The New York Times on NBC’s new plans for “free” TV show downloads:

But the files, which would be downloaded overnight to home computers, would contain commercials that viewers would not be able to skip through. And the file would not be transferable to a disk or to another computer.

I get the feeling NBC would like to force us to watch the commercials Clockwork Orange-style.

The files would degrade after the seven-day period and be unwatchable. “Kind of like ‘Mission: Impossible,’ only I don’t think there would be any explosion and smoke,” Mr. Gaspin said.

This sounds way better than iTunes!

The programs will initially be downloadable only to PCs with the Windows operating system, but NBC said it planned to make the service available to Mac computers and iPods later.

I’m sure NBC has some intern downloading a copy of Xcode as we speak.

Gems From the Archive of the New York Times ★

Jason Kottke:

Now that the NY Times has discontinued their Times Select subscription program and made much more of their 150+ years of content available for anyone to read and link to, let’s take a look at some of the more notable items that the non-subscriber has been missing.

Wednesday, 19 Sep 2007

The Conscience of a Liberal ★

The world’s best political commentator, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, is now also writing a weblog for The Times. Hooray for the unpaywalled Times.

Stephen Fry: ‘Device and Desires’ ★

Actor and writer Stephen Fry is a gadget hound, and proves it in this extensive survey of the current state-of-the-art in the smartphone market. E.g., regarding the Sony-Ericsson P1i:

The P1i is what happens when “oh, that’ll do” becomes the corporate motto. UIQ promised something, the actual GUI is reasonable, in fact quite delightful, but it needed refinement, it needed acceleration and it needed flair. Instead we’ve got a very, very slow device that eats power, is difficult to use in varying environments and frequently hangs and crashes. In a word unusable. And I can just hear them hiding behind the excuse of “price” and “sectors of the market” and other bullshit. What, Apple’s a bigger company than Sony? Got more muscle? What muscle it has got, it got from daring to be better. That was once true of Sony too.

T-Mobile to Sell iPhone in Germany ★

Goes on sales November 9 for €399; plans to be announced later.

Interesting stuff at the end of the story on iTunes song pricing in Europe. The European Commission is investigating charges that Apple is breaking the law by selling the same songs at different prices for different countries. Steve Jobs flatly lays the blame at the music labels’ feet: “We think the prices should be the same.”. “Anybody in Europe should be able to buy off of any store. I’ve been saying this from the start. But the music companies don’t permit us to resell their music that way. So it’s really an issue with the music companies.”

Smartphone Market Shares Across the World ★

It’s fascinating how different the markets are in different regions of the world. Microsoft and RIM are huge in the U.S., but mere also-rans everywhere else. Linux is huge in Asia, but barely registers in Europe or North America. And Symbian dominates the entire world except for North America, where it’s behind even Apple, which only entered the market three months ago.

David Maynor’s Home Office ★

David Maynor:

Here is a pick of the home office I have been working from, this setup is mostly duplicated everywhere else I would work from, I thought you might just want to see what the fuss is about.

Let me guess which part of the setup is not duplicated everywhere else he might work from. Um: all the guns laying around on the table and floor?

‘Always Wait for Something Better’ ★

The Macalope on David Berlind:

New Yorkers like to say that the outdoors is something you have to go through to get to the cab. Well, EDGE is something you have to go through to get to WiFi. My god, people act like EDGE is some blight on the human condition like polio or something, as if there were no trade-offs to be made that 3G was simply better.

It’s not.

More on Photoshop’s New Logo ★

Comments on John Nack’s weblog are rather negative.

Carbon Copy Cloner 3.0 ★

Looks like a splendid update to Mike Bombich’s donationware rival to SuperDuper. New features include block-level disk-to-disk clones, better synchronization features, network backups, and scheduling features.

WireTap Studio Preview Movies ★

Ambrosia’s Andrew Welch links to a slew of QuickTime movies showing off their upcoming WireTap Studio.

Undercover ★

$49 theft-notification software for Mac OS X notebooks; if your machine is stolen, it starts transmitting things like current screenshots, network settings, and, if there’s a built-in iSight, photos from the camera. (Via Jason Santa Maria.)

TrueGrain ★

$300 “pro-grade tool for accurately recapturing the aesthetics of black-and-white film with digital photography”; simulates the grain of a bunch of specific black-and-white film stocks.

Tuesday, 18 Sep 2007

Complete Archives of ‘Siskel & Ebert’ and ‘Ebert & Roeper’ From 1986 to Present ★

Via Kottke, the complete post-1986 movie reviews from Siskel, Ebert, and Roeper’s show. Gene Siskel, we miss you.

Watch Siskel hand Ebert his hat in their review of Full Metal Jacket from 1987 — Siskel calls it a “near masterpiece” and nails it with regard to the dual emotions evoked by the combat scenes: thrill and terror. Ebert, on the other hand, seems to have watched some other movie, and his repeated comparisons to Platoon seem utterly irrelevant 20 years later.

Another classic, this one they both get right: GoodFellas in 1990.

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed ★

Upcoming Wii game lets you use the controller as a lightsaber. As if demand for Wiis weren’t high enough already.

David Maynor Releases Details of Wi-Fi Exploit Report From August 2006 ★

Details available in this paper.

New Photoshop Logo From Adobe ★

Only app I know of with a logo that isn’t used at all as part of its icon or about box. Sort of reminds me of the old PBS logo. (Thanks to Neven Mrgan.)

Double-Tap Home Button Preference in iPhone 1.1.1 OS ★

iPhones running the 1.1.1 release of the OS were on hand at today’s event in London; this screenshot from Engadget shows the new options available for double-tapping the Home button: Home, Phone Favorites, or iPod. (Plus, you can optionally set it to invoke heads-up display playback controls if audio is currently playing, which is what double-tapping Home does on the iPod Touch.)

Good call by Steven Berlin Johnson back in July.

iTunes to Be Exclusive Distributor of Ed Burns’s New Movie ★

This AP profile of filmmaker Ed Burns ends with an interesting nugget:

Next month, Burns’ new romantic comedy, “Purple Violets,” will become the first featured film to be released and distributed by iTunes.

I looked for more information about this, and found this excerpt of an interview with Burns from PremiumHollywood:

Burns: So, we’re gambling and we’re gonna be the first film that is released exclusively through iTunes. It’ll be available for four weeks exclusively, and the idea is we’ll promote it the same as you would a theatrical release and we’ll see what the numbers are. If the attendance, if the downloads, which we expect to be a much higher numbers than the attendance, I think it’ll be the way I would go in the future for small movies like this. […]

Reporter: When did you say it would be available?

Burns: Um, October 9th.

Reporter: Is iTunes promising you a huge amount of promotion for doing this?

Burns: Huge is a relative term. We’ll have to see, but they’re promising promotion. I hope it’s huge.

New Promotional Site for Mac Office 2008 ★

Whole thing is done in Flash.

The D/Objective-C Bridge ★

Michel Fortin on his newly-released D/Objective-C Bridge.

Candid Camera: The Cult of Leica ★

Anthony Lane in The New Yorker:

The Leica is lumpless, with a flat top built from a single piece of brass. It has no prism, because it focusses with a range finder—situated above the lens. And it has no mirror inside, and therefore no clunk as the mirror swings. When you take a picture with an S.L.R., there is a distinctive sound, somewhere between a clatter and a thump; I worship my beat-up Nikon FE, but there is no denying that every snap reminds me of a cow kicking over a milk pail. With a Leica, all you hear is the shutter, which is the quietest on the market. The result — and this may be the most seductive reason for the Leica cult — is that a photograph sounds like a kiss.

The Talk Show, Episode 10 ★

“I hear a pussycat.”

iToner Still Works ★

So yesterday’s iTunes 7.4.2 update breaks all the known workarounds for freely adding custom iPhone ringtones via file-extension renaming and AAC metadata hacking. But Ambrosia’s $15 iToner still works like a charm. (iToner doesn’t go through iTunes, it communicates directly with your iPhone, so I think only an iPhone software update could affect iToner, not an iTunes update.)

Jeffrey Zeldman: ‘Facebook Considered Harmless’ ★

Thank goodness Zeldman joined Facebook; gets me one step closer to my goal of being the last person on the web who has not.

Big Sale at Freeverse ★

30 percent off Freeverse’s games and apps, through September 20.

Presentations Added to Google Docs ★

Doesn’t work with Safari (including version 3). Otherwise, seems like a reasonable web-based presentation editor.

Apple Chooses O2 as Exclusive Carrier for iPhone in U.K. ★

Apple:

iPhone is scheduled to go on sale on November 9 and will be sold exclusively in the UK through Apple’s retail and online stores, O2 and The Carphone Warehouse’s retail and online stores. iPhone will be available in an 8GB model for £269 (inc VAT) and will work with either a PC or Mac. Three new great value iPhone tariffs will be available from O2 starting at £35, which all include unlimited anytime, anywhere mobile data usage and, in a market first, free unlimited use of the UK’s largest single public Wi-Fi network, covering over 7,500 cafes, restaurants, airport lounges, pubs and other locations across the UK.

The free access to a large network of Wi-Fi hotspots sounds great; I wish AT&T had something to offer like that.

European Court of First Instance: Microsoft Abused Its Dominant Position ★

David Charter reporting for The Times Online:

The judges in Luxembourg supported a fine of €497 million and confirmed the Commision’s ruling that by bundling up Windows Media Player with its Windows operating system, Microsoft had damaged rival media players’ ability to compete. They also upheld an order by the Commission in 2004 that Microsoft supply technical information to other companies, such as Sun Microsystems, so that they can make their servers compatible with Windows-based software.

Gary Vaynerchuk on The Ellen DeGeneres Show Thursday ★

Set your TiVos to record: Gary tells me he has a bet with one of Ellen’s producers that he can generate a 15-percent spike in TiVo recordings for the show.

The Truth Hurts ★

The Boston Herald:

Griffin Whitman, a 10-year-old Red Sox fan from Swampscott, was excited to attend his first Yankees vs. Red Sox game Friday night. The young autograph-collector was even more thrilled to score Yankees outfielder Shelley Duncan’s signature before the game. That is, until Griffin read the message from the 27-year-old rookie: “Red Sox suck! Shelley Duncan.” […]

Griffin’s mother, Karen, blasted the Yankees slugger’s bad manners.

“This is someone who wears the Yankee uniform and is on the payroll and should be setting an example for 10-year-olds,” she said.

Jesus, they really bleed the sense of humor out of Red Sox fans from a young age. Maybe they’re just born joyless and miserable. When I was 10 I would have laughed my ass off if some player from the Red Sox had given me a “Yankees suck!” autograph.

Monday, 17 Sep 2007

Meizu M8 ★

This upcoming phone looks like a rip-off of Nokia’s upcoming phone.

New York Times to Stop Charging for Parts of Its Web Site ★

Glad to hear it. I didn’t mind paying the $50 a year for TimesSelect — I’d pay that just to read Paul Krugman and Frank Rich — but it was frustrating not to be able to link to certain articles at The Times because they were behind the pay wall.

iTunes 7.4.2 ★

No release notes online (that I’ve seen), but the Software Update blurb says: “iTunes 7.4.2 addresses an issue with creating ringtones using iTunes Plus song purchases and includes bug fixes to improve stability and performance.”

Where by “bug fixes” they mean “closes the loopholes that allow you to create ringtones for free from the music you already own.”

Reuters: ‘Apple’s iPhone Can Only Help Rivals in Europe’ ★

Tarmo Virki reporting for Reuters:

Major handset vendors have much more to gain than to lose from the buzz Apple Inc’s coveted iPhone will create when it arrives in European stores for the key shopping season ahead of Christmas.

In other news, war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.

Inscribed in the Living Tile: Type in the Toronto Subway ★

Joe Clark on the sad typographic history of the Toronto subway system.

Trailer: ‘No Country For Old Men’ ★

Modern-day Western from Joel and Ethan Coen. Can’t wait. The Coen brothers are on my list of filmmakers who I’d go see a movie they made about paint drying.

Pay Phones on Chestnut Street Between 10th and Broad ★

Photographs taken on my walk home from lunch yesterday.

TechCrunch: ‘Yahoo Acquires Zimbra for $350 Million in Cash’ ★

Mike Arrington:

Yahoo will announce the acquisition of open source online/offline office suite Zimbra this evening, we just heard through a very solid source. The price: $350 million, in cash, confirmed.

Adobe Photoshop CS3 for iPhone ★

“Also, we’ve done away with warning dialog boxes in Photoshop. Instead, Photoshop actually calls your iPhone and tells you the warning!” (Thanks to Dan Benjamin.)

‘Where Thieves and Pimps Run Free’ ★

So that aforelinked quote on the music business from Hunter S. Thompson? Ends up it’s a widely-cited misquote. The actual quote is about the TV industry:

“The TV business is uglier than most things. It is normally perceived as some kind of cruel and shallow money trench through the heart of the journalism industry, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free and good men die like dogs, for no good reason.”

That it’s equally true for the music industry is why the misquote resonates. (Thanks to Ramanan Sivaranjan for the link to David Emery’s investigation on the quote.)

Cinemascapes ★

Rosecrans Baldwin interviews photographer Aaron Hobson.

Devicescape Connect ★

Glenn Fleishman:

Devicescape has released a simple application for the iPhone that lets you connect to Wi-Fi hotspots without all the fuss of tapping in user names and passwords, clicking Accept buttons, or remembering WEP and WPA encryption keys. Devicescape’s Connect application requires the Nullriver AppTapp application installer, a third-party hack that enables easy installation of software on the iPhone.

Mark Cuban Switches to the Mac ★

Billionaire captain of industry Mark Cuban — who really does capitalize and punctuate his writing as you see below — got frustrated with Windows, bought a MacBook, and loves it:

First is that when I close my MacBook without turning it off, it doesn’t lose power. It can sit there for hours and then work when I open it up.

The 2nd is that it rarely freezes up. Maybe 3 or 4 times in months.

Finally, i LOVE the fact that it boots up in 1/1000000000 of the time it takes my PC. It probably will add years to my life .. (ok an exaggeration).

Im not an Apple fanboy, but I love me some MacBook

There’s a whole class of recent switchers who define “Apple fanboy” as “anyone who’s been an enthusiastic Mac user since before I switched to the Mac”.

Humanized Enso Beta Products ★

New software from Humanized; might be of interest to DF readers who use Windows.

Hunter S. Thompson on the Music Business ★

Good words to keep in mind regarding the ringtone racket, from Dr. Hunter S. Thompson:

“The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.”

Update: Ends up this is a misquote.

Sunday, 16 Sep 2007

Jottit ★

Radically simple web-based web page editor, by Aaron Swartz and Simon Carstensen. Starting a new page, the first time you visit the site, could not be any simpler: you just type text (Markdown-formatted, natch) in a textarea and click a button. No sign up, no account creation. Just write. After creating a page, you can password protect it, but you don’t have to if you don’t need to.

More info on Jottit from Aaron Swartz.

Nasty Legal Fight Over Ringtones Between Bob Marley’s Family, Verizon, and Universal Music ★

I love the lead by reporter Andrew Adam Newman:

The licensing dispute between the estate of the reggae singer Bob Marley and the Universal Music Group took an ugly turn yesterday, with nobody getting together or feeling the least bit all right.

Market Share ★

2003 piece from the DF archives, just as apt today, on the Mac’s market share:

Overall PC market share covers large market segments where Apple isn’t competing — including markets where Apple doesn’t want to compete. Fifteen or 20 years ago, personal computers were generally only purchased and used by people who were “into” computers. Today, however, many computers are purchased for use as generic business machines, modern-day typewriters and adding machines.

Randall Stross in The New York Times on the Mac’s Overall PC Market Share ★

So The New York Times ran a piece today by Randall Stross, which can more or less be summarized as follows: Microsoft’s Windows Vista is a turd, and Apple has blown it by not increasing the Mac’s market share even more than they have in the past year. Stross makes all the usual mistakes in Mac market share analysis, first and foremost by confusing who Apple is competing against. Apple does not sell an operating system that competes against Windows. Apple sells computers. Apple does not sell as many computers as Dell or HP, but Apple makes way more money per computer sold than Dell or HP (or any other major PC maker).

Precise Screen Sizes for iPod Touch and iPhone ★

Just in case you wanted one more piece of evidence that the iPhone and iPod Touch use different screens, Apple’s documentation for iPod and iPhone case designers has precise dimensions. The iPhone screen measures 76.38 × 51.42 mm; the iPod Touch screen measures 74.9 × 49.9 mm. (Thanks to François Menu.)

iPhone Features You’ll Miss Out on by Buying an iPod Touch ★

Bill Palmer runs down everything the iPhone has that the iPod Touch doesn’t.

iPod Classic Audio Measurements ★

Detailed audio quality analyis of the iPod Classic by Marc Heijligers:

Trying to reveal what I hear with the new iPod, I’ve measured the device and I’ve compared it to the iPod Video 5G. The measurements show is that the iPod Classic (also called 6G) indeed has an uplift in treble, and its timing response is incorrect. I assume Apple is able to patch the flaws by means of a firmware update.

Apple Engineers Refer to Chinese Factory as ‘Mordor’ ★

Entry for “send to Mordor” at the Double-Tongued Dictionary:

Hardware techies at Apple are regularly sent from California for intense two-week shifts to the city-sized FoxConn factory in Shenzhen, China where iPods are made and tested. Internally at Apple this is known as “being sent to Mordor.”

I’m sure it’s a lovely place. (Via Kottke.)

1996 Charlie Rose Interview With Steve Jobs and John Lasseter ★

Terrific interview, after the release of Toy Story, but before Jobs’s return to Apple. (Via Kottke.)

The Definition of Insanity ★

Jeremy Allison, on the suspicous voting patterns in the ISO standardization process for Microsoft’s OOXML document formats:

So we saw over the past few weeks some strange and rather irregular national positions coming to light. My own favorites were Cuba voting “yes” to the fast-tracking of OOXML, even though Microsoft is prohibited by the US Government from selling any software on the island that might even be able to read and write the new format, and Azerbaijan’s “yes” vote, even though OOXML as defined isn’t able to express a Web URL address in Azeri, their official language.

(Via Simon Willison.)

The ‘longdesc’ Lottery ★

Mark Pilgrim, writing for the WHATWG weblog, on the longdesc attribute:

That means that less than 1% of images that provide a longdesc attribute are actually useful. No more than one in a hundred get it right, of one in a thousand that even try.

Saturday, 15 Sep 2007

One-Fifth of Retail Copies of Microsoft Office Are for Mac ★

From a CNet story on Vista’s slower than expected adoption rate:

Retail sales of Office products from January through June were roughly double those of Office 2003 during its first six months on the market and up 59.6 percent from Office sales for the first six months of last year. […]

While much of the sales were for the new Office 2007, Swenson said just over 20 percent of all boxed copies of Office were Office for Mac. Swenson credited the large number of people switching to Macs as part of the reason for the spike in Mac Office sales.

That doesn’t mean Mac Office account for one-fifth of Office’s total sales — the corporate enterprise market doesn’t buy boxed retail copies of Office — but it’s still impressive, especially considering that the current version of Mac Office is rather old and doesn’t run natively on Intel Macs. (Thanks to Alex Merz.)

iPod Touch Technical Specifications ★

According to their tech specs pages, the iPod Touch and iPhone both have 3.5-inch displays with 480 × 320 resolution, but the iPhone checks in at 160 ppi, the iPod Touch at an ever-so-slightly-denser 163 ppi. So they apparently don’t use the same display. (Thanks to everyone who pointed this out.)

Adobe Releases Lightroom 1.2 and Camera Raw 4.2 ★

Looks like Lightroom 1.2 is mostly a bug fix update; Camera Raw 4.2 adds support for a slew of new cameras.

Friday, 14 Sep 2007

iPod Touch’s Display Not as Good as iPhone’s? ★

Photos from Macworld, comparing the iPod Touch’s display to the iPhone’s:

The touch is noticeably darker, lacks fine detail, and blows out dark “highlights” into the negative.

I didn’t expect this — I figured the Touch would use the exact same display. I wonder if they just got a bad iPod Touch, or if this is evident across the board?

Why the Magnifying Glass Doesn’t Work in Some iPhone Web Apps ★

Justin Williams:

We designed PocketTweets so that scaling isn’t necessary. Unfortunately, setting user-scaling to false is what is causing the magnifying glass to not work in <textarea> tags. Taking the user-scalable parameter out of the equation allows me to magnify as I please.

Jiminy, That’s Thin ★

Side-by-side, the iPod Touch is a lot thinner than the iPhone, which itself is pretty thin. From AppleInsider’s unpacking photos and tour.

iPhone Store Credit Page Shows Screenshots of iPhone OS X 1.1.1 ★

The screenshots that show you how to check your iPhone’s serial number are based on the as-yet-unreleased 1.1.1 version of the OS. (The current release version is 1.0.2; no idea what happened to 1.1.0.) One change is an additional setting under General for “Home Button”; my guess is that it’ll let you select an action for double-clicking. The iPod Touch uses a double-click of the Home button to bring up music player controls.

The Zap Colors Bookmarklet ★

Nifty bookmarklet for those of you who dislike the DF color scheme. Adding a dark-on-light option to the DF preferences page has been on the to-do list for years.

Cottyn ★

New online t-shirt shop. (Via Naz Hamid.)

Phone Different ★

My thanks to this week’s RSS feed sponsor, Phone Different. If you want iPhone peripherals — cases, Bluetooth headsets, chargers, anything — Phone Different’s got them. Through Wednesday, use the coupon code “MACNERDERY” to get a 10 percent discount on any purchase. They’ve got a weblog and forum packed with additional iPhone nerdery, too.

Coudal Partners’ Layer Tennis ★

At long last, the return of the game formerly known as Photoshop Tennis:

We’re just about ready to roll with Layer Tennis and we’re sure you’re going to find that it has been worth the wait. If you are going to be screwing around on Friday afternoons this Fall (and who isn’t?) make sure you’re screwing around somewhere with high-speed web access.

First match, Friday 28 September: Shaun Inman vs. Kevin Cornell, with commentary by yours truly. I can’t wait.

Fake Steve on the Ringtone Racket ★

Fake Steve:

Perhaps, if enough people complain, we will drop this policy at some point in the future and make ringtones free. And maybe, at that point, we will offer anyone who paid 99 cents for a ringtone a retroactive partial rebate in the form of a fifty-cent store credit. I’ve got Phil Schiller working on this right now.

Namaste right back at you, Fake Steve.

A Baffling Phenomenon: Customized Ringtones ★

David Pogue on the ringtone racket:

If I buy and download a pop song legitimately, shouldn’t I be able to trigger playback any way I want? Why must I pay one fee to play it by tapping Play, and a second fee to play it when someone calls my phone?

It just makes no sense.

The New England Patriots: Cheaters ★

Shameful:

The National Football League fined New England Patriots Coach Bill Belichick $500,000 yesterday, and the team will forfeit its first-round draft pick in 2008 if it makes the playoffs, for violating league rules Sunday when a Patriots staff member was discovered videotaping signals by Jets coaches during the season opener at the Meadowlands.

See also: “Shady Brady and Bill Belicheat”.

iPhone $100 Store Credit Redemption ★

Easy as pie: Just enter your iPhone phone number and serial number, and Apple sends you an SMS with a 6-digit passcode. Enter the passcode on Apple’s web site, and you get your $100 store credit. Took about two minutes, start to finish.

Mac Rumors’s Preview of Ambrosia Software’s WireTap Studio ★

Impressive stuff. Stores your original recordings in a library:

Another related feature is lossless editing. No matter how many changes you’ve made to the recording, you can always go back to the original recording (at the highest quality). This feature is similar to how Apple’s iPhoto and Aperture applications work on digital photos, keeping the originals intact while you apply edits over time.

The LivePreview feature has to be seen to be believed.

Thursday, 13 Sep 2007

Wii Overtakes Xbox 360 in Global Sales ★

Not only did the Xbox 360 have a year-long head start, but the Nintendo still isn’t producing Wii consoles fast enough to meet demand. I still haven’t seen one on a store shelf.

iPod Touch Features Guide (PDF) ★

This is certainly curious:

Before you can use any of the iPod touch features, you must use iTunes to set up and register iPod touch, and to create an iTunes Store account (if you don’t already have one).

(Thanks to Rosyna.)

Mac Office 2008 to Use the Standard Mac Installer ★

Good news from Microsoft’s Mac BU’s Dunstan Gourlie:

To that end, I am happy to announce that Office 2008 for Mac will use the Apple-recommended Apple Installer technology for Office 2008 installation. This means that the data that Office installs will ship on the disc in .pkg format, installs will work well with Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) and will be Applescript-able. Once installed, the user has the freedom to move the Office folder to a different location on the system and Office will run from there. I hope that this will make Office for Mac configuration/deployment easier for IT admins.

And in other good news, they’re no longer going to spew additional fonts in your Library folder whether you like it or not.

Apple Schedules U.K. Press Event for September 18 ★

Hello, iPhone.

Impressionism, Realism, and Blogging ★

Kottke:

The downside for Impressionist blogs is that their individual posts don’t work that well outside of their intended context.

A good example of this is Monoscope.

Bugs Are Magic Tricks ★

Spot-on analogy from Steven Frank:

A good bug, I mean a really good, pound-your-head-on-the-desk-for-a-week bug, is exactly like a magic trick in that something impossible appears to be happening.

Yours Truly on Last Night’s ‘Your Mac Life’ ★

I was a guest on last night’s episode of Your Mac Life, talking to host Shawn King about the breakdown between NBC and Apple, and iTunes’s new ringtones racket.

Wednesday, 12 Sep 2007

Kirk McElhearn on the New iPod Interface ★

Kirk McElhearn:

When you are on the main menu (the top-level menu), or the Music menu (which leads to Playlists, Artists, Albums, etc.), you see album art on the right half of the iPod screen. This is a random cover from your music, and it changes about every 8 seconds. It also moves around; you know, like those annoying Flash ads on web pages that distract you so you can’t read articles?

Lessons on the Surge From Economics 101 ★

Oliver R. Goodenough, on the U.S. occupation of Iraq:

Economics professors have a standard game they use to demonstrate how apparently rational decisions can create a disastrous result. They call it a “dollar auction.” The rules are simple. The professor offers a dollar for sale to the highest bidder, with only one wrinkle: the second-highest bidder has to pay up on their losing bid as well. Several students almost always get sucked in.

Exporting the iPhone ★

Canadian Dave Shea, on the SIM unlocking hacks for the iPhone:

If you’re an American iPhone owner, you probably still remember what June 29th felt like. To a lesser degree, that was what today felt like for the rest of the world.

Sun to Become Windows Server OEM ★

Scott McNealy is rolling over in his grave.

All Cool ★

Emma Story, on Microsoft’s customer support for Xbox 360:

I don’t know if you’ve ever called Microsoft about a problem with your Xbox, but the whole experience seems clumsily targeted at teenage boys and fills me with murderous rage. The automated voice system has that sort of fake-cool tone you get in soda commercials, and the rep I spoke with kept asserting that various things were cool. The Xbox serial number, the color of the power supply light, my zip code: all cool. He also didn’t know what he was talking about. (“It sounds like your AV cables just, uh, died. I guess.”)

MemoryMiner and PulpMotion Cross-Promotion ★

Sounds like a good deal.

Doofus ★

Paul Boutin in Slate, on why he prefers his BlackBerry to an iPhone:

When I’m in a tight spot, my BlackBerry always helps me out. It also sends a subtle signal to my correspondents that I’m getting a lot done. An e-mail that says “Sent from my BlackBerry” gives the impression that you’re on the move but still chained to work, e-mailing from the elevator. An e-mail that says “Sent from my iPhone” conjures an image of a doofus who wants you to know he has an iPhone.

One could, of course, simply change the email sig in the iPhone Settings app to read “Sent from my BlackBerry”. Your colleagues will think you’re working your ass off. (Some of Boutin’s other observations, especially about BlackBerry’s AutoText feature, are actually practical.)

Billable 1.2 ★

Bunch of new features added to Clickable Bliss’s neato $35 invoicing app for Mac OS X. Top of the list: AppleScript support and the ability to send PDF invoices by email with a single click. Check out the screencasts to learn more.

MessagePad 2007 ★

Andy Ihnatko’s iPhone.

Free iPhone Unlock Software? ★

According to MacApper, iPhone hackers have duplicated the iPhoneSIMfree technique for unlocking an iPhone to run on any SIM card. (If it’s true that the technique depends on a buffer overflow, kiss it goodbye with the next iPhone OS update.)

Tuesday, 11 Sep 2007

JetPens — Japanese Pens and Stationery ★

The Japanese have a far better selection of pens on the market than we do here in the U.S. Maybe you knew this already, but I just learned about it a few weeks ago. For example, earlier this year I switched from the Pilot Precise V5 rollerball to the Pilot G2 gel pen. The G2 is a great pen, but alas, the finest available point — 0.5mm — isn’t quite fine enough for my taste.

It ends up Pilot produces 0.38mm G2s, but they’re only available in Japan. Luckily, JetPens.com sells Japanese pens and stationery over the Internet. I ordered a fistful of these 0.38mm G2s and they showed up yesterday — and damn if they’re not perfect. Best pen I’ve ever used. If you’re a pen nerd, prepare to break out your credit card.

Josh Pigford: ‘Image Editors Are the New FTP Application’ ★

Josh Pigford, observing the recent run of new bitmap image editors for Mac OS X (Acorn, Pixelmator, Iris):

I think what really turns me off about all of this is that all of these image editors do, more or less, the same thing. Sure, they each have a different UI and will each perform tasks a tad different than the other but for the most part they all just edit images.

Substitute “text” for “images” and he’d be arguing that Allan Odgaard never should have written TextMate, or that the Coding Monkeys shouldn’t have written SubEthaEdit.

As for why image editors are suddenly popping out of the woodwork, that’s easy: Core Image. That’s not to say Core Image makes it easy to write apps like Acorn, Pixelmator, or Iris — just that it makes it a lot less work than it would have been before Core Image existed. (And don’t miss Siracusa’s quip.)

Joswiak Says Apple Has No Position on Unofficial Apps for iPhone/iPod Touch ★

It’s kind of implicit that this has been Apple’s stance all along, given that there aren’t any technical barriers in place to prevent third-party apps from running on the iPhone.

Ringtones Now Available in iTunes Store ★

I’ve been playing with this for about two hours; it’s buggy and frustrating.

Blackfriars’ Marketing: Why a Million iPhones in 74 Days Is Better Than You Think ★

Carl Howe has a good point:

Everyone is focusing on estimates of about 700,000 iphones sold over 74 days. But in reality, iPhones were very hard to find for nearly 21 days of that selling period! I’ve included a (admittedly very rough) movie showing iPhone availability at Apple stores during the first month of sales. Suffice it to say that if you wanted an iPhone during the period between July 1 and July 21, you had to be either lucky or determined to get one, because most Apple stores were out of stock of them.