Linked List: March 19, 2008

Wednesday, 19 March 2008

Great piece by Steven Frank:

My current hypothesis is that there are at least three positions of prominence in each segment — three ways to be number one, if you will: The First One, The Free One, and The Good One.

Airport Base Station Firmware Update Enables Support for Time Machine Backups? ★

Michael Rose reports on TUAW readers who, after installing today’s AirPort software updates, are now able to use USB drives attached to AirPort Extreme base stations as Time Machine backup targets.

Apple Offering Safari 3.1 to Windows iTunes Users ★

Joe Wilcox reports that Apple’s Software Update app for Windows — which gets installed with iTunes and QuickTime — is offering Safari 3.1 to Windows users, even if they hadn’t installed Safari for Windows before. Interesting.

MacJournals: Input Managers Are Not ‘Plug-Ins’ ★

Must-read, must-bookmark, piece from MacJournals:

The problem is that the Mac press has decided, by unwritten fiat, to call Input Manager hacks “plug-ins” and confer an aura of legitimacy on them, while continuing to call other forms of patches “hacks” and caution you against installing them. That’s both misleading and unfair. The fact that Input Managers work through a Cocoa method does not make them better or worse than APE “haxies” that load through low-level Mach messages, or than any other way that third-party code loads without support into any application’s address space.

Amen.

Breakage ★

From MacFixIt’s report on Safari 3.1:

1Passwd is one of the input managers broken by Safari 3.1.

PithHelmet broken. This input manager is also broken by Safari 3.1.

Utterly backwards assignment of blame. Safari 3.1 doesn’t break these hacks; these hacks break Safari 3.1. Input Manager hacks are not “plug-ins”. There is no supported API to enable the functions these hacks provide, which means they’re unsupported by Apple, which means that if they break a future release of Safari (or whatever other apps they patch) the fault lies entirely with the creator of the hack.

If Ted Landau were dead, he’d be rolling over in his grave.

The Talk Show, Episode 17 ★

New episode of the award-winning podcast by Dan Benjamin and yours truly, where by “award-winning” I mean “has never won an award”. Topics include SXSW, the iPhone SDK, Arthur C. Clarke’s 2010 (coincidentally recorded before he died yesterday), and inevitably, Stanley Kubrick.

Hannaford? Never Heard of Them. Oh, You Mean That Hannaford. ★

After the supermarket chain Hannaford exposed 4 million credit card numbers in a security breach, the security consultants Rapid7 wiped all references to Hannaford as one of their clients.

Financial Times: Apple in Talks With Music Companies for Music Subscription Service ★

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson, reporting for The Financial Times (who’ve been spot-on in their recent Apple rumor reporting):

Apple is in discussions with the big music companies about a radical new business model that would give customers free access to its entire iTunes music library in exchange for paying a premium for its iPod and iPhone devices.

Apple would not comment on the plan, but executives familiar with the negotiations said they hinged on a dispute over the price the computer maker would be willing to pay for access to the labels’ libraries. […]

Nokia is understood to be offering almost $80 per handset to music industry partners, to be divided according to their share of the market. However, Apple has so far offered only about $20 per device, two executives said. “It’s who blinks first, and whether or not anyone does blink,” one executive said.

First iPhone Developer Acceptances Confirmed ★

Erica Sadun has the scoop on the first developers accepted by Apple into the iPhone SDK program:

Five iPhone limit. For anyone hoping to find a back door way to distribute software, tough luck. You may develop for up to five iPhones and that’s it. So no distribution sans Apple.

Test devices are iBricks — so to speak. Adding the pre-release iPhone OS to your iPhone seems to kill actual phone functionality. Update: We have unconfirmed reports that some developer phones continue to work as expected; as soon as we can clarify this we will.

A small handful of developers have told me they got golden tickets yesterday or today, too.

Rogue Amoeba Updates Instant Hijack Hack for Compatibility With Security Update 2008-002 ★

Rogue Amoeba’s Mike Ash:

Apple released Security Update 2008-002 yesterday and this led to a problem for some users on Mac OS X 10.5 using our Instant Hijack component. The Instant Hijack component is optionally installed by Airfoil, Audio Hijack Pro, and Nicecast, and enables these applications to grab audio from applications that are already running. Following the Security Update, ssh and some related programs would crash when they were run on Mac OS X 10.5 machines with Instant Hijack installed.

They posted updates to all three apps with a new version of Instant Hijack.

The unfortunate irony here is that just a week ago, Rogue Amoeba asked Apple to allow for Instant Hijack-style system hacks in the iPhone OS. Rogue Amoeba fixed this bug in under a day, but this sort of incident is exactly why Apple isn’t going to grant third-party developers low-level access to the OS.

Jackass of Last Week: Jim Cramer ★

Jim Cramer, last week: “Bear Stearns is fine! Do not take your money out! […] Bear Stearns is not in trouble!”

Playing to Type ★

Nice piece by Virginia Postrel on modern typography in The Atlantic (whence came the aforelinked interview with Michael Bierut):

In 2001, The Wall Street Journal hired Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones to create a new typeface for its financial tables. The result, called Retina, uses the microscopic precision of digital design to correct for the blurring that takes place when thin ink hits cheap paper at high speed. Designed for tiny agate type, Retina looks bizarre at larger sizes; Frere-Jones compares it to a fish evolved to survive at extreme ocean depths.

Michael Bierut Talks Typography With The Atlantic ★

Terrific video interview with Michael Bierut; topics range from Kubrick’s favorite font to the various cover designs of Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

Adobe Smoking Same Dope as Sun ★

Ben Charny (yes, that guy) in The Wall Street Journal:

On Tuesday, when asked about the issue during a conference call with investors, [Adobe CEO Shantanu] Narayen said the company had since obtained the software developer tools Apple released last month. The tools will let Adobe build a Flash player for the iPhone, then distribute it through Apple’s iTunes online store, he said.

And without approval from Apple (including APIs beyond those in the current third-party SDK), they can distribute it in the same alternate universe as Sun’s supposedly-in-the-works Java port.

(The full Journal story is, alas, behind their pay wall. (Rupert Murdoch, where are you?) Best way I know to get a free version is to follow a link to it from Google News.)

Mediatyping ★

Dave Shea on creating mobile style sheets, and serving them via browser sniffing. Lots of good info in the comments, too.

The Coming Gold Rush ★

Brent Simmons on the iPhone app market:

The iFund money is Cloud money.

That is, developing an iPhone app itself may not be that expensive. But developing — and running and maintaining and scaling — a server app for the iPhone to talk to is expensive.

Google I/O ★

New from Google: Two-day web developer conference in San Francisco, May 28-29. Think WWDC for web programmers, perhaps.

BusySync 10K Report ★

Pretty good for six months on the market. Version 2.0 is looking sweet.