By John Gruber
Mux — Video for developers
Linked List: March 20, 2008
Thursday, 20 March 2008
- Rosecrans Baldwin: ‘Paris, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down’ ★
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I’m here pointing out what an enormous doofus Leander Kahney is; Rosecrans Baldwin is in Paris, writing artful essays like this one.
- Theocacao: ‘Writing Modern Copy for Product Pages’ ★
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Good copywriting advice from Scott Stevenson.
Update: Stevenson’s advice is a also a good metric for the product itself. If you can’t come up with a short, clear, precise product description, it’s a good sign the product is conceptually flawed.
- The Macalope: ‘Oh, Kay’ ★
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The Macalope on Roger Kay’s goofy Apple products are now plagued by security problems and they had it coming piece in BusinessWeek:
Could someone please sit down the slower students in the class and explain to them that “hackers” who seek to alter a device’s software for the purpose of giving it more functionality are not the same as “hackers” who try to find illicit ways to compromise your data for personal gain.
Kay apparently believes there’s a rash of people breaking into the homes of Apple customers, installing applications on their iPhones or enabling them to be used with other carriers and then slipping away into the night.
- Waffle: ‘Where By “Interesting”, I Mean “Annoying”’ ★
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Jesper on Apple’s Software Update for Windows:
Listing new applications in the Software Update list is wrong. It’s Software Update, not Software Installer. Google, even if they too call it an ‘Updater’, does this right on OS X by making it ridiculously clear that you’re about to install a new product instead of updating an existing product, but even so this is not a feature that most people expect of an updater.
- Vintage Logos ★
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“Collection of vintage logos from a mid-’70s edition of the book World of Logotypes.” Great source of inspiration — all good logos should look good when reduced to black-and-white.
Is it just me or does this logo from the 1976 Montreal Olympics look like a hand giving the finger? Update: My wife adds: “A three-fingered Simpsons hand.”
- Drawing the Candidates ★
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Steven Heller of The New York Times interviews top political cartoonists to talk about how they draw McCain, Clinton, and Obama. (Via Andy Ihnatko.)
- All Highs Eventually Wear Off ★
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Press statement from Adobe yesterday:
Adobe has evaluated the iPhone SDK and can now start to develop a way to bring Flash Player to the iPhone. However, to bring the full capabilities of Flash to the iPhone Web-browsing experience we do need to work with Apple beyond and above what is available through the SDK and the current license around it.
- Bezos on Kindle Sales ★
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Looks like they can’t make them fast enough — not a bad problem to have. I’d love to know how many they’ve sold so far. Update: Here’s a direct link to the letter (as a JPEG?!).
- Waxy: ‘Abort, Retry, or EPIC FAIL’ ★
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Andy Baio on the FAIL meme:
This is nothing new. It’s as old as communication itself. I’m sure that the moment man discovered fire, there was some guy nearby saying, “Too smoky. Can burn you. Lame.”
- Glenn Fleishman on the AirPort Update ★
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Glenn Fleishman:
The 7.3.1 firmware update for Time Capsule and AirPort Extreme Base Station network gateways adds two significant improvements, neither of them mentioned in Apple’s release notes. You can archive the internal drive in a Time Capsule appliance — copying its contents, including backup images of networked systems — to an externally conncted USB drive at full USB speeds, without round-tripping the backup through a mounted AFP server. And, apparently, USB-connected drives on an AirPort Extreme Base Station are available for Time Machine backups in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.
- Absurd Entries in the OED ★
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Ammon Shea, who spent the last year reading the OED from cover to cover:
Absurd Entries is the name that I gave to a certain class of definition that I would come across every so often when reading the OED. They are rarer than the mistakes, and considerably more fun to read. These are the extremely rare moments when the OED does something that is so inexplicable that you have to close the book and check the cover to make sure that it is indeed the same book that you thought. I have decided, without giving too much thought to the matter, to divide them into two separate categories: ‘Blatant Disregard for the Reader’s Level of Education’ and ‘What Were They Thinking?’
- Martha Stewart: My New MacBook Air ★
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Sounds like someone should tell her about Boot Camp (or Fusion and Parallels).
Update from Martha:
Many of you have commented that you think I should use Parallels for my new Mac to run Windows as well — I actually DID know about that! I just like having the two computers side by side, as sometimes I need to have my email and schedule up on one, while browsing the Web on the other.
- Updating Your Twitter Avatar From Acorn ★
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Convenient plugin for Acorn by Philippe Casgrain. Worth checking out the source code to see just how few lines it took.
