Linked List: September 13, 2010

Monday, 13 September 2010

HTML5 Video Player Comparison Chart 

Useful resource from Philip Bräunlich. (Via Cameron Moll.)

John Siracusa’s Review of the Mac OS X Public Beta 

There’s a lot about the Mac OS X Public Beta that feels really old, but nothing more than “Music Player”.

(Safari’s Reader view works well to stitch together the 16 (!) page breaks.)

Amazon’s New Kindle Commercial 

Taking the iPad head-on as an e-reader: cheaper and works in bright sunlight. Note also that the woman is holding her Kindle easily in one hand. Good ad.

Biolab Disaster 

Fabulous jump-run-shoot platform game by Dominic Szablewski — pure HTML5 and JavaScript, no Flash, no plugins. Super fun.

Ten Years Ago Today: Mac OS X Public Beta 

Good times. Benj Edwards has a detailed look back at Macworld.

MacRumors: Apple Acquired Imsense Ltd. for HDR Capabilities in iOS 4.1 

Great reporting by Eric Slivka at MacRumors.

Bouncing Beholder 

From Marijn Haverbeke, “a JavaScript platform game that fits in 1024 bytes”.

Jean-Louis Gassée on the Challenges Facing Stephen Elop at Nokia 

Jean-Louis Gassée:

Today, Nokia pushes devices that use older Symbian S60 stacks, newer Symbian^3 and Symbian^4 engines, as well as a mobile Linux derivative: Meego. Imagine the chuckles in the halls of Cupertino, Mountain View, and Palo Alto. Even with plenty of money and management/engineering talent, updating one software platform is a struggle. Ask Apple, Google, or HP, and the chuckles quickly become groans. Nokia thinks it can stay on the field when it’s playing the game in such a disorganized fashion?

That’s Nokia’s problem in a nut. They need a single cohesive, attractive mobile software platform.

Interesting to me is that one aspect of Elop’s career hasn’t gotten much attention: he was the CEO of Macromedia at the time they were pushing Flash Lite as a mobile software platform. So: Elop has already led a major effort to establish a mobile software platform, and it utterly failed, and left the non-Lite regular-strength Flash in a mobile platform hole that Adobe is still trying to dig itself out of.

Nokia’s Vanjoki Resigns as New CEO Elop Comes In 

Reuters:

Anssi Vanjoki, the Nokia executive in charge of smartphones and services, is resigning following the appointment of outsider Stephen Elop as CEO of the world’s biggest cellphone maker.

What if Elop brings in J Allard and Robbie Bach?

The Power of Exchange’s ‘Remote Wipe’ 

I never really thought about this, but it’s pretty awful. When you create an Exchange email/calendar/contacts account on your mobile device — WebOS, Android, iOS, BlackBerry, whatever — you’re implicitly granting your company’s IT department the ability to wipe all data off your phone at any time. Not just the Exchange account data, but all data.

Seven Points Through the First 59:57 Doesn’t Tend to Cut It in the NFL, No Matter How the Last Play Goes Down 

The NFL season has started, and last night in a nationally televised game, my favorite team, the Dallas Cowboys, lost 13-7 in spectacularly ignominious fashion to the lowly Washington Redskins, insofar as (a) the only touchdown the Redskins scored was a defensive touchdown from a fluke fumble recovery on a first-half-ending play Dallas never should have called; and (b) the final play of the game, a come-from-behind go-ahead touchdown after Tony Romo led an 80-yard drive with under two minutes to play, was negated by a bone-headed holding penalty by the (I hope) soon-to-be-unemployed right tackle Alex Barron. This is important because it has robbed me of a chance to gloat.

Meet Josh Simpson, the Man Behind Twitter’s @BPGlobalPR 

Nice scoop from Mat Honan for The Awl.

Michael Gartenberg on Whether the Carriers Are Ruining the Android Experience 

Michael Gartenberg;

It’s somewhat ironic that the Nexus One remains a flagship device for the Android platform early nine months after introduction because it’s a shining example of timely updates — it takes advantage of all of Android 2.2 Froyo’s features, something that no other device on the market can claim. Perhaps it’s also time for Google to re-think the Nexus phone path and once again show the market not only what state-of-the-art hardware looks like but also a state-of-the-art software vision as well.

What percentage of Android users have even seen Google’s default Android UI?