Linked List: June 24, 2011

Friday, 24 June 2011

The AppStorm Freelance Mac App Bundle ★

My thanks to the AppStorm Freelance Mac App Bundle for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. They’ve got a fantastic deal: $330 worth of apps and resources, including Billings, WriteRoom, TextExpander, 1Password, LittleSnapper, Arq, Radium, and Alarms. In addition to those great apps, you get the Rockstar Freelancer e-book, a commercial WordPress theme, and a web-based client management app.

All that for just $49. It’s a great price for some great apps. Act quickly: the bundle is only available for another four days.

Express First, Pro Later ★

Ken Segall:

Imagine if they had unveiled FCPX as the new Final Cut Express instead. Buyers of that product would have been absolutely delighted by the many leaps forward in power and simplicity, and the missing features would have been insignificant to them. A new Final Cut Express would also have given pro editors a tantalizing preview of a new FCPX to come.

Sure seems like this is exactly what Apple should have done.

Conan O’Brien on Final Cut Pro X ★

Not sure it’s ever good to be a late night punchline, but, on the other hand, what other company today could make video editing software a late night punchline?

Jalkut Sums It Up ★

Daniel Jalkut, on Twitter:

Final Cut Pro X review: Apple will happily piss off 5,000 professionals to please 5,000,000 amateurs.

The obvious response to this would be to ask why not please both groups? The answer to that is focus. Perhaps Apple is too focused here. Maybe they should have waited longer to release version X, to include more of the features from 7. Maybe they should have added X as a new product — a mid-level prosumer tier, replacing Final Cut Express but not Final Cut Pro. But Apple errs on the side of too much focus.

Steve Jobs, back in 1997: “Focus is about saying no.”

Pogue, Point-by-Point, on the Concerns of Professional Video Editors Regarding Final Cut Pro X ★

David Pogue:

I wrote my review from the perspective of an advanced amateur; I’m not a professional editor. […] But in this post, I’m going to address the concerns of professional video editors, one by one. The information here comes from consultation with Final Cut Pro X’s product managers at Apple.

The “missing features” generally fall into three categories: features that are actually there and have just been moved around, features that Apple intends to restore and features that require a third-party (non-Apple) add-on or plug-in.

The closest we’ve gotten, thus far, to a response from Apple.

On the Other Side: Serenity Caldwell ★

Serenity Caldwell:

Some people will read the above story and insist that yes, just like iMovie, Final Cut is getting dumbed down, and that Apple doesn’t want to service professional users anymore. If you’re reading it like that, however, I don’t think you’re reading at all.

But, for now at least, Apple is clearly willing to forgo high-end professional users. Or maybe Apple is counting on those users sticking with Final Cut Pro 7 until X grows to meet their needs?

Jeffery Harrell on What’s Wrong With Final Cut Pro X ★

Jeffery Harrell:

This isn’t just a bunch of entitled, stubborn editors whining to each other. Well, I mean, it is, and I’m one of them. But aside from that, there’s also some really serious stuff going on. It’s not “I don’t like it,” or “I don’t prefer it” or even “I choose not to make the change because it’s too burdensome for too little benefit.” It’s “Because of the choices you guys made, we literally can’t use your product any more.”

Backed up with solid use-cases where Final Cut Pro X fails for pros, including the problems posed by the way Final Cut Pro X shows all of your media, for all projects, all the time. I love the perspective on this piece. It conveys the point of view of a professional editor.

Dropbox Breach: Fewer Than 100 Accounts Affected, but One Person Actively Exploited Security Hole ★

Jason Kincaid, for AOL/TechCrunch:

First, the good news: the scale of the attack affected “fewer than a hundred accounts” out of Dropbox’s 25 million total users. But according to the letter, those accounts were all accessed by a single individual. In other words, these weren’t accidental logins due to typos — someone discovered the hole and actively used it to access files that were not theirs. That’s obviously very alarming.

Why Macs Cost More Than PCs ★

Andrew Richardson takes Matt Richman’s numbers and goes further:

If the average selling price of a Mac runs about $710 more than a PC (ASP of a Mac - ASP of an HP machine), and about $320 of that is profit, then the remaining $390 must be those higher costs. Apple’s computing hardware, and the software development behind OS X, actually cost more to manufacture. Given the volume their manufacturing partners are turning out and the squeeze to contain costs put on them by Apple, one has to wonder why.

The answer is fairly obvious to anyone coming to Macs after years of using commodity PC equipment: better design and build quality costs more.

David Cole Does Four Takes on an Alternate Cover for ‘Kind of Bloop’ ★

I like the one at top right.

Duncan Davidson on the Maisel/Baio Incident ★

Duncan Davidson:

I think the work is transformative enough that it would qualify as fair use. Look carefully and you can see that it’s not just a derezzed image. It was crafted in a creative way, down to the pattern in the tie. Do you agree? It’s OK if you don’t. We could talk about it over beers. Only a judge’s opinion would really matter.

The Online Photographer: Kind of Blue, Kind of Bloop, Kind of Screwed ★

The Online Photographer, on the Baio/Maisel affair:

I side with Jay in this one. That is, I think the Kind of Bloop cover is indeed a case of infringement and does not qualify as Fair Use. I’ll let Ctein expain it in more detail if he cares to, since he knows more about copyright law than I do, but the issue hinges on “derivative” vs. “transformative” works of art. You’re allowed to transform (create something new on the shoulders of the old); you’re not allowed to derive (copy, even loosely — even in another medium).

Sometimes it does take a jury to decide which is which. Sad but true.

What angers me about Maisel’s reaction is not his decision not to allow Andy Baio to use his pixel-art recreation of the photo. It’s that he didn’t simply ask Andy Baio to stop, and instead pressed for significant financial damages. The decent thing to do, as a first step, is to say “I am not OK with what you’ve done, I want you to stop.”

‘Secret’ Sneak Peek at ‘Sea Ray’, Nokia’s First Windows Phone ★

Stephen Elop makes the case for the N9 as a step toward Nokia’s Windows Phone future.

‘Imagine Joe McCarthy Dragging Cabinet Members Into Hearings and Demanding That They Publicly Disavow the Works of Groucho Marx, and You Get a Rough Idea of the General Style of Bachmannian Politics’ ★

Matt Taibbi profiles Michele Bachmann in Rolling Stone:

In modern American politics, being the right kind of ignorant and entertainingly crazy is like having a big right hand in boxing; you’ve always got a puncher’s chance. And Bachmann is exactly the right kind of completely batshit crazy. Not medically crazy, not talking-to-herself-on-the-subway crazy, but grandiose crazy, late-stage Kim Jong-Il crazy — crazy in the sense that she’s living completely inside her own mind, frenetically pacing the hallways of a vast sand castle she’s built in there, unable to meaningfully communicate with the human beings on the other side of the moat, who are all presumed to be enemies.

‘Cars 2’ to Be First Pixar Film on the Wrong Side of the Tomatometer ★

Russ Fischer, SlashFilm:

It’s only fair, I suppose, that if we run articles trumpeting the fact that other Pixar movies have achieved some form of massively positive consensus on Rotten Tomatoes, that when the company finally releases one that falls far short of the same margin, it would be worth noting. So this weekend will stand as a milestone in the history of Pixar, as Cars 2 opens to the first generally negative consensus opinion in the company’s experience.

Metacritic has it at 59, which isn’t bad — but it’s low by Pixar standards. It’s clearly not a dud — Ebert liked it, as did Peter Travers — but unlike almost all other Pixar films, it seems to be polarizing.

No, a Web Interface Is Not Necessarily Canonical ★

Oscar North, a few weeks ago, when there was still a question as to whether there’d be a web interface to iCloud:

So if the truth does now reside in the Cloud then there must be a way for you the user to tell iCloud about any lies your devices might be telling it. And there is really only one way for Apple to allow you to do this: It needs a canonical web interface that allows you to roll back changes made to your iCloud by your devices.

iCloud is based on the idea that there’s one canonical data store — the one “in the cloud”, stored in Apple’s data center. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that a web-based interface is necessary to manage it. This is what I was trying to express in my “It’s All Software” piece. A web interface is just another client.

Think about IMAP. The canonical storage is on the IMAP server. Your webmail is just another IMAP client accessing your email account — no more or less canonical than your desktop email client.

The Sound of Money ★

Nice piece by John McCoy on the Andy Baio/Jay Maisel imbroglio.

Fragmentation? I Don’t See Any Fragmentation ★

Hulu Plus for Android is out:

With the first phase of the Android rollout, Hulu Plus is available on six phones, including the Nexus One, Nexus S, HTC Inspire 4G, Motorola Droid II, Motorola Droid X, and the Motorola Atrix.

Google, one month ago at I/O:

Over the past two and a half years, we’ve shipped eight releases of Android and there are now more than 310 Android devices around the world, of all shapes and sizes.

So 6 of those 310 can run Hulu Plus.

Apple: Frequently Asked Questions About the MobileMe Transition and iCloud ★

Apple:

Will I be able to access iCloud services on the web?

Yes. Web access to iCloud Mail, Contacts, Calendar, and Find My iPhone will be available at icloud.com this fall.

Another winning wager.

This one answers a question I didn’t know the answer to:

If I use different accounts for iTunes and MobileMe, can I merge them into a single account and use it with iCloud?

No. You cannot merge two accounts into one. However, you will be able to move your MobileMe account ([email protected]) to iCloud and, if you choose, you can continue to use a different iTunes account for store purchases and iTunes in the Cloud.

A Consequence of Losing the PC Wars ★

Matt Richman does the math:

Apple makes more money from the sale of one Mac than HP does from selling seven PCs.

Card.io: Credit Card Scanning From Your Mobile Phone Camera ★

Clever idea. I wonder why Square didn’t take this route.

Update: One possible reason: retailers get lower card-processing fees from swiping, because the magnetic strip contains extra data not printed on the card, which can prove that the card was physically present for the transaction.

Tee Trilogy ★

Do you like Star Wars? Do you like clever t-shirts? Well, then, here’s the bundle for you.

Apple Releases Mac OS X 10.6.8 ★

Perhaps the last dot release of Snow Leopard.