Linked List: August 5, 2011

Friday, 5 August 2011

AskDifferent 

My thanks to AskDifferent for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. AskDifferent is a question and answer site for any and all Apple tech support questions, built using the amazing Stack Overflow engine. What these guys have done with Stack Overflow — and its sibling sites — is nothing short of amazing. Smart discussions, high signal-to-noise, and a community that really works. And to top it off they use Markdown.

With community voting, tags, and Wikipedia-style editing, AskDifferent always has great answers, and the best answers get voted to the top. They’re pursuing excellence, accuracy, and relevance, not “hits”. There’s no better site on the web for Apple-related tech problems and questions.

The Self-Canceling Rumor 

Alex Heath at Cult of Mac sure cooks his claim chowder fast.

HP TouchPad Discounted to $400 

Makes me think sales aren’t so hot.

Update: It’s on Woot today for $380.

Uniform Type Identifier for Markdown 

I’ve been asked a few times recently what the recommended UTI is for Markdown-formatted text and text files. Here’s the answer:

net.daringfireball.markdown, which conforms to public.plain-text. The encoding should always be UTF-8.

Now that a lot of Mac and iOS software have built-in support for Markdown, it’d be less confusing if everyone used the same UTI.

Update March 2014: Originally, I recommended that the net.daringfireball.markdown UTI should conform to public.text, but public.plain-text is a better choice.