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Linked List: April 20, 2005

Wednesday, 20 April 2005

New weblog from O’Reilly, tracking emerging trends. Pretty good design, with a Kottke-esque single-stream mix of links and longer entries. (You can turn on something similar here at Daring Fireball on the Preferences page.) Built with Movable Type.

Automator Actions Can Be Saved as Contextual Menu Plug-Ins ★

Derrick Story:

All of those companies should come watch the Automator demo. It’s so easy to use and powerful. I’m going to be eliminating lots of repetitive tasks from my working life. But get this, you can save an Automator script as a Finder “plug-in,” which is Apple’s terminology for a CM (contextual menu) item, accessible via a right-click of the mouse.

What this means is that you’ll be able to write your own CMs with Automator in just a matter of minutes. This is going to be fun…

New Sony ‘Network Audio System’ Supports ITMS DRM ★

First non-Apple product to support iTunes Music Store DRM.

Humans vs. Bayesian Filters ★

Interesting observation from Joel Spolsky on spam filtering:

So while everybody is worried about how spam filters might inadvertently delete the proverbial crucial email from a customer, in practice, in the presence of lots of spam, human beings are far more likely to delete a real email than a well-implemented Bayesian filter.

I think this is true, especially for non-spam messages that have spammy-looking subjects.

NBC Tech Correspondent Took Payola From Apple, Sony, HP, and Others ★

Washington Post media critic Howard Kurtz:

[Corey] Greenberg, an NBC contributor, confirmed yesterday that he has received payments from Apple as well as Sony, Hewlett-Packard, Seiko Epson, Creative Technology and Energizer Holdings, charging $15,000 apiece to talk up their products on news shows. The contracts were first disclosed by the Wall Street Journal.

SubEthaEdit 2.1.2 ★

The Coding Monkeys have released a new version of SubEthaEdit and are running a “get two licenses for the price of one” promotion from now until April 29.

Glenn Fleishman on Adobe’s Macromedia Acquisition ★

Nice overview of the history of the desktop publishing market.

Safari Regressions ★

Dave Hyatt is accepting TrackBack pings describing regressions from Safari 1.2 to 1.3. Note his previous entry, however, before you gripe about the menu key shortcut change for the View Source command.