Linked List: June 30, 2005

Thursday, 30 June 2005

Featuritis vs. the Happy User Peak ★: Kathy Sierra on the “Featuritis Curve”. It’s a nice visualization of Einstein’s oft-quoted maxim: “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” In Sierra’s Featuritis Curve, the right side of the curve is not as simple as possible; the left side is too simple. This is related to some of the points I tried to make in yesterday’s fireball — I think Apple has the entire iPod lineup positioned near the peak of the Featuritis Curve.
New Surfin’ Safari Weblog ★: Dave Hyatt’s Surfin’ Safari weblog has moved and is now hosted at the same site as the Web Kit Open Source Project. Plus there are several new contributors to the weblog.
Macworld: Adobe Creative Suite 2 ★: Saturation coverage from Macworld on the new Adobe Creative Suite 2 — reviews of each of the apps and interviews with people at Adobe. This is exactly the sort of journalism that Macworld does better than any other Mac publication. (Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, and Acrobat Professional all get 4.5 mice; GoLive on the other hand, gets just 2 mice, which is the equivalent of a sack of dog turds.)
The Queen Gives Sony Chief an Earful Regarding Remote Control Design ★: Macworld UK:

iPod user HRH Queen Elizabeth II has admitted she finds Sony products too difficult to use.

Sony’s new CEO Howard Stringer recounted a luncheon with the Queen to Sony shareholders. He told them that the Queen had struggled with certain Sony products.

According to Stringer the Queen told him: “I have a lot of trouble with your remote controls. Too many arrows.”
Dave Winer Thinks Property Lists Are “a Weird Format” ★: Shows how long he’s been away from the Mac. He should just buy a PowerBook and come home. (iTunes uses an XML plist file to store your podcast subscriptions; Winer would prefer to see them use OPML.)
Quarter Life Crisis: iTunes 4.9 ★: Sven-S. Porst is pretty harsh in his review of iTunes 4.9. I disagree with several of his assessments (I’m not offended by the podcast source list icon, for example), but he makes many good points (e.g. why can you disable the Radio and Party Shuffle source list icons, but not Podcasts?).