Linked List: January 5, 2006

Thursday, 5 January 2006

Behind the Magic Curtain ★: Former Apple product manager Mike Evangelist writes about what it’s like preparing for and demoing on stage at a Steve Jobs keynote. Evangelist is writing a book about his experience at Apple and publishing the drafts on his web site.
DragThing and PCalc Updates ★: Both of James Thomson’s nifty apps are now universal binaries.
New ‘iWeb’ App Leaked on Apple.com ★: Google’s cache has a snapshot of a GarageBand page on Apple.com that references iLife ’06 and a new iLife app called iWeb. (Via John Siracusa via AIM.)
A Marriage Not Made in Heaven ★: David Pogue pretty much trashes the user interface and experience of Palm’s new Windows-powered Treo 700W:

Sooner or later, you’ll run into the “Program Memory Low” error message, requiring you to shut down programs manually in a special list box.

The 700W’s beefed-up memory (60 megabytes free) makes this situation less frequent. Still, the whole ritual should be unnecessary. Doesn’t anyone at Microsoft realize how silly it sounds to say, “Just a minute — I have to quit some programs on my phone”?
Amazon Album Art Widget ★: Very nifty widget; grabs album art from Amazon and assigns it to the currently selected tracks in iTunes. Freeware, donations encouraged.
Visual Tour of Recent Windows Vista ‘Pre-Beta’ ★: Still looks really ugly to me. I mean really ugly.