Linked List: March 9, 2006

Thursday, 9 March 2006

More From Cabel Sasser on the Nintendo DS Lite 

These video segments are fucking sasser-ific.

What’s the Secret to Your Success? 

Michael Hyatt, President and CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers:

My basic rule is this: respond immediately unless there is a good reason to wait.

(Via Dan Benjamin.)

Almost iPod, but in the End a Samsung 

David Pogue, reviewing Samsung’s new iPod Nano rival:

In fact, at least six factors make the iPod such a hit: cool-looking hardware; a fun-to-use, variable-speed scroll wheel; an ultrasimple software menu; effortless song synchronization with Mac or Windows; seamless, rock-solid integration with an online music store (iTunes); and a universe of accessories. Mess up any aspect of the formula, and your iPod killer is doomed to market-share crumbs.

Microsoft Excel 12 

Microsoft’s David Gainer shows screenshots of Excel 12 from the upcoming Office 2007, including an alternate dark gray theme. I just don’t get the thinking behind abandoning the menu bar. These Office 2007 apps are some of the most un-Mac-like GUI apps I’ve ever seen. You might say, “Well, of course they aren’t Mac-like, they’re for Windows”, but my point is that the gestalt of Windows and Mac OS X UI design are diverging rather than converging.

On the other hand, Paul Thurrott says that Vista’s Photo Gallery and Calendar apps are veritable rip-offs of iPhoto and iCal.

Zeldman Switches to WordPress 

Up until now, he’d been hand-coding Zeldman.com, including the RSS feed.

Office 2007 UI 

Screenshots of the final UI appearance for Office 2007. Nowhere near as ugly as the brushed-metal-ish theme from earlier betas. This whole “ribbon” paradigm strikes me as little more than a way for them to cram more tiny, inscrutable toolbar icons into these apps than ever before. It just seems so distracting.

Yojimbo 1.1 

Nice update to Bare Bones Software’s new organizer. Additions include basic AppleScript support for creating new items (which in turn should make it much easier to migrate from other organizer tools), an iTunes-style shortcut arrow for opening bookmarks from the list view, an even more modernized Tiger-style UI appearance, and much more.

Google Buys Writely 

Fits right in, since it’s never been out of “beta”.

SuperDuper 2.1 

Universal binary update to Shirt Pocket Software’s outstanding disk-cloning and backup utility. I can’t recommend SuperDuper highly enough.

ADC Documentation Updates 

Daniel Jalkut reports on a bunch of developer documentation updates from Apple.