The Talk Show: Live From WWDC
7:00pm Tuesday  •  California Theatre
Tickets Available  •  Fun Will Be Had

Linked List: May 12, 2006

Friday, 12 May 2006

AppleCared: My Life Inside Apple and AppleCare 

Adam Knight’s detailed look inside life as an AppleCare tech support agent.

The greatest challenge in technical support is matching the level of the customer. Some folks see windows, menus, and icons while others see their own little world with their own little names. For one fellow, the system still had lines of text. Line one was the menu bar, line two the window’s title, line three the toolbar, and so forth. That was a very interesting night, and oh, it did last into the darkness of the night, that one.

Major Vulnerability Found in Diebold Election Machines 

Appalling, but considering Diebold’s track record, not surprising.

Airfoil for Windows 

Rogue Amoeba expands into Windows development — interesting! Unsurprisingly, Airfoil on Windows looks cool, pretty much like how I’d imagine it would look if it were an Apple product that came with the AirPort Express.

Timeline of iPhone Rumors 

Just in case you’ve got your knickers in a knot over the line in Mossberg’s column this week about Apple being at work on an “iPhone”, splash some cold water on your face by perusing Rui Carmo’s extensive timeline of iPhone rumors dating back to July 2004.

Under U.K. copyright law, it’s illegal to rip music from CDs to other formats, but 59 percent of poll respondents believe otherwise, and 55 percent actually break the law.

Engineering Management Hacks: The BigBook Technique 

Very funny “Mythical Man-Month” anecdote from Marc Hedlund.

Mossberg on Apple’s ‘End-to-End’ Strategy 

Walter Mossberg speculates that Apple’s end-to-end product design strategy — where they design and control everything from the hardware to the software — is a better overall strategy than the open component model typically championed by Microsoft (and the model of the personal computer industry).

This line has drawn a lot of attention:

Now, Apple is working on other projects built on the same end-to-end model as the iPod: a media-playing cellphone and a home-media hub.

in that it doesn’t read like he’s speculating, but rather it reads like he’s revealing something he knows as fact.

I continue to believe that the best reason to believe that Apple is going to do a mobile phone is that (a) you know Steve Jobs uses a mobile phone; and (b) there’s not a single existing mobile phone that’s good enough to make Jobs happy.