Linked List: June 19, 2006

Monday, 19 June 2006

Experimenting With Light on Apple Notebook Computers ★

Amit Singh — who first published example code showing how to use unsupported APIs to use the motion sensors in Mac notebooks — now shows how to get readings from a Mac’s ambient light sensor and how to get and set the brightness of the backlit keyboards.

How long until someone writes a hack to use the keyboard backlight as a CPU monitor?

50 Cent Deal With Apple? ★

AllHipHop.com:

Rap star 50 Cent is entering the world of technology and is currently in negotiations with Apple’s CEO Steve Jobs to produce a line of affordable home computers to inner-city residents.

According to a recent article in Forbes, 50 Cent, born Curtis Jackson and his high powered manager Chris Lighty of Violator management, are negotiating the branding deal with the computer/software giant.

Interesting.

Variety: Apple Negotiating Terms for Movie Downloads ★

Movie industry sources blabbed to Variety regarding their negotiations with Apple for movie downloads via ITMS. Apple wants them all priced at $9.99; the studios insist on variable pricing.

Anil Dash: Office 2007 Is the Bravest Upgrade Ever ★

Anil Dash:

Short and sweet, the Ribbon and new UI in Microsoft Office 2007 is the ballsiest new feature in the history of computer software. I’ve been using Office 12 for about six months, and not only has it made me more productive, I’m struck by the sheer ambition of the changes in this version.

Dash points out that Office’s $11+ billion a year in revenue works out to around $250 million a week, which puts the Office team under an enormous amount of pressure and scrutiny. In the movie industry, that amount of weekly revenue would be considered the all-time greatest box office opening — week-in, week-out, 52 weeks a year.

Also: Sippey likes Office 2007, too.

‘Get a Mac’ Commercials Reviewed in Slate ★

Seth Stevenson reviews, and more or less pans, Apple’s new “Get a Mac” ad campaign because he dislikes the casting, and he thinks some of the anti-PC propaganda is too exaggerated. In their favor, he writes:

[…] the campaign is a marvel of clarity and simplicity. No slogans. No video effects. No voice-overs. And lots of clean, white space. It’s like a bath of cool mineral water when these ads come on after a string of garish, jam-packed spots for other products.

The more I see these ads on TV, the more I think this stylistic simplicity is as big a part of the ads’ intended message as anything the characters actually say. The characters are talking about the Mac; the tone, style, direction, and editing are about Apple.

Lineform 1.1 ★

Interesting $79 drawing program from Tribar Software; new version adds support for SVG import and export, AppleScript, and Core Image filters. Lineform is certainly ambitious — they’re positioning it as an artistic tool competing against Illustrator, as opposed to, say, OmniGraffle. (Advertising that the user manual is only 30-pages long doesn’t exactly make it seem like an Illustrator peer, though.)

A Kernel of Truth: The Plot Thickens ★

Follow-up from John Siracusa on his Mac OS X kernel speculation, including his best guess as to what Apple might replace Mach with if they’re going to replace Mach.

He also points to a comment from Rosyna, who suggests a very reasonable explanation for the missing x86 Darwin kernel source code: that it contains code for Rosetta (which is licensed from Transitive) that Apple can’t release.

A Kernel of Truth ★

John Siracusa examines the rumors swirling around Mac OS X’s Mach kernel.

Montage 1.0 Public Beta Montage Screenwriting Software - From Work In Progress to Final Draft ★

New screenwriting app from Mariner Software (makers of Mariner Write). Sports a very trendy Mac OS X UI, and it imports Final Draft documents. That’s essential for any app in this market, because Final Draft is to the screenwriting market what Microsoft Word is to the rest of the word processing market: despised by some because of its interface and bloated feature set, but required because its document format is the “industry standard”.

(Via MDJ 2006.06.16.)