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

Linked List: September 25, 2006

Monday, 25 September 2006

Update the Updater? 

Quentin Carnicelli on another ludicrous piece of UI design from Adobe.

Apple Strongly Denies Getting Information From SecureWorks 

George Ou gets unambiguous, straightforward answers from Apple regarding what information they received from SecureWorks regarding any possible Wi-Fi exploits in Mac OS X. (Short answer: zilch.)

Trickle Theory 

Rands:

Let’s first break down impossibleness. For the sake of this article, there are two types of impossible tasks. First, there are impossibly dull tasks. This is work which requires no mental effort, but is vast in size. Bug scrubbing is a great example of this. At the other end of the spectrum are impossibly hard tasks. These are tasks like, “Hey Rands, we need new product by Christmas. Yes, I know it’s October. Ready. Go!”

Oddly, attacking both boring and hard tasks involve the same mental kung-fu where your first move is starting.

Using ‘strings’ Against Universal Binaries 

If you run strings against a universal binary and don’t specify the -arch all option, it will only search the binary for the current host architecture. (Via Rentzsch.)

Packing Needless Firearms to Secure Expensive Camera and Computer Equipment in Checked Luggage 

If you pack a declared firearm — such as a relatively harmless starter pistol — in your checked luggage, you can secure it, along with anything else in the same case, with a lock the TSA can’t open, and TSA will provide additional tracking on the case.

Notes on Techmeme’s New Sponsorship Model 

Interesting idea for sponsorship: up to three sponsors per month pay Techmeme to get the most recent post in their RSS feeds included on Techmeme’s front page. It’s not so much advertising as it is a way to pay to reach a large audience from your own weblog. Looks like it pays well, too — at $3,000 - $4,500 a month, that’s about $130K a year.

James Duncan Davidson on the ‘Photoshop Lightroom’ Branding 

Problem is, Photoshop isn’t an umbrella brand. At least not to its users. Yah, there’s Photoshop Elements, but we all understand that as a dumbed down version of Photoshop. Lightroom is off the charts in “think different” from Photoshop. Trying to tie it to Photoshop like this is about as smart as, oh, renaming the iPod as the MacPod.

‘Toynbee Tiles’ Mystery Resurrected in Philly 

Let’s see: a story centered in Philadelphia, about mysterious street art referencing Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. If that’s not Daring Fireball link material, I don’t know what is.

I’ll just add that I’ve been fascinated by these tiles ever since I moved to Philadelphia, and I noticed a few years ago when new ones started cropping up again. There’s one in the left lane of the Vine Street Expressway, a bit before the merge point with the Schuylkill Expressway, noticeable only when traffic is at a standstill. An insane location for a guerrilla art installation given how fast people drive there when traffic isn’t jammed.

(Thanks to Bryan Bell for the link.)

Billable 1.0 

New time-tracking and invoicing app for Mac OS X, with a simple, intuitive task-oriented UI. $20 through October 31, $25 after that. It looks useful for time-tracking individual tasks even if you don’t do work for multiple clients. (Via Daniel Jalkut.)

Aperture 1.5 

Free update to Aperture, announced today at a special media event at the Photokina conference in Germany. New features include flexible library management, integration with iLife and iWork apps (i.e. so Aperture users get the same photo library browsing that iPhoto users do) and a whole bunch of new image manipulation features.

Flickr Tools: Aperture 

On the other end of the Aperture-Lightroom rivalry, Flickr today released an export plug-in for Aperture, written by Frasier Speirs (author of the nifty FlickrExport plug-in for iPhoto). Free during the beta, £14 (about US$27 today) after that.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Beta 4 

New public beta of Adobe’s arch-rival to Aperture. Note that its brand name has been changed to “Adobe Photoshop Lightroom”.

‘Find Songs Without Artwork’ AppleScript for iTunes 

Script by Marc Friedenberg “creates a playlist containing songs which do not have any album art. It can work on selected songs or on an entire playlist.”

Virtual Key Codes 

Wolf Rentzsch:

Virtual key codes — the unique number assigned to each and every key on your keyboard — unfortunately seem to reside somewhat on the voodoo side of Mac programming.