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Linked List: November 13, 2006

Monday, 13 November 2006

Engadget: Installing the Zune… Sucked 

What a pain in the ass software installer. Even if the installer hadn’t crashed a couple of times on these guys — who wants to go through that many sign-up screens just to get started with a new gadget? Tell me this sign-up process won’t make for a fun Christmas morning.

It’s Official: Java Now Worth Zero 

Fake Steve:

So by now you’ve heard the “big news.” After years of trying to figure out ways to make money on Java, and all the while pretending that they actually are making loads of money on Java (while refusing to break out any numbers) Sun has thrown in the towel. They’re open-sourcing Java — i.e., giving it away free and declaring victory.

Open sourcing Java is almost certainly a very good thing for Java developers, and it’s probably a good thing for the world at large. I have yet to see a cogent explanation as to how it’s going to make Sun a nickel, though.

Apple Execs Appear in iPod Poker Game 

Schiller and Joz appear as players in the iPod Hold ’Em Poker game.

Completion Dictionary 4.0 

Free Xcode plug-in for Xcode adds user-defined macros and integrates with Xcode’s built-in auto-completion capabilities. From Objective Development, the makers of LaunchBar.

(Via Brent Simmons.)

New MacBook, MacBook Pros Come With 802.11n-Capable Cards 

Interesting:

Like the iMac line that received a Core 2 Duo upgrade in September, the new laptops have seen their wireless cards replaced by a new varient that supports the 802.11n Draft 1.0 networking standard, although Mac OS X drivers are not yet available.

What’s Past Is Prologue 

The inside scoop on the short codes prefixing software licenses from Rogue Amoeba.

Blogcast 

New integrated bundle of Movable Type software, hosting, and consulting service from my friend Timothy Appnel.

Greg Maletic on OpenDoc 

Great look back at Apple, circa 1995, from Greg Maletic, who was then the product marketing manager for OpenDoc:

Apple was so worried about stepping on its developers’ toes that it resisted any attempts to add useful functionality to Mac OS. It wasn’t the kind of company that could succesfully develop a technology like OpenDoc. That’s when I knew that OpenDoc would fail.

Zunes Being Sold Before Official Launch 

Pictures of the packaging and installation software from some guy who bought one at Best Buy over the weekend. Can anyone explain what’s going on in the photo of the girls in the second screenshot of the installer?

Evan Williams shows how an almost totally Ajax UI can still support permalinks. Clever. (For what it’s worth, though, I didn’t mean to imply in my Stikkit review that I thought Ajax ruled out permalinks — I was only complaining about the current Stikkit implementation.)

Podcast Bumper Music = Flash Splash Pages on Web Sites 

Jason Kottke:

Podcasters have been slower to break out of the mold provided by talk radio. The playing of music before segments and as transitions between segments makes some sense on the radio, where it’s used in some cases to fill airtime. But for podcasts, there’s no need to fill airtime with anything but content. 30 seconds of music before the actual podcast begins is the audio equivalent of Flash splash pages on web sites.

Yes yes yes.

Donald J. Rosenberg Joins Apple as General Counsel 

Apple PR:

Apple today announced that Donald J. Rosenberg, senior vice president and general counsel of IBM, will join the company as its senior vice president and general counsel, reporting to Apple CEO Steve Jobs.

Dunstan Orchard Now Working at Flickr 

He was working on a web development team at Apple for the last year or two. Hopefully Flickr will just hand him the keys to their design car — Orchard could give them a serious injection of awesomeness. His weblog, in cold storage since July 2005, still ranks as one of my all-time favorite designs.

Java Is Free 

Sun releases big chunks of Java under the GPL 2.