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Linked List: November 21, 2006

Tuesday, 21 November 2006

Gus Mueller:

Among the many bits of advice he gave me, the one he drove home most was not to sell your app too cheap. I of course ignored him, and he gave me crap when VoodooPad 1.0 came out for 10 bucks.
“People read into the quality of the app based on price, and you’ll even sell more” he said. “It’s crazy, and it doesn’t make sense, but it’s the way it is.”

When I eventually raised the price to 24.95 he asked me how things were going after the price increase. “Much better” I said.

Wheaties for Your Wallet ★

The Wesabe weblog; good posts about Wesabe itself and some personal finance advice, like saving money on health insurance by going with a higher deductible.

Wesabe ★

What a brilliant premise: Wesabe is a new social web app for personal finance, founded by Jason Knight and Marc Hedlund. The idea is that it’s an attempt to harness collective wisdom about finance and spending decisions — both big and small.

The biggest problems facing an online site dealing with personal finance data, of course, are privacy and security. Wesabe recognizes this, and they talk about their policies and procedures clearly and plainly.

Definitely worth checking out.

Flickr: Triple Treat ★

Three big new features for Flickr: guest passes for sharing photos with non-Flickr (and non-Yahoo) users; an updated mobile-optimized site; and “Camera Finder”, a feature that tracks the camera models used by Flickr photographers. (Via 2lmc Spool.)

DragThing 5.7b1 ★

Nifty new theming feature in James Thomson’s excellent dock and palette utility.

JavaScript Trick to Work Around IE6 Background Image Flickering ★

The easiest solution to IE6 problems, of course, is just to drop support for it. Not an option for everyone, of course, but that’s what I’d do.

Rich Mogull on Vista Security ★

Rich Mogull, responding to Tom Ptacek:

I think all the pundits need to be clear about which OS versions they are talking about. To a very real degree they are debating around each other — Tom focusing on Vista, and John on XP.

I have nothing bad to say about Vista’s security. In fact, I hope Vista does surpass Mac OS X in terms of security. That’d be good for everyone — Windows users will have a secure system, for once, and Apple will feel pressure to jump ahead. Ptacek seems to think that just because I write about Macs I’m rooting against Windows.

Thomas Ptacek ★

Thomas Ptacek, in the middle of a weblog post titled “Five Reasons To Ignore John Gruber’s OS X Security Punditry”:

No it isn’t. Want an easy way to debunk that argument? Here you go: MacOS 9 sees a tiny fraction of the malware Windows does. But nobody seriously argues that OS 9, which doesn’t even have a secure VM system, is more secure than Windows XP.

More “stable”? No, probably not. But more “secure”? Yes. Please, Mr. Ptacek, please tell me about the exploits you would use to attack a Mac OS 9 system. Was the U.S. Army “not serious” when they moved their web server to Mac OS 9 back in 1999? I’m not saying Mac OS 9 was a good server platform; I’m not saying the cooperative memory model was even vaguely modern by 1999’s industry standards; but secure? Yes, yes it was.

As for the rest of his piece, it’s mostly blah blah blah, Gruber just writes to make Mac ‘fanatics’ happy and his opinion isn’t worth listening to on security related issues because he’s just a UI guy.

New iPod Shuffle Commercial ★

Put some music on. Music from The Prototypes.

Relaunch on MacZot ★

Wired Up and Fired Up on the results of promoting their app Relaunch on MacZot:

I can absolutely concur with him when he says, “What I was selling before the promotion was exactly the same as afterwards.” Even on the day of the promotion I received about the same amount of sales that I’d expect on any normal, rainy, Autumn day.

‘E’: A TextMate-ish Text Editor for Windows ★

Plans include bundle compatibility with TextMate. The screenshots sure ain’t pretty. I’ve also got to say that “E” is a terrible name. (Via Allan Odgaard.)

Robert Altman Dies at 81 ★

Personal favorites of mine: The Player, The Long Goodbye, and of course, Nashville. And as a kid, I loved Popeye, which he made with Robin Williams in 1980.

Fission 1.1 ★

Free update to Rogue Amoeba’s $32 audio editor:

New in version 1.1 is native support for opening and saving WAV files, a Normalize function to normalize audio, looped playback, and more.

Hivelogic: Building Ruby, Rails, LightTPD, and MySQL on Tiger ★

If you want to develop, run, and test Ruby on Rails web apps locally on your Mac, you’re going to want to install MySQL, Rails, and a newer version of Ruby than the version that ships from Apple. You’re also going to be happier using the LightTPD web server than the pure-Ruby (and thus somewhat slow, even for testing) WEBrick.

My friend and colleague Dan Benjamin first published these instructions in December last year, but he’s kept them up-to-date as newer versions of the various components have been released. Dan’s instructions are comprehensive, well-written, and, most importantly, show you how to install all this stuff the right way, such that they don’t clobber Mac OS X’s standard components.

Top Secret ★

John Siracusa speculates on what the deal is with the “top secret” Leopard features that Steve Jobs claimed to be withholding at WWDC in August. I still think it’s about the visual look-and-feel getting a major overhaul.