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Linked List: November 29, 2006

Wednesday, 29 November 2006

Charting Answers 

Yahoo Answers was doing 24 times the traffic of Google Answers, according to Hitwise. I always take third-party web stats with an enormous grain of salt (I’m looking in your direction, Alexa), but I think it’s clear that Yahoo was kicking Google’s ass in the answering department.

textutil — Command-Line Utility for Translating Text File Formats 

From the man page:

textutil can be used to manipulate text files of various formats, using the mechanisms provided by the Cocoa text system.

Can’t believe I never heard of this before; it’s a shell tool that reads, writes, concatentates, and converts text, HTML, .rtf (and .rtfd), .doc, .wordml, and .webarchive files.

Arno Gourdol on the Origins of ‘.DS_Store’ and the General Shittiness of the Mac OS X Finder 

I hadn’t seen Arno Gourdol’s weblog before his aforelinked entry on the Mac OS X shutdown feature, but back in September he published a piece about how ‘.DS_Store’ files got their name. (It stands for “Desktop Services Store”.)

More interesting is this comment from Gourdol, on the OS X Finder itself:

I’ve been biting my tongue for a few years now, and while John Siracusa had been a thoughtful critic of the Mac OS X Finder, I must say I agree with almost everything he has to say about the Finder. … We actually used printouts of John’s columns to try to influence the decision makers at the time, as sometimes a voice from the outside is given more weight than a chorus on the inside. Unfortunately, there were powerful forces at work.

“Powerful forces”, eh?

Open Source Web Design 

1,700 free web site design templates. Many of them look quite nice.

Update: Plus, the site’s founder, Francis J. Skettino, is a computer science major at Drexel, just like yours truly was back in the day.

(Thanks to Chris Pepper.)

The Design of the Mac OS X Shutdown Feature 

Arno Gourdol, who was the Mac OS X Finder Lead at Apple from 1999-2001, responds to Joel Spolsky’s criticism of the Windows Vista shutdown features by discussing the design of Mac OS X’s. Gourdol argued for something far simpler — too simple, I think. Ben Skelton, in this comment on Gourdol’s post, does a great job explaining why all of Mac OS X’s shutdown features are useful.

Also, my guess is that the unnamed “Senior VP” at Apple whom Gourdol argued with, and lost, regarding this design was Scott Forstall.

Update: Forstall isn’t a “senior” VP, and wasn’t a VP at all at that time. A few knowledgeable little birdies have suggested that the only two likely candidates are Avie Tevanian and Bertrand Serlet, and most of the birdies are voting for Bertrand. Thanks, birdies.

Update 2: A few more birdies have chirped, and the overwhelming consensus is now that it was Avie Tevanian. Overwhelming, I say.

Official Google Blog: ‘Adieu to Google Answers’ 

No explanation as to why they’ve shut it down.

Asteroid’s Revenge 

Clever game idea — you’re an asteroid out for revenge against an armada of ships. The physics are spot on. (Via Andy Baio.)