By John Gruber
WorkOS launches auth.md — an open protocol for agent registration.
Linked List: December 15, 2006
Friday, 15 December 2006
- Third MS Word Code Execution Exploit Posted ★
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Thank goodness there’s such robust competition in the word processing market. My favorite line:
Microsoft suggests that users “do not open or save Word files,” even those that arrive unexpectedly from trusted sources.
Go ahead and use it, just don’t open or save anything.
- NAPP: CS3 in Action ★
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NAPP has a bunch of videos demoing the new features in Photoshop CS3. (Thanks to Jacob Rus.)
- FLV Online Converter ★
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Free web-based service for converting embedded Flash video content into other formats.
- Macworld Video: Adobe Photoshop CS3 Beta ★
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Jason Snell interviews Adobe’s John Nash about Photoshop CS3, then demos a few of the new features.
- Andrew Shebanow: Is Office Open XML a One-Way Standard? Ask Microsoft ★
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The Mac Office team has decided that rather than implement their own code to read and write the new Office 2007 “open” XML standard file formats, they would instead wrap the Windows Office code. I.e. they concluded that it’d be easier to port the Windows code to Mac OS X than to write their own code to parse the formats.
These formats are “open” in that they’ve published specs for the formats, but the truth is that there’s likely only ever going to be a single actual implementation to fully support them — the one that Microsoft wrote for Windows.
- NewsLife 0.9 ★
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ThinkMac’s new $20 feed reader debuts as a public beta. The focus is clearly on simplicity. If it’s good enough to release and sell, though, it ought to be good enough to call 1.0.
- Micromat CEO Jeff Baudin Addresses TechTool Serial Number Privacy Issue ★
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Jeff Baudin, in a post on Micromat’s forum regarding the aforelinked privacy concerns raised by PowerPage, argues that broadcasting your Mac’s serial number isn’t that big a deal, but they’re going to stop doing it in the next update to TechTool.
- Tim Bray: ‘Apple App Attrition’ ★
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Tim Bray got a kernel panic after unplugging his external display from his notebook, and when the system rebooted, Apple Mail’s account configuration info was corrupted, which prompted him to switch to Thunderbird. A few observations:
- I’ve seen a few other reports like Bray’s about Mail losing track of your account settings after a crash. Forewarned is forearmed.
- Using fewer of Apple’s bundled apps doesn’t make you less of a Mac user.
- Mark Pilgrim has an interesting observation regarding some Mac users’ sentiment that data loss after a crash is to be expected.
- BBC News: ‘Mass Mouse Escape on Saudi Plane’ ★
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I’ll bet they wish they had some motherfucking snakes on that plane.
(Thanks to my wife, both for the link and the joke.)
- TechTool Pro Broadcasts Your Mac’s Serial Number Via Bonjour ★
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Ostensibly as part of an anti-bootlegging measure. Doesn’t seem like a good idea to me. (Thanks to Dan Benjamin.)
- TubeSock: Rip Videos From YouTube ★
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Very cool $15 app lets you grab video from YouTube and save it to a file in your choice of formats. You just give TubeSock the URL to the YouTube video and click Save.
How can you not love a company named “Stinkbot”?
- Kottke: ‘Slate Has Gone to the Dark Side by Splitting Up Their Articles Into Multiple Pages’ ★
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This practice is overwhelmingly popular on major corporate media sites, and almost utterly non-existent on independent sites. Obviously, the corporate sites do it to artificially jack up their page views, which in turn increases the number of ads they can serve. But do advertisers really fall for this? Or, as Marc Hedlund asks, for the similar practice of forcing a refresh of the page every few minutes via JavaScript?
- Aaron Swartz on Google’s Company Culture ★
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Aaron Swartz:
Google hires programmers straight out of college and tempts them with all the benefits of college life. Indeed, as the hiring brochures stress, the place was explicitly modeled upon college. At one point, I wondered why Google didn’t just go all the way and build their own dormitories.
- David Pogue Reviews Windows Vista ★
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David Pogue:
Now, before the hate-mail tsunami begins, it’s important to note that Apple has itself borrowed feature ideas on occasion, even from Windows. But never this broadly, boldly or blatantly. There must be enough steam coming out of Apple executives’ ears to power the Polar Express.