By John Gruber
WorkOS launches auth.md — an open protocol for agent registration.
Linked List: December 27, 2006
Wednesday, 27 December 2006
- Jason Snell: iPhone, iTV, and Household Names ★
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Jason Snell:
So let me get this straight. Apple has never, ever even admitted that this product might one day exist. Cisco’s owned the trademark on “iPhone” for ten years. And frankly, the whole i-Everything thing is getting a bit tired. So does anyone reasonably think that Apple was truly planning on calling their phone the iPhone? The only people who should be disappointed are the people who have been throwing around the word iPhone as if it were a real product name, which it never was.
I agree with Snell that if there’s an obvious name Apple might actually use for a phone, it’s “iPod Phone”, or “iPod something”. I still hear people at the mall calling the Apple store “the iPod store”.
- Happy Cog Redesigned Dictionary.com ★
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I noticed that Dictionary.com got a terrific redesign a few months ago, but I didn’t know that it was from Happy Cog until I read Zeldman’s 2006 year in review. A perfect example of a redesign that was more about improving the experience than merely improving the site’s aesthetics.
- Parodying the News Is Getting Harder ★
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The Golden State Fence Company, one of the firms hired to construct a border fence between the U.S. and Mexico, has agreed to pay $5 million in fines for hiring illegal immigrants. (Thanks to Erik Barzeski.)
- HTML5 Elements and Attributes ★
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All 85 tag elements and their supported attributes in the WHATWG draft spec for HTML 5. (Via Mark Pilgrim.)
- Reading Daring Fireball on the Wii ★
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Looks like I need to do something to make the layout work better on relatively narrow screens.
Update: From the comments (on Flickr), it looks like this is the zoomed-in view, which explains why it doesn’t fit. I still think I ought to buy a Wii for, uh, browser-testing, though.
- Falsified Documents May Be at Core of Apple Options Backdating Scandal ★
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Justin Scheck reporting for Law.com:
According to people with knowledge of Apple’s situation, federal prosecutors are looking closely at stock option administration documents that were apparently falsified by company officials to maximize the profitability of option grants to executives.
Still looks like the whole mess is being blamed on Nancy Heinen and Fred Anderson, Apple’s former chief counsel and CFO, respectively. But Scheck also reports that Steve Jobs has hired his own legal representation, separate from Apple’s.
Apple shares dipped two percent on this news. (Via The Macalope.)
- iTunes Visits Skyrocket 413 Percent on Christmas Day ★
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The numbers are from Hitwise, not Apple, so take them with a grain of salt, because third party “competitive traffic analysis” is not an exact science. But Hitwise says Christmas Day visits to the iTunes Store outnumbered visits to the Zune store 30-1. (Part of that spread though, surely, is that most Zunes are brand-new, whereas a lot of people with existing iPods received iTunes gift cards.)
Anyway, last year Apple sold 14 million iPods in the holiday quarter; in 2004 they sold 4 million. I’ve seen analysts picking a number between 15-20 million for this year; I’m going out on a limb and predicting 24 million iPods.