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Linked List: January 23, 2007

Tuesday, 23 January 2007

Pirating the 2007 Oscars 

Terrific analysis from Andy Baio on how long it takes for Oscar nominated films to be pirated. (Answer: not long.) He also draws an interesting conclusion that the more effort a studio exerts trying to keep a screener (a DVD distributed to Oscar voters) from being bootlegged, the worse chance that movie has of winning an award. The anti-copying measures make it less likely screeners will even watch it.

Methinks the movie industry is getting closer and closer to their date with a Napster-style reckoning.

Walt Mossberg on Vista’s Performance 

Walt Mossberg:

I tested Vista on three computers. On a new, top-of-the-line Hewlett-Packard laptop, with Vista preinstalled, it worked smoothly and quickly. It was a pleasure.

On a three-year-old H-P desktop, a Vista upgrade installed itself fine. But even though this computer had a full gigabyte of memory and what was once a high-end graphics card, Vista Ultimate reverted to the Basic user interface. And even then, it ran so slowly and unsteadily as to make the PC essentially unusable.

Mac OS X is the only desktop operating system I know of that has gotten faster, rather than slower, with each major release. The classic Mac OS was just as guilty as Windows in this regard. (Going from System 6 to System 7 was painful.)

Sure, part of it is that 10.0 was just so damn slow, but I think it’s a sign that Apple’s executives value engineering as a core principle. Apple spends engineering resources to improve the performance of existing code. Marketing-driven companies never do this because you can’t use “Many things are now a little bit faster than they used to be” as a selling point for an upgrade. I suspect this is a big part of why OS X appears to run so well on the iPhone.

Megazoomer 

SIMBL hack for Mac OS X that lets you turn any window full-screen:

Just press Command-Enter, and the front-most window grows to fill your entire monitor. Press the same keys, and it shrinks again.

Update: Worth noting that Megazoomer only works in Cocoa apps.

Cocoa Tutorial for Absolute Newbies 

Scott Stevenson:

My goal with this was to do the simplest thing possible while still ending up with something useful. It’s a relatively short read by design — probably about twenty minutes. Essentially, you’re shown how to launch Xcode, create a project, launch Interface Builder, add a few items and compile the result. There’s no code, but we do bask in the glow of NSTextView’s rich text handling.

Security Update 2007-001 

Fixes the QuickTime ‘rtsp://’ URL handler buffer overflow from the Month of Apple Bugs project.

Joel Spolsky on ‘Dreaming in Code’ 

Joel Spolsky on Scott Rosenberg’s Dreaming in Code:

Scott Rosenberg’s excellent new book, which was supposed to be a Soul of a New Machine for the hottest open source startup of the decade, ends up, in frustration, with Scott cutting the story short because Chandler 1.0 was just not going to happen any time soon (and presumably Rosenberg couldn’t run the risk that we wouldn’t be using books at all by the time it shipped, opting instead to absorb knowledge by taking a pill).

Still, it’s a great look at one particular type of software project: the kind that ends up spinning and spinning its wheels without really going anywhere because the vision was too grand and the details were a little short.

Backdrop 

Another aptly named freeware utility for covering your desktop with a plain background.

Microsoft Expression Suite 

Suite of design apps that seem intended to compete squarely against Adobe’s Creative Suite for the Windows professional design market. (Please, no snickers about that being an oxymoron.) So now Adobe is getting platform-specific competition from both Apple and Microsoft. The danger to Adobe is that they’ll get out-Windowsed on one end and out-Mac’ed on the other while they attempt to straddle both platforms.

(Via Metafilter.)

Update: Expression Media is Microsoft’s new version of iView MediaPro, which they bought back in June.

Screenshot Helper 

Free utility that displays a full-screen image or solid color. Intended for taking screenshots, but perhaps useful for the I-only-want-see-what-I’m-writing crowd as well. (Thanks to Victor Gavenda.)

Eric Meyer on Twitter 

Good criticism overall, but it’s a tricky spot for the Twitter team. A big part of Twitter’s appeal is its nearly utter simplicity. My guess is Twitter will eventually accommodate most of his complaints, though.

Microsoft Tech Evangelist Viewed Industry Analysts as Bribable 

(Warning: Link is to a PDF.)

This Comes v. Microsoft antitrust case in Iowa is a veritable gold mine for Microsoft internal communications dirt. This PDF includes a memo written in 1997 by James Plamondon, a Microsoft technical evangelist. From p. 48 (the strike-through humor is in the original):

Analysts are people who are paid to take a stand, while always trying to appear to be disinterested observers (since the appearance of independence maximizes the price they can charge for selling out). Treat them as you would treat nuclear weapons — as an important part of your arsenal, which you want to keep out of the hands of the enemy. Bribe Hire them to produce “studies” that “prove” that your technology is superior to the enemy’s, and that it is gaining momentum faster.

Did I just hear someone say “Rob Enderle”?

(Thanks to DF reader James Bass.)

SpotlightFS 

New file system plug-in from Google’s Greg Miller, for use with Amit Singh’s MacFUSE:

SpotlightFS is a MacFUSE file system that creates true smart folders, where the folders’ contents are dynamically generated by querying Spotlight. This differs from Finder’s version of smart folders, which are really plist files with a .savedSearch file extension. Since SpotlightFS smart folders are true folders, they can be used from anywhere — including the command line.

OK, that is fucking cool.

$1,995 docking station for iPods that provides “better than CD” audiophile sound. It requires modifications to the iPod itself to get digital audio out. (Thanks to Rich Siegel.)

Steve Jobs: ‘Design Is How It Works’ 

With regard to the comments on Jeff Atwood’s aforelinked “There Are No Design Leaders in the PC Industry”, it is astounding to me how many of those defending the status quo think that “design” only means “cosmetic appeal”. This quote from Steve Jobs, from a piece in The New York Times Magazine back in 2003, says it best:

“Most people make the mistake of thinking design is what it looks like,” says Steve Jobs, Apple’s C.E.O. “People think it’s this veneer — that the designers are handed this box and told, ‘Make it look good!’ That’s not what we think design is. It’s not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.”