By John Gruber
WorkOS launches auth.md — an open protocol for agent registration.
Linked List: February 28, 2007
Wednesday, 28 February 2007
- The Macalope on Cory Doctorow’s DRM Piece in Salon ★
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Well-considered response to Cory Doctorow’s “I don’t believe Steve Jobs” DRM piece from Salon last week:
Doctorow does make some good points but, as usual for him with this subject, he’s so wound up about it that he keeps heading off into la-la-koo-koo crazy-bananas land to make sure you know how bad DRM is.
- Follow-Up From Dori Smith on Web Conference Gender Diversity ★
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Dori Smith:
I’m not talking percentages. I’m not talking strict numbers. What I am talking about is that when someone says that she is looking for women developers and speakers and yet cannot find them, then she isn’t looking very hard. Or possibly, at all.
- Giant Sinkhole Swallows Guatemala Homes ★
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Astounding and tragic.
- swfIR: swf Image Replacement ★
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Says Zeldman:
Using unobtrusive JavaScript, progressive enhancement, and Flash, swfIR (pronounced “swiffer”) lets designers include high-quality, scalable artwork in user-resizable web layouts — and even add styles to the images.
- First 75 days of Wii Transfer ★
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Manton Reece reveals the sales data from the first 75 days of his Wii Transfer app. I don’t think his price increase (from $9 to $14) had any effect on sales — the drop-off that coincided with the increase was part of the overall trend of the drop-off after the release of version 2.0.
- Mail 2.0: What Happens While Sending Messages ★
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Few can work up a good UI rant like Pierre Igot can.
- Jackass of the Week: Gundeep Hora ★
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Gundeep Hora speculates that Apple might kill Mac OS X because they’re moving toward consumer electronics like the iPhone. The same iPhone that uses OS X as its operating system. Uh-huh.
Another you-might-think-it’s-a-joke-but-apparently-he’s-serious bit of punditry from Mr. Hora: “Microsoft Should Acquire Linux”.
- Windows Vista: I’m Breaking Up With You ★
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Chris Pirillo is the sort of user who wants to like Vista; it’s a very bad sign for Microsoft that he doesn’t.
- Matt Neuburg: Replacing AppleScript With Ruby ★
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Matt Neuburg:
My book, AppleScript: The Definitive Guide, describes and teaches the AppleScript language, but it also bemoans that language’s many failings. I won’t enumerate those failings here; let’s just stipulate that for some users, typically those with some experience of other programming languages, scripting Mac applications via Apple events would be a much more pleasant experience if AppleScript weren’t involved. In fact, I happen to be one such user.
And:
The true benefits of using Ruby instead of AppleScript as a base for sending Apple events to scriptable applications emerge when you consider the relative merits of the two languages. You shed the clumsy, tricky verbosity of AppleScript, along with its gaping linguistic holes (such as the paucity of string-handling abilities) in favor of such Ruby elegances as regular expressions, iterators, blocks, and true object-orientation—not to mention all the power of Ruby’s vast built-in classes, libraries, and gems.
- Showdown — Markdown in JavaScript ★
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John Fraser’s fast and compliant JavaScript port of Markdown. This is terrific.
- Background Music ★
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Dave Hyatt on the factors that can lead web browsers to consume too much CPU time.
- Starbucks Chairman Warns of ‘The Commoditization of the Starbucks Experience’ ★
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Interesting and candid appraisal of where Starbucks’s brand stands today.
- Raising the Titanic, Sinking Christianity? ★
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More on James Cameron’s claim to have discovered the tomb of Jesus and his family.
- New TextMate Book ★
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TextMate: Power Editing for the Mac, by James Edward Gray II, and published by The Pragmatic Programmers. $30 for paper, $20 for PDF, $37.45 for both.
- Beta Means Buggy ★
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Derik DeLong complains that Parallels’s support for Boot Camp partitions didn’t work for him in beta releases, but now works perfectly in the release version. Isn’t that what “beta” means?
- Hixie’s Natural Log: ‘Fixing the “Usemap” Attribute’ ★
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I ♥ HTML5 and the WHAT Working Group. I should just go ahead and switch DF to HTML5 now.
- ‘Children of Men’ Design Work ★
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Advertising, propaganda (is that redundant?), and user-interface designs from the imagined future of Children of Men.
- Missing Sync for BlackBerry Preview Released ★
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Good news for BlackBerry-using Mac users.