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Linked List: March 8, 2007

Thursday, 8 March 2007

Cosmetically and typographically, it is noticeably improved from the old design. But that’s not saying much — the previous New Yorker web site was a cheap-looking embarrassment. There is far too much going on in their sidebars, and the Digg, Delicious, and Reddit links attached to each article are awkward. That goes for the link to the “Print” version of each article, too. (Print media CSS stylesheets, Google it.) The paper edition of The New Yorker features a splendid, timeless, uncluttered design; this web design is far too cluttered, and for that reason alone still feels un-New-Yorker-y. The New Yorker aspires to thoughtfulness; visual clutter works against that.

Kottke has a bunch of observations, the most alarming of which is that most of his links to newyorker.com are now 404s. I’m hoping this is just a launch bug — letting links go stale after a redesign is no longer acceptable (if it ever was).

‘Brian Krebs Watch’ on Whether Apple Lied About Maynor and Ellch ★

Based on the handful of emails David Maynor released last week, this is a fair analysis of whether and how they refute Lynn Fox’s statements regarding what information Maynor and Ellch had supplied to Apple. In short: what Apple said was either true or still inconclusive. (Maynor only released emails sent from his personal account; he is apparently not permitted to release any email sent from his account with then-employer SecureWorks.)

If there’s a problem, I think it’s that Fox’s statements carried the implication that Maynor had sent Apple no technical information at all regarding his research; that’s not the case. He did send Apple information, including scripts. One problem seems to be that no one at Apple was able to use his information to reproduce any of the exploits.

The other curious thing is that Maynor also discovered a Bluetooth exploit, sent Apple packet captures regarding it, and but that problem apparently remains unfixed today, six months later, in Mac OS X 10.4.8.

IconShoppe — Royalty-Free Stock Icons for the Web ★

Dan Cederholm’s stock iconography moves to its own domain. Great web design, as usual.

Fortune: ‘Why Apple Is the Best Retailer in America’ ★

Jerry Useem in Fortune:

“One of the best pieces of advice Mickey ever gave us was to go rent a warehouse and build a prototype of a store, and not, you know, just design it, go build 20 of them, then discover it didn’t work,” says Jobs. In other words, design it as you would a product.

This is a terrific article, with a lot of insight into just how much thought went into these store designs. According to Jobs, they abandoned their first store mockup because it was organized by product, and they realized it would be better to organize it by activity. The Genius Bars are patterned after hotel concierge desks; they got the idea after asking 18 people what their best ever customer experience was, and 16 of them said it was in a hotel.

Deck Expansion ★

Four new sites in The Deck: Khoi Vinh’s Subtraction, Greg Storey’s Airbag Industries, Tina Roth Eisenberg’s Swiss Miss, and Zeldman.

It’s like Deck honcho Jim Coudal is just filching sites from the top of my RSS subscription list.

CRM114 ★

Wikipedia:

The term CRM114 is first applied to the radio discriminator aboard a B-52 in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.

After Dr. Strangelove, the Kubrick rubric CRM114 appears in three subsequent movies. The spacecraft Discovery’s registration/serial number in 2001: A Space Odyssey is CRM 114, and in Eyes Wide Shut, the mortuary is located on Level/Wing C, Room 114. Kubrick cleverly uses the homonym “Serum 114,” a drug injected into Alex to help his reformation, in A Clockwork Orange.

I’ll have “Kubrick rubric” in my head for the remainder of the day.

(Via Buzz Andersen.)

Paid Software Reviews at The Apple Blog ★

I’m not sure what’s dumber: that The Apple Blog is now charging developers $200 to get a review published, or the idea that any developer would pay for this.

Josh Pigford writes:

We get literally hundreds of software and hardware review requests each month. We love trying out new products, so this usually works out pretty well.

The problem is that we just can’t review everything (obviously).

So, for the remainder of this week we’ll be offering a discounted price to review your Mac/Apple related software or hardware.

The idea is that you review the best and most interesting products. Not the ones that pay you. It’s totally cool to let developers pay you to get their app mentioned on your web site, but there’s a word for that: advertisement.

I predict they’ll scrap this plan within 24 hours.

Update: I should have said “12 hours”.