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Linked List: April 11, 2007

Wednesday, 11 April 2007

So it goes.

New Skype beta for Mac OS X. In my experience, Skype’s public betas are as reliable and stable as their official releases. Release notes here.

Stikkit Quick With Quicksilver ★

New Quicksilver plugin for Stikkit users.

Twitter and Jott Vulnerable to SMS and Caller ID Spoofing ★

I didn’t know it was so easy to spoof an SMS sender.

Microsoft Engaging in Channel Stuffing With Xbox 360? ★

Puffing up their sales numbers for Xbox 360 by bragging about how many units have been shipped to retailers, rather than how many have actually been sold to customers. (Thanks to Andy Reitz.)

Will Ferrell Movie Generator ★

I’m not sure if this is a joke.

Uncov: ‘Meebo Is What’s Wrong With Web 2.0’ ★

Nice rant about web apps that consume copious amounts of memory and CPU time from Uncov, a new site focused on nerd-level coverage of web app startups:

The user doesn’t care that Firefox’s JavaScript interpreter runs in the same thread as the renderer, and that faulty JS can bring down the browser. The bottom line is, if the user comes to your application and Firefox crashes or starts eating memory, your application is at fault, not Firefox.

(Via Valleywag.)

Dear God, Make Art Thievery Die. Amen. ★

One of the most shameless rip-offs I’ve ever seen.

Regarding the Palette Title Bar Controls in CS3 ★

Ends up the title bar controls for palette windows in CS3 are on the right side, Windows-style. “X” for close, “_” for collapse. God, that just looks so wrong — how did this ever get approved? If Adobe really wanted to put these controls in the same location on both platforms, why not do it the Mac way? If Windows users cared about consistency, they wouldn’t be using Windows.

Keith Richards Is Amazing ★

Dlisted:

Keith Richards has confessed that he threw a canary out the window, because it was bothering his hangover. The bird belonged to his bandmate, Ronnie Wood’s son. He said he was trying to lay down and the bird was making so much noise that he threw it out the window. Keith apparently thought the bird was an alarm clock.

(Thanks to Amy Gruber.)

Brian Tiemann on MPEG-4 and DivX ★

Brian Tiemann:

But the real lesson is that whereas MPEG-4 is a series of structured standards developed by independent bodies and corporations such as IBM to whom patent and license fees must be paid, DivX is more like a backyard rocket made of chicken wire and aluminum siding and stolen North Korean engines.

Erik Vlietinck on Adobe Creative Suite 3 ★

Erik Vlietinck:

After having spent three weeks with the entire Creative Suite 3 for Web and Print Production, there is no longer any sense in denying it: much of CS3 is hypeware. InDesign CS3 is a disappointment, Photoshop CS3 Extended will appeal especially to scientists and medical users but there’s little to entice photographers.

Is Vlietinck right that the title bar controls for the palettes are on the right, Windows-style, even in the Mac versions?

Jackass of the Week: Yahoo Music’s Ian Rogers ★

In a post on the Yahoo Music Blog trumpeting the positive reviews for the new Wi-Fi-enabled Sansa Connect (which features integration with Yahoo), Ian Rogers justifies the $12/month subscription fee thusly (boldface added):

For those of you about to complain about the $12/month to get unlimited tracks (like, um, Steve Jobs), check yourself before you riggity wreck yourself. Labels and artists get paid for every radio play and every Yahoo! Music download to the Sansa Connect, whereas we all know iPods are mostly full of not-paid-for MP3s. At Yahoo! we would like to help maintain a healthy music business, compensating labels and artists at a fair price to consumers.

What a great pitch to get iPod users to switch to the Sansa: accuse them of being thieves.

My money says that what most iPods are full of are songs ripped — legally — from iPod owners’ CD collections. But even if I’m wrong, the Sansa Connect plays MP3 files, making it just as easy to use with bootlegged music files as an iPod.

Former Apple Executive Tim Bucher Has a Role in Sansa’s New iPod Competitor ★

Eddie Hargreaves at The Apple Blog:

SanDisk has launched a Wi-Fi-enabled MP3 player, Sansa Connect, and a central player in its creation is Zing, a company co-founded by former Apple executive Tim Bucher.

Bucher, you may recall, was named head of Apple’s Macintosh hardware engineering division in 2004 after Jon Rubinstein left that position to head up the then-new iPod division. Six months later, MDJ broke the story that Bucher had been fired under mysterious circumstances. In 2005, Bucher filed a wrongful termination suit against Apple, claiming, amongst other things, that Steve Jobs had told him, “People sometimes think you are manic-depressive. … I’m not sure what I am going to do, but I think I am going to have to ask you to leave the company.”

Anyway, this Sansa player looks interesting — the Wi-Fi feature lets you browse pictures from Flickr and download songs directly from Yahoo’s subscription-based music service.

Proposal to Adopt HTML5 ★

Apple, Mozilla Foundation, and Opera officially propose that the W3C use the WHATWG’s HTML5 draft specification as the starting point for further HTML development. The correct answer to this offer is “Yes.”

‘Ze Frank: The Songs’ Album Available at iTunes Store ★

$10 album of the songs from Ze Frank’s The Show, including such timeless classics as “Where the Fuck Do Ideas Come From?”, “Hindsight is 20/20”, and my personal favorite, “If the Earth Were a Sandwich”. (Thanks to Jesper.)

AIGA NY: Design Remixed: John Gruber ★

Speaking of the Apple Store in Soho, I’ll be speaking there on Wednesday, June 20, as part of AIGA’s “Design Remixed” series. I’ll be giving a less technical, more designer-targeted version of my talk from C4[0], on the difference between consistency and uniformity in user interface design.

What Happens When John Hodgman Visits the Apple Store in Soho? ★

Hear Hodgman tell the tale on the latest episode of This American Life, “Nice Work if You Can Get It”. (Thanks to Joe Clark.)

Airbag Blog Advisory Sytem — Because Words Sometimes Hurt ★

No longer just a joke — it’s now a fully operational system. I ran the front page of DF through and it rang up as “Asshat”. Damn curse words.