The Talk Show: Live From WWDC
7:00pm Tuesday • California Theatre
Tickets Available • Fun Will Be Had

Linked List: May 8, 2007

Tuesday, 8 May 2007

Christopher Breen explains how to use HandBrake to rip episodic DVDs (e.g. compilations of TV shows) for playback on Apple TV.

Jeff Veen Reveals New Google Analytics ★

Unveiled today, but not available to users for a few more weeks. Correction: New accounts get the updated Google Analytics interface now — it’s just the current users who have to wait a few weeks.

Adobe Lightroom Still Available for $199 From Amazon ★

The standard price went to $299 on May 1, but Amazon.com still has retail copies selling for the introductory price of $199 “while supplies last”. I’ve been using Lightroom for a week and love it.

DTrace for Ruby Is Available ★

A good fundamental rule for software development is to avoid premature optimization. Don’t guess what code ought to be optimized to make the whole system faster. Get it working first, then measure to identify where the bottlenecks really are.

Joyent’s DTrace-enabling patches for Ruby give Rails developers much better tools for measuring exactly where the bottlenecks are in a live web app.

More New Get a Mac Commercials ★

All three are pretty good. I like that they’re making fun of how many versions of Vista there are.

Wanted: Apple Mail Mini Player ★

Derek Powazek:

This Mini Player view is notable because iTunes is the only iApp that has such a state. Ostensibly this is because you may need quick access to your music controls when in other apps. But I think some other apps could use a mini state. Specifically, Apple’s Mail.

My initial reaction is that it’s more of an argument that Apple should allow Dashboard widgets to live in the regular window layers. There are some widget-sized status windows that’d be convenient to keep visible all the time.

MySpace Built on .Net ★

In my Microsoft ♥ Yahoo piece on Saturday, I wrote:

When was the last time you saw a new hit web site developed using Microsoft’s web stack?

A slew of readers wrote in to point out that MySpace now runs on .Net. It was originally written using ColdFusion (!) and was ported over to .Net last year.

According to this post from Microsoft’s Scott Guthrie, MySpace does 1.5 billion page views a day. That’s impressive. But it still doesn’t count as a hit new site developed using Microsoft’s web stack — clearly their switch to .Net was a success, but it happened after they became a billion-dollar subsidiary of News Corp.

My point isn’t really whether Microsoft’s web development kit is good or bad, but simply that all of the grassroots-level developer enthusiasm is for open source tools (and Flash).

Growth of Twitter vs. Blogger ★

Jason Kottke compares the early growth of Blogger to Twitter, in terms of messages posted. Twitter is now growing much faster, and growing in sudden tremendous bursts.

Update: Uh-oh, looks like the data Kottke used — Twitter post IDs — weren’t actually sequential and therefore aren’t a valid way to measure this.