Linked List: June 13, 2007

Wednesday, 13 June 2007

A Very Sweet Solution 

This whole “web apps are the iPhone SDK” thing is clearly polarizing. There are many people, particularly web developers, who don’t seem to understand why Mac developers aren’t satisfied.

I should just redirect everyone to Michael Tsai’s weblog this week. He sums up the situation perfectly simply by using Steve Jobs’s own words about why the iPhone Maps app is a real app, and not just a WebKit view pointing at maps.google.com.

Apple Design Awards 2007 

Panic wins Best User Experience for Coda; Karelia wins runner-up for Sandvox. Other winners include CSSEdit for Best Developer Tool and Delicious Library 2.0 for Best App That Doesn’t Yet Exist.

More on ZFS Support 

InformationWeek:

Seeking to clarify a statement made on Monday by Brian Croll, senior director of Mac OS X Product Marketing, to two InformationWeek reporters that Apple’s new “Leopard” operating system would not include the ZFS file system, an Apple spokesperson indicated that ZFS would be available as a limited option, but not as the default file system.

ZFS “is only available a read-only option from the command line,” according to an Apple spokesperson.

Fake Steve on Microsoft 

Insightful analogy from Fake Steve:

Remember Detroit in the 1970s, when customers started saying they wanted smaller, cheaper, leaner, simpler cars? Toyota and Honda listened, while the Big Three kept cranking out monstrously huge cars and then putting all sorts of effort (advertising, discounts on the lot, dealer incentives, blackballing dealers who tried to open Toyota or Honda stores, spouting empty patriotic rhetoric about buying American, blah blah) thinking that by doing this they could get customers to buy the cars that they’d already told Detroit they didn’t want. [...] Now at Microsoft we’re seeing a repeat of this phenomenon.

Gizmodo: Andre the Giant Selected as New Hand Model for iPhone 

Interesting comparison of old and new iPhone promotional photos; the new one makes the iPhone look smaller by using a model with much larger hands.

Santa Rosa Comes to the Mac: A Review of the New MacBook Pro 

Eric Bangeman reviews the new 1920x1200 high resolution 17-inch MacBook Pro.

Thor Larholm on Exploiting Safari for Windows 

His exploit takes advantage of Safari’s lax input validation in URL protocol handlers.

64-Bit Carbon Canned 

When Apple announced at WWDC 2006 that full 64-bit support was coming in Leopard, the message was that it would be supported in both Carbon and Cocoa. Now it’s Cocoa-only. As Michael Tsai mentions, this matters even for developers writing Cocoa apps:

All of my applications are Cocoa, but they use bits of Carbon to do things that aren’t possible with pure Cocoa.

Security Researchers: Safari for Windows Not So Secure 

Lots of crashers and several remote code execution exploits.

It’s a beta — and I presume Apple will be releasing updated betas between now and October (or whenever it’s going to be when Safari 3 officially ships) — but if they’re hoping to attract Firefox users, it isn’t going to work if Safari for Windows gets pegged as insecure.