Linked List: July 26, 2007

Thursday, 26 July 2007

What Happens When Your iPhone Voicemail Box Is Full 

Doesn’t drop old ones; it just stops accepting new ones.

Think Different 

Fake Steve on Apple’s stock: “Yeah, it was a good day.”

TinyBuddy: AIM for iPhone From AOL, Sort Of 

Jason Snell on an intriguing web app interface to AIM for iPhone:

TinyBuddy uses AOL’s OpenAuth servers to authenticate you, meaning that the TinyBuddy web site never touches your password — so it can’t store it and use it later. Instead, TinyBuddy’s embedded JavaScript only handles a special authentication token provided by AIM.

Safari 3’s New Keyboard Shortcut for Blocking Pop-Up Windows 

Poka-yoke in action.

One Book to Specify Them All 

Khoi Vinh interviews Stephen Coles about FontBook, “the largest typeface reference in the world”.

What Too Much Clarity Looks Like 

Lightroom 1.1’s Clarity tool is amazing, but Duncan Davidson has a good example of its limitations.

Microsoft to Provide Advertising for Digg 

Reuters:

Digg Chief Executive Jay Adelson said his company also considered partnerships with Google and Yahoo Inc, but chose Microsoft because of the level of customization the software maker offered with its advertising platform.

I’m sure it wasn’t that Microsoft guaranteed the most money.

Apple Stock Way Up 

Reached an all-time high of $148.50 at one point. 73 percent year-over-year growth in quarterly profit will do that.

“A Product Transition I Can’t Get Into” 

Noted by Forbes’s Brian Caufield, a tantalizing statement from Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer during the quarterly conference call, when he was asked why Apple’s guidance for the current quarter is just 65 cents per share, far under the 92 cents they just booked in the past quarter and the 82 cents analysts pulled out of their butts:

Oppenheimer gave three reasons for the shift, two prosaic, and one very tantalizing. Apple’s back-to-school product promotions will cost the company. Prices are rising for key parts, such as the flash memory that powers the iPhone and many of Apple’s music players. Finally, Oppenheimer said, there will be a “product transition I can’t get into.”

If it’s going to affect earnings, that seems to imply not just something new announced by the end of September, but something available for sale during the quarter. Curious.

Update: Here’s how I’m interpreting this. I think what he’s saying is that Apple is going to replace an older product which currently has high margins with a new product that, at least at first, will have significantly lower margins. Imagine, say, new iPods that sell at the same prices as current models but which cost more to produce. Or maybe it means they’re going to switch to the subscription-based accounting for more products?

QuickTime 7.2 Brings Leopard Functionality 

Ken Aspeslagh:

Following a continuing trend of adding new things without telling anyone, the recent QuickTime 7.2 update includes more than just bug fixes. We’ve confirmed that the QTKit Capture functionality previously billed as a feature of Leopard is included with the update.

(Via MDJ.)

The New Backpack 

Nice update to 37signals’s Backpack. Much more control over the order of elements on the page, plus account-wide search. Alas, the rollover-based UI for editing items doesn’t compute on the rollover-less iPhone.

Update: One day later, and they’ve already got a workaround for using it on an iPhone. A quick tap on any item reveals the same editing controls typically available by rollover.

The Items We Carry 

Irresistible (at least to me) new Flickr group started by Naz Hamid. Moleskines and iPhones are well-represented. (Surprisingly many Field Notes notebooks for a yet-to-be-released product.)

Redefining ‘Growth Stock’ 

Boy, that really is slow.

Daring Fireball Display Preferences 

For those of you who think the font size on Daring Fireball is too small and never noticed the link at the bottom of every page: you can use the DF Prefs page to set a bigger font size, saved in a cookie in your browser.