Linked List: August 8, 2007

Wednesday, 8 August 2007

Inspirational Bracelet 

Barry Bonds, send me your address.

Send Voicemail to Yourself on an iPhone 

Nifty trick for sending voicemail to yourself on an iPhone — a poor man’s voice memo feature.

Advanced Computation in Numbers 

OK, it doesn’t support pivot tables, but Ale Muñoz observes that Numbers can compute the answer to the ultimate question about life, the universe, and everything. And in far less than 7.5 million years.

The Framework Formally Known as ’Prints 

Grid-master Khoi Vinh interviews Olav Frihagen Bjørkøy, the 21-year-old Norwegian behind last week’s aforelinked Blueprint layout framework.

The New iMac’s Price-Drop 

The-ish.com specs out a new 24-inch iMac with 2 GB of RAM, and find that it’s $699 cheaper than one of the previous iMacs priced on Monday:

What a difference a day makes. That’s hardly a “$200″ difference. That is actually a $699 difference.

I see what they meant by lower-margin product transition.

Mac Pro RAID 

More from James Duncan Davidson, this time on the new RAID storage option for Mac Pros that Apple released yesterday.

iPhoto 7.0.1 and .Mac Gallery 

James Duncan Davidson:

More than that, the emphasis in Flickr is on the collective photo sharing experience and on the community. .Mac Gallery is more about one person sharing their work. There’s no comments, notes, or other stuff to get in the way. And, despite the interestingness of all that, sometimes you don’t want it.

Bruce Schneier Interviews Kip Hawley, Head of the TSA 

Super-smart no-punches-pulled interview by Bruce Schneier with TSA chief Kip Hawley:

BS: When can we keep our shoes on?

KH: Any time after you clear security. Sorry, Bruce, I don’t like it either, but this is not just something leftover from 2002. It is a real, current concern. We’re looking at shoe scanners and ways of using millimeter wave and/or backscatter to get there, but until the technology catches up to the risk, the shoes have to go in the bin.

BS: This feels so much like “cover your ass” security: you’re screening our shoes because everyone knows Richard Reid hid explosives in them, and you’ll be raked over the coals if that particular plot ever happens again. But there are literally thousands of possible plots.

How Apple’s Small Things Influence Their Big Things 

Jason Fried on the parallels between the iPhone and new iMacs, and the iPod and old iMacs.

The Myth of Cocoa Apps 

Adrian Sutton:

There’s this myth that’s existed ever since the beginning of OS X - that Cocoa apps are automatically better than any other type of application. They use less RAM, run faster and are just all round better - you can’t dispute it. If you take a lousy Carbon app and rewrite it in Cocoa it will become amazing and all its problems will be solved.

This is of course, complete and utter bull.

Video of Today’s Apple Special Event 

Love that the opening song was The Stones’ “Satisfaction”. Weird watching Jobs in such a small venue, though — sort of like watching a superband like The Stones or U2 play in a bar.

Scott McNulty, among many others, observes that the Apple logo is no longer on the Command key on the new keyboards. There was no Apple logo on the original Macintosh keyboard, either — just the cloverleaf.

At one point during development of the original Mac, the Command key symbol was an Apple logo — both on the keyboard and on-screen, for menu key shortcuts. According to Andy Hertzfeld it was nixed by Steve Jobs in 1983:

“There are too many Apples on the screen! It’s ridiculous! We’re taking the Apple logo in vain! We’ve got to stop doing that!”

I’m just happy they added the word “command”. I’ve lost track how many times over the years I’ve been asked, “What’s the ‘Command’ key?”

Apple — Keyboard 

The new keyboard — a keyboard! — gets a top-level directory on Apple.com. Interesting that the Bluetooth version is so drastically different than the corded version.

iWork ’08 Tutorials 

Apple has really put a lot of work into the iWork support materials. Watching these movies is a great way to see what’s new and how it works.

Freakonomics Weblog Moves to NYTimes.com 

Interesting move by The Times; they’re steadily growing their team of online-only writers. (Yes, the Freakonomics guys write a column for the Times Magazine, but their weblog entries won’t appear in the paper.)

Bonds Makes History With 756th Home Run 

See, sometimes cheaters do win.