By John Gruber
Due — never forget anything, ever again.
Excellent freeware game for iPhone, programmed by Delicious Monster’s Lucas Newman and with artwork by Adam Betts. It’s a perfect game for the iPhone: simple, fun, quick, and a natural fit for a touch screen.
This is not a web app, it’s a real native iPhone app. The good news about that is the experience is better than any web app running in MobileSafari could possibly provide; the bad news, alas, is that the only way to install it is through the use of unsupported hacks not for the faint of heart. I played the game on Newman’s iPhone at C4, and it’s worth it. (Lights Off finished second in the Iron Coder contest, behind only Ken and Glen Aspeslagh’s two-way videoconferencing app.)
The final word on the saga; well-said.
Rory Prior proposes an improved design for the Mac OS X Dock, emphasizing clarity and simplicity over special effects.
Macworld’s Rob Griffiths looks at Numbers 1.0.
David Chartier on iPhoto’s new keyword/tagging features.
Insightful analysis from Shots Ring Out regarding Universal’s “we’re going to sell DRM-free music but not through iTunes” plan.
“As with previous versions, the Preferences window looks like a normal window but is actually application-modal.”
Alex Payne summarizes just about every session from C4[1] over the weekend; great coverage of a great conference.
The article that prompted The Question. There is an interesting story to be written about this topic, but this isn’t it.
Brand-new tab interface, better AIM DirectConnect reliability, and more.
Even better, Apple has finally released an official SDK for iPhoto plugins; up until now, FlickrExport had to rely on undocumented APIs.
The battle for web standards goes mainstream; BusinessWeek certainly gets it.
AT&T censored non-obscene, non-profane anti-George W. Bush lyrics from a webcast of a Pearl Jam concert. Disgraceful.
“If a company that is controlling a Webcast is cutting out bits of our performance — not based on laws, but on their own preferences and interpretations — fans have little choice but to watch the censored version,” Pearl Jam said in a prepared statement. “What happened to us this weekend was a wake up call, and it’s about something much bigger than the censorship of a rock band.”
There was a story going around last week, originating in The North Denver News, that a man had had cosmetic surgery on his fat thumbs to slim them down to better enable using them with his iPhone. Unsurprisingly, the story was a complete hoax.
Update: Here’s an editor’s note from The North Denver News claiming the piece was intended as “satirical social commentary”.
Craig Hockenberry’s C4 Iron Coder contest entry: a graphic calculator web app for iPhones.
Christopher Null:
Those little charges add up fast. $0.02 per kilobyte sounds pretty cheap, right? WRONG. Do the math: A 1-megabyte web page (a very common size) costs almost twenty bucks to open. 20. Dollars. Whoa. Seriously.