Linked List: August 24, 2007

Friday, 24 August 2007

Making Things Up 

Brent Simmons, in a terrific interview with Shawn Blanc:

Ever since I was a kid I pictured myself working at home. I thought it would be as a novelist rather than a programmer, but it’s about the same thing: I sit in a chair in front of a computer and make things up.

Numbers Rocks 

Insightful write-up on Numbers from Mac Thought Crime. (Via Michael Tsai.)

Snapz Pro X 2.1.1 

Performance and bug-fix update to Ambrosia’s excellent Mac OS X screenshot/screencast recording utility.

Should Do This 

New service from the Robot Co-Op. Very clever design: the UI for the main form explains what the site is all about. The top items on the Apple Should Do This list are actually pretty damn good.

Guess What? They Just Walked In. 

Speaking of Palm CEO Ed Colligan, now’s a good time to recall his comments from last November, regarding the prospects of Apple’s then-only-rumored entry into the mobile phone market:

Colligan laughed off the idea that any company — including the wildly popular Apple Computer — could easily win customers in the finicky smart-phone sector.

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

Dear Palm: It’s Time for an Intervention 

Engadget to Palm: Here’s a long list of the many ways you suck and have completely squandered your lead in the mobile market.

Palm CEO Ed Colligan to Engadget: Thank you sirs, may I have another!

Rob Galbraith on the New Nikon D3 Digital SLR 

So much cool stuff in this camera — Nikon has really jumped back into the high-end SLR market.

FSJ, Image Misuse, and Wikipedia 

Great post by James Duncan Davidson on Wikipedia’s lousy attribution credits for photographers. The credits are there, but they’re hidden several pages away, leading people like Fake Steve author Daniel Lyons to re-use them without any attribution at all.

17-Year-Old Unlocks iPhone 

17-year-old George Hotz unlocked his iPhone so it could work on T-Mobile’s network:

The hack, which Hotz posted Thursday to his blog, is complicated and requires skill with both soldering and software. It takes about two hours to perform.

The teen estimates he spent 500 hours developing his technique, sometimes working until 9 am and then waking the next day at 4 pm to resume his work.

Obviously, anything that requires soldering is only going to appeal to a minuscule niche, so this isn’t really huge news. But there’s something admirable about a kid willing to put that amount of time into an obsessive project like this. Someone at Apple ought to line him up for an internship next summer.

For Some Cases of ‘Every’ 

One more quip regarding Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s weblog entry touting their stock ticker symbol change to “JAVA”:

[…] every major PC manufacturer bundles Java upon shipment, as does every mobile phone manufacturer, and tens of millions of developers touch it every day in the world’s IT shops.

Yeah, sure couldn’t build a good mobile device without Java installed.

It’s just the stock symbol, but it strikes me as so wrong, almost defeatist, to make any sort of branding statement that suggests that you believe one of your products is bigger than the company itself. It’d be like if Apple had changed its symbol to “MAC” or “IPOD”. Foolish.

Sun Changes Stock Symbol From ‘SUNW’ to ‘JAVA’ 

Apparently they couldn’t find a four-character symbol that stood for “shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic”. (SDCT?)

Tinderbox 

My thanks to Eastgate, makers of Tinderbox, for sponsoring the RSS feed this week. They bill Tinderbox as a “personal content assistant”. It’s also an excellent tool for writing hypertext; check out Matt Neuburg’s write-up in TidBITS. And note this: Tinderbox comes with a bundled version of Bare Bones’s Yojimbo. Buy Tinderbox, get Yojimbo free.

Deleting iTunes Tracks From Playlists 

Great iTunes tip from Jason Guthrie: You can delete tracks directly from a playlist listing using Command-Option-Delete. I did not know that. (Via Shaun Inman.) Update: Option-Delete works as well.