Linked List: September 11, 2007

Tuesday, 11 September 2007

JetPens — Japanese Pens and Stationery ★

The Japanese have a far better selection of pens on the market than we do here in the U.S. Maybe you knew this already, but I just learned about it a few weeks ago. For example, earlier this year I switched from the Pilot Precise V5 rollerball to the Pilot G2 gel pen. The G2 is a great pen, but alas, the finest available point — 0.5mm — isn’t quite fine enough for my taste.

It ends up Pilot produces 0.38mm G2s, but they’re only available in Japan. Luckily, JetPens.com sells Japanese pens and stationery over the Internet. I ordered a fistful of these 0.38mm G2s and they showed up yesterday — and damn if they’re not perfect. Best pen I’ve ever used. If you’re a pen nerd, prepare to break out your credit card.

Josh Pigford: ‘Image Editors Are the New FTP Application’ ★

Josh Pigford, observing the recent run of new bitmap image editors for Mac OS X (Acorn, Pixelmator, Iris):

I think what really turns me off about all of this is that all of these image editors do, more or less, the same thing. Sure, they each have a different UI and will each perform tasks a tad different than the other but for the most part they all just edit images.

Substitute “text” for “images” and he’d be arguing that Allan Odgaard never should have written TextMate, or that the Coding Monkeys shouldn’t have written SubEthaEdit.

As for why image editors are suddenly popping out of the woodwork, that’s easy: Core Image. That’s not to say Core Image makes it easy to write apps like Acorn, Pixelmator, or Iris — just that it makes it a lot less work than it would have been before Core Image existed. (And don’t miss Siracusa’s quip.)

Joswiak Says Apple Has No Position on Unofficial Apps for iPhone/iPod Touch ★

It’s kind of implicit that this has been Apple’s stance all along, given that there aren’t any technical barriers in place to prevent third-party apps from running on the iPhone.

Ringtones Now Available in iTunes Store ★

I’ve been playing with this for about two hours; it’s buggy and frustrating.

Blackfriars’ Marketing: Why a Million iPhones in 74 Days Is Better Than You Think ★

Carl Howe has a good point:

Everyone is focusing on estimates of about 700,000 iphones sold over 74 days. But in reality, iPhones were very hard to find for nearly 21 days of that selling period! I’ve included a (admittedly very rough) movie showing iPhone availability at Apple stores during the first month of sales. Suffice it to say that if you wanted an iPhone during the period between July 1 and July 21, you had to be either lucky or determined to get one, because most Apple stores were out of stock of them.

MakeiPhoneRingtone 1.0 ★

Freeware drag-and-drop tool from Rogue Amoeba to automate the bizarre “change the file extension, show it to iTunes, then change the file extension back” song and dance for creating your own iPhone ringtones.

Teaser for Another New Image Editor: Iris ★

From Nolobe, the guys behind Interarchy. Waiting for Leopard, apparently.

Take Fetch Back to School Contest ★

Big prizes from Fetch Softworks:

Fetch Softworks is celebrating the new school year with the Take Fetch Back to School essay contest. Students, teachers, and other school employees in the U.S. can win an Apple MacBook or iPod Nano by sharing how they use Fetch in their academic work.