Linked List: September 20, 2007

Thursday, 20 September 2007

Complains about battery life — it’s not bad, but it wasn’t as good as what Apple claims — and gets confirmation from Apple that the display problems reported by many Touch owners are, in fact, a hardware problem affecting some units. (Mossberg reports that the displays on his two demo units both look great.)

VoodooPad and Acorn Updates ★

Gus Mueller:

Both have bug fixes, and a couple of new features. Acorn’s update is mostly to fix a handful of crashers and a couple of new features that lots of people have been asking for. VoodooPad’s “wiki markup engine” (vroom vroom?) has had some minor tweaks so that it won’t wipe out custom links pasted from other apps, among other things.

MacJournals: On Ringtones and Copyrights ★

MDJ’s scrupulously detailed look at the intersection of ringtones and copyright law. Part of the argument here is that making a ringtone necessitates making an additional copy of the song file, whether it’s truncated or not. That’s just a matter of implementation, though — Apple could easily allow the iPhone’s phone app to play the same song files in your regular music library.

Also, this is interesting:

You can peek behind the curtain just a little bit by looking at the FAQ page from TuneCore, a company that takes a flat fee for putting digital music to which you own the copyright onto online stores such as the iTunes Store, Napster, eMusic, Rhapsody, MusicNet, GroupieTunes, and others, both in the United States and internationally. TuneCore swears up, down, and sideways that it does not keep even the tiniest percentage of the royalties from any online store, instead taking a flat fee per year and per album to get your tunes listed. As part of this, TuneCore discloses the royalty rates paid to artists on the various systems.

Playlist Reviews the iPod Touch ★

Christopher Breen: “Among my list of concerns only one is a deal-killer—the quality of the video.”

Dr. Copperplate and Mr. Gothic ★

Armin Vit on Copperplate Gothic.

Mint: Year Two in Review ★

Shaun Inman:

Two years ago this past Labor Day I launched Mint. No, not that “inspired” third-party finance aggregator the VCs are going gaga over. The original Mint, the only (to my knowledge) self-hosted, real-time, extensible web stats app. So what’s happened since the first yearly review (for posterity and those who are just now joining us)?

I count Mint as one of my essential tools for running DF.

Canadian Dollar Reaches Parity With Staggering U.S. Greenback ★

The dollar also hit an all-time low against the Euro. Heck of a job, Bushie.

Carl Howe on Apple’s iPhone Marketing Strategy ★

Carl Howe is a very smart dude:

Consumers value what they pay for. They don’t value things the perceive as free. And that’s the marketing blunder the US mobile phone market has bought into over the last 10 to 15 years. By bundling “free” and generic phones with cell phone service, mobile carriers have devalued both the brand values of the handset makers and their own services.

Put Your Content in my Pocket, Part II ★

Second part of Craig Hockenberry’s outstanding guide to MobileSafari-optimized web development for A List Apart.

iPhone and iPod: Contain or Disengage? ★

Terrific essay from Wil Shipley on Apple’s growing hubris:

Apple’s emulating the most pernicious qualities of Nintendo and the Microsoft XBox — you pay us a tax or you don’t work with our systems.

But Apple’s “approval” just comes from Apple getting a cut. It’s a measure of greed, not quality. We’re not talking about THX-certification here, we’re talking about extortion. This kind of lock-in seems very appealing for the company doing the locking early on, but it always, ALWAYS ends up biting the company in the butt. Ask IBM with their ubiquitous 970 servers and their extortionist service contracts. Oh, wait, those don’t exist any more.

The best thing that could happen to Apple this year would be for Microsoft’s Zune 2.0 to be a kick-ass product, both technologically and in terms of being designed to make customers happy, not entertainment conglomerates. Apple needs competition.

More on JetPens ★

After I linked to their wonderful Japanese imported .38mm Pilot G2 pens, they sold out. Good news: the black ones are back in stock.

Number One Priority ★

One more thing regarding Bill Carter’s New York Times report on NBC’s idiotic new “free TV show downloads that only work on Windows, expire in a week, and have commercials you’re not allowed to fast forward through” initiative:

But, Mr. Gaspin said, “piracy was and is our No. 1 priority.” He said that the music industry had been devastated by the free exchange of music, much of it facilitated by iTunes.

That’s Jeff Gaspin, the president of the NBC Universal Television Group. So his number-one priority is piracy. Not making high-quality shows. Not forging a sponsorship or advertising model that is less annoying and distracting to viewers, such that they (the viewers) would be less likely to want to fast-forward the advertising messages. No, piracy, that’s his top priority.

And shame on Bill Carter for letting Gaspin’s statement regarding iTunes being a facilitator of music piracy stand undisputed. What Gaspin means is simply that iTunes allows you to play non-DRM-protected music (and video). In the entertainment industry’s mind, anything that can be used to play bootlegged copyrighted material is deemed problematic. It’s despicable.

What To Do With 756 ★

Mike Monteiro on Bonds’s home run ball: “I voted to send it to the Hall. It’s history; and not all history is pretty.”

Vote756.com ★

Designer Marc Ecko paid $750,000 for Barry Bonds’s record-breaking home run ball; he’s now holding an online poll to determine whether to (a) send it to Cooperstown; (b) brand it with an asterisk and then send it to Cooperstown; or (c) banish the ball.

I give Bonds shit because I do believe he cheated by using illegal performance-enhancing drugs. But I voted for (a), if for no other reason than that he’s been proven guilty of no such thing. The fact is he hit every one of those home runs, and every one of them is in the books.

Mint.com: Refreshing Money Management ★

(a) A web app that, at least at a glance, looks like an arch-rival to the year-old Wesabe; (b) the “winner” of the TechCrunch 40, a depressingly uninspired collection of (in many cases laughably-named) startups competing at a conference organized by Mike Arrington and Jason Calacanis; and (c) a name that was already taken.

Regarding the Idea That Maybe You Can Make a Copy of the Helvetica Font Files on an iPhone and Just Give Them Marker Felt’s File Names ★

Dozens of readers emailed to suggest this; I tried it, it doesn’t work. In short, font names are embedded within the data of the font file, they don’t come from the font’s file name.

It wasn’t a bad idea to try it, though.

NBC to Offer Crappy Windows-Only Downloads of Its Shows ★

Bill Carter, reporting for The New York Times on NBC’s new plans for “free” TV show downloads:

But the files, which would be downloaded overnight to home computers, would contain commercials that viewers would not be able to skip through. And the file would not be transferable to a disk or to another computer.

I get the feeling NBC would like to force us to watch the commercials Clockwork Orange-style.

The files would degrade after the seven-day period and be unwatchable. “Kind of like ‘Mission: Impossible,’ only I don’t think there would be any explosion and smoke,” Mr. Gaspin said.

This sounds way better than iTunes!

The programs will initially be downloadable only to PCs with the Windows operating system, but NBC said it planned to make the service available to Mac computers and iPods later.

I’m sure NBC has some intern downloading a copy of Xcode as we speak.

Gems From the Archive of the New York Times ★

Jason Kottke:

Now that the NY Times has discontinued their Times Select subscription program and made much more of their 150+ years of content available for anyone to read and link to, let’s take a look at some of the more notable items that the non-subscriber has been missing.