Linked List: December 4, 2007

Tuesday, 4 December 2007

Flickr Adds Photo Editing 

Impressive as hell. Makes it feasible for many people to use Flickr as their primary photo library and editor.

Perl on Rails – Why the BBC Fails at the Internet 

Almost unbelievable story about the BBC’s backwater web infrastructure, which they outsourced to Siemens:

The BBC’s infrastructure is shockingly outdated, having changed only by fractions over the past decade. […] The front-end servers proxy to the application layer, which is a handful of Solaris machines running Perl 5.6 — a language that was superseded with the release of Perl 5.8 over five and a half years ago. Part of the reason for this is the bizarre insistence that any native modules or anything that can call code of any kind must be removed from the standard libraries and replaced with a neutered version of that library by a Siemens engineer.

Yes, that’s right, Siemens forks Perl to remove features that their engineers don’t like.

Scribbles 1.0 

Intriguing new $20 little drawing app from Atebits. Delightfully simple, but very clever UI. The main window has just a handful of controls, and no text labels. The tools at the bottom — brush, color, and layers — are modal, but their modality is inline, and dismissed with a big, friendly Dashboard-widget-style “x” in a black circle. More thoughts on Scribbles’s UI design from developer Loren Brichter here.

Even if you’re not looking for a simple sketching app, it’s worth checking out just to examine the UI. E.g., note the way that the click-to-close “x” appears in the same spot as the corresponding brush/color/layer buttons in the drawing window.

Analyst: Apple to Raise iTunes Movie Prices 

Pali Research analyst Richard Greenfield reports that Apple is set to raise the prices of iTunes movie download to around the same price as DVDs — at $15 wholesale, the retail price would have to be $16 or more. This makes sense if Apple convinced the studios to allow for iTunes movie rentals.

Better Skype Compatibility With Leopard Firewall 

Villu Arak:

Earlier this month, we promised an update to Skype for Mac that would get along beautifully with Leopard’s firewall. Today’s hotfix to Skype 2.7 for Mac beta does just that.

Joyent: December Accelerator Sale 

Steep pre-pay discounts this month at Joyent on their Accelerator hosting accounts: pay for one year, get two; pay for two, get five. (I host DF on an Accelerator account.)