By John Gruber
WorkOS launches auth.md — an open protocol for agent registration.
Linked List: January 31, 2008
Thursday, 31 January 2008
- Windows Vista Help: Opening the Windows Vista box ★
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Even the packaging suffers from poor usability. Jiminy. (Via Rands.)
- Myths About Helvetica and Mac OS X 10.5 ★
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Ralf Herrmann straightens out some of the confusion that has resulted for design professionals regarding Helvetica and Mac OS X 10.5. In previous versions of Mac OS X, you could disable or delete the system’s default Helvetica, and many design pros did so to use a PostScript version instead. In Leopard, though, Helvetica is a system font, meaning it isn’t easily disabled or removed and must be present for the system to function properly. I agree with Herrmann that the system’s default Helvetica is beautiful and suited to any purpose, even high-end printing. (Thanks to Joe Clark.)
- Prologue ★
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Speaking of Twitter, Prologue looks interesting: it’s a WordPress theme that serves as a standalone Twitter-like server for a small team. This sort of idea — more reliable and private — sounds perfect for distributed teams.
- Twitter/Joyent Divorce ★
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Let’s see if Twitter’s reliability changes.
- Garmin’s Nüvifone Site ★
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Upon further examination, I’m getting a much stronger vaporware vibe from this. For something due by September, they’re awfully short on details. Their screenshot gallery is entirely comprised of mockups, not actual screenshots or photos from an actual prototype. (Unless the Nüviphone is going to pack a 1400 × 795 display, which is pretty unlikely.) When Apple pre-announced the iPhone six months in advance, they had real screenshots and actual prototype hardware. No word at all on how you type, what OS the device is using, Mac/PC connectivity or synching, or what rendering engine the web browser users. Whole things smells less-than-half-baked. Update: Engadget has “hands-on” photos, but none with the prototype turned, you know, on.
Garmin also seems to be implicitly encouraging direct comparison to the iPhone and Apple: the hardware is obviously iPhone-esque; the screenshot mockups are entirely set in Myriad (the iPhone uses Helvetica, of course, but Myriad is Apple’s branding font); and even the name, “Nüvifone”, contains the substring “ifone”.
- Gartner Predicts Apple Will Double U.S., Europe PC Share by 2011 ★
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Even if you don’t believe it, it’s interesting in that even a few years ago, you’d never have seen a prediction like this from Gartner. And if they’re right, the math is just spectacular for Apple: it’s not like Apple is expanding into the low-end budget computer market, so if they do double their share, it’ll take place entirely in the middle-to-high end of the market.
Update: Nice reminder from The Macalope regarding Gartner’s Apple-savviness (where by “savviness”, I mean “jackassyness”): a little over a year ago two of their analysts called on Apple to entirely quit the hardware business and license Mac OS X to Dell.
- DiskWarrior 4.1 ★
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The best disk utility for the Mac, period — now fully compatible with Leopard. If you don’t have DiskWarrior, you should.
- EDGE Network Down in Midwest U.S. ★
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Works fine here in Philadelphia.
- SimpleBits Joins The Deck ★
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The latest member of The Deck advertising network: Dan Cederholm’s SimpleBits. Coincides with another swell redesign.
- Amazon to Buy Audible for $300 Million ★
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Seems like both a good match and a good deal for Amazon.
- MarsEdit 2.1 ★
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New release of Red Sweater’s best-of-breed desktop weblog editor. Adds top-notch support for tagging, improved live preview, local search for drafts and entries, and much-improved support for saving drafts on the server. The last one (drafts on server) includes a very clever workaround for Movable Type’s utter inability to handle this properly.
- Garmin Announces Nüvifone ★
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First new phone I’ve seen since the iPhone that looks interesting. The UI looks clean, and the hardware looks nice, too. (Why do so many companies insist upon putting ad-like decals all over the front of their cases?) As phones gain GPS features, it makes sense for Garmin to start making phones — the days of dedicated handheld GPS units seem numbered. Let’s wait and see what the price is, and how the UI really works, though.
Jason Fried makes similar comments, and notes:
Aside from Apple, Garmin is the only company I’ve seen that understand UI design for small devices. The Nuvi is dead simple to use. If they can translate their GPS UI chops into a phone UI, they may be on to something big.
I have a several-year-old Garmin handheld GPS, and I agree: the UI is pretty good.
- Thick Review for Thin Notebook ★
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Wonderfully exhaustive review and analysis of the MacBook Air by Jason Snell at Macworld:
There is no denying that the MacBook Air’s thinness makes it visually striking. But I’m not convinced of the utility of that thinness. Other than allowing Apple to declare the Air the current winner of the race to design the thinnest laptop, it seems that the Air has slimmed down in the least important dimension.