By John Gruber
WorkOS launches auth.md — an open protocol for agent registration.
Linked List: February 29, 2008
Friday, 29 February 2008
- Secrets 1.0b13 ★
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Open source System Prefs pane by Quicksilver author “Alcor” that gives you a GUI for tweaking secret preferences, both for software that ships with Mac OS X and for third-party apps, with the information about the secret prefs coming from a publicly accessible database. Even if you don’t install the prefs panel, the database is a terrific resource. (Via Chris Messina.)
- Developing Rails Applications on Mac OS X Leopard ★
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First in a three-part ADC series on Rails. (Via Ernest Prabhakar.)
- Blood, Sweat, and Fear: Great Design Hurts ★
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Remember my criticism last year regarding SXSW’s panel-heavy session line-ups? This year I’m putting my mouth where my mouth is, and delivering a co-presention with Michael Lopp. We’re going to pack a day’s worth of advice and strong opinions into a one-hour session. 3:30 Saturday March 8, room B.
- 3 a.m. ★
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Coudal Partners:
Hillary asked a serious question in her latest campaign spot. We thought it deserved an equally serious response.
Best campaign commercial I’ve ever seen.
- Cydia: Bringing Debian APT to the iPhone ★
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Incredible Mobile OS X project from Jay Freeman: a port of Debian’s APT with a complete, working BSD and GNU Unix userspace tool set. And a brand new GUI app to manage it, Cydia. And, unlike Installer, the whole thing is open source. Gerd Kamp points out that Freeman also ported PyObjC to Mobile OS X, allowing native iPhone apps to be written in Python. My vaguely informed hunch is that the official SDK from Apple won’t even support that.
- Gizmodo’s First Look at Time Capsule ★
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Wilson Rothman:
We’ve been fiddling with Time Capsule since it arrived this AM, and so far it works as billed, clean and easy.
- John Moltz’s TED Coverage ★
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Makes me wish I was fake-there, too.
- Will New Blu-ray Drives Suck Your Laptop Battery Dry? ★
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I’m not sure what’s more appalling; the purported battery drain Blu-ray drives have on laptops, or the photo of the Blu-ray mascot accompanying the article. And what’s with this quip:
“If you bought an iPhone and you couldn’t watch a two-hour movie, which you barely can now, that would be a huge problem,” [Yankee Group analyst Josh] Martin continued.
A fully-charged iPhone gets way more than two hours of video playback. Walt Mossberg got “just under Apple’s claim of seven hours, enough to watch four average-length movies.”
- Big Medium ★
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My thanks to Global Moxie for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. The cleverly-named Big Medium is a web site content management system built for designers. It’s designed to be easy to install, configure, and customize with no additional programming. Features includes both WYSIWYG and Markdown support for content editing, scheduled publication, comments, and more.
Check out the gallery of sites based on Big Medium to see what it’s capable of. Through March 31, save $35 with coupon code: “DARINGFIREBALL”.
- The Talk Show, Episode 16 ★
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New episode of the only podcast featuring Dan Benjamin and yours truly; topics include Apple’s latest MacBooks, Lost (sans spoilers), and the genius of Caddyshack.
- M.B. Darden on Apple’s Retail Stores ★
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It’s pieces like this one — written by a non-nerd, brand-new Apple customer — that make me think the growth in Mac sales over the past two years is just the beginning of an enormous trend.
- The New Fiver ★
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Nice interactive feature from Condé Nast Portfolio on the new U.S. five-dollar bill, including previous designs back to 1861.
- Comcast Paid People Off the Street to Attend FCC Hearing ★
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Bob Fernandez, reporting for The Philadelphia Inquirer:
Comcast Corp. admitted yesterday that it paid people to attend a government hearing. Company critics say the freelance attendees were there to crowd them out; Comcast says they were merely saving seats for employees.
Rat bastards.
- Leap Day ★
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Happy birthday to everyone out there with — let’s face it — the worst birthday possible.
- Trism ★
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Demo video and interview with the author of Trism, a very cool looking puzzle game for Mobile OS X that makes great use of the accelerometer — you tilt the hardware to control which direction the tiles will fall. (Via Andy Baio.)