Linked List: March 25, 2008

Tuesday, 25 March 2008

Apple Settles ‘Millions of Colors’ Lawsuit ★

Remember that class action lawsuit filed a year ago regarding 6-bit MacBook displays that Apple billed as being capable of displaying “millions of colors”? It’s been quietly settled.

Apologist, Eh? ★

Wired’s Scott Gilbertson:

As Apple apologist John Gruber points out, the real issue is the decision to make installing Safari the default behavior. In other words, the user has to opt out, which isn’t clear when Apple’s Software Update runs. Gruber argues, and I would agree, that part of the problem is simply design.

Asaph ★

Interesting new “microblog” app by Dominic Szablewski. Sort of like an even simpler version of Tumblr that you run on your own server (PHP 5 and MySQL). Check out the demo video to see the bookmarklets in action.

Dept. of Currency: Penny Dreadful ★

David Owen in The New Yorker on the U.S. penny, which is worth less than it costs to produce:

A modern penny simply isn’t worth enough to worry about. In 1940, an average one-pound loaf of bread sold for eight cents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. That means that a penny in those days bought enough bread to make a good-sized sandwich. These days, a penny doesn’t buy much more than a bit of crust. Accurately comparing monetary values (and bread loaves) across decades is impossible, but by almost any economic measure a 1940 penny had more purchasing power than a modern quarter does.

I’ve been throwing pennies away for years.

Muxtape ★

Super-simple music sharing site lets you create virtual mix tapes. Three-field sign-up and you’re done.

Microsoft Succeeds in Making Vista Even Worse ★

Kevin Maney:

Windows Vista is already perhaps the most frustrating product Microsoft has yet heaved onto the computing public. But now its Service Pack 1 update, which is supposed to FIX holes and squeaks in the Vista code, seems to be making things worse.

The consensus seems to be that with SP1 Vista has gone from bad to worse.

The Age of the Anti-Cassandra ★

Paul Krugman:

Cassandra had the gift of prophecy — she saw, correctly, what was coming — but was under a curse: nobody would believe her.

Today, our public discourse is dominated by people who have been wrong about everything — but are still, mysteriously, treated as men of wisdom, whose judgments should be believed. Those who were actually right about the major issues of the day can’t get a word in edgewise.

Steve Jobs on Paul Rand ★

Video from a 1993 interview with Steve Jobs about Paul Rand. Regarding working with Rand on the logo for NeXT:

I asked him if he’d come up with a few options. And he said “No, I will solve your problem for you. And you will pay me. And you don’t have to use the solution; if you want options, go talk to other people.”

And, asked to describe Rand’s work:

His work, for me, is very emotional, and yet when you study it, it’s very intellectual. If you scratch the surface on any of his work you find out the depth of the intellectual problem solving that has taken place, and yet when you first see it, it’s wonderfully emotional.

(Via Cameron Hunt.)

Cabel Sasser: In Japan, URLs Are Totally Out ★

Cabel Sasser reports that in Japan, rather than URLs, advertisers are promoting search terms. Like, say, instead of “daringfireball.net”, an ad would feature “Daring Fireball” in a text field with a “Search” button next to it.

I tend to do this on The Talk Show — rather than pronounce or spell out a URL, I’ll just say what to Google for. More memorable, less mistake-prone, and even if the target isn’t the first result, it’s almost certainly near the top.

Hidden Preference to Enable GDI Text Rendering for Safari on Windows ★

Dave Hyatt:

The version of WebKit that ships with Safari 3.1 on Windows uses CoreGraphics antialiasing for text. The latest WebKit in nightly builds has made good progress on a GDI text rendering mode (i.e., the text rendering matches your OS look/settings).

Ken Fisher Reviews Safari 3.1 on Windows ★

Very positive review; his biggest gripe is Safari’s use of Mac OS X’s CoreGraphics sub-pixel anti-aliasing rather than Windows’s native ClearType.

RegexKitLite ★

Interesting. RegexKit is an open source Cocoa framework for PCRE (my favorite regex engine). The new RegexKitLite is a framework for the ICU regex engine, which is already included in Mac OS X. ICU’s regex syntax is not as expressive as PCRE’s, but it’s pretty good overall. And the RegexKitLite API is far simpler, it offers better Unicode support than RegexKit/PCRE, and because the engine is built into Mac OS X, it’s smaller. (Via Michael Tsai.)

Firefox 3 Background Windows Look Focused ★

Luke Iannini points to one of the remaining tell-tale signs that Firefox 3 only fakes its Mac-style interface theme: all of its windows have the dark “focused” look of an active frontmost window.

Lying for Jesus? ★

Richard Dawkins, on the now-infamous premiere of Expelled:

Now, to the film itself. What a shoddy, second-rate piece of work. A favourite joke among the film-making community is the ‘Lord Privy Seal’. Amateurs and novices in the making of documentaries can’t resist illustrating every significant word in the commentary by cutting to a picture of it. The Lord Privy Seal is an antiquated title in Britain’s heraldic tradition. The joke imagines a low-grade film director who illustrates it by cutting to a picture of a Lord, then a privy, and then a seal. Mathis’ film is positively barking with Lord Privy Seals.

The Inevitability of the iPhone ★

Matt Asay:

I walked into my local AT&T Wireless store on Saturday fully expecting and prepared to get a Blackberry 8820. My Blackberry 8800 died while I was in London last week. […] Unfortunately for Research in Motion, maker of the Blackberry, the in-store price for the 8820 was the same as the iPhone. I deliberated for all of three seconds and walked out with the iPhone.

O’Reilly Releases Book on Jailbroken iPhone Development ★

iPhone Open Application Development is a new book by Jonathan A. Zdziarski, where by “open” they mean “unofficial” — the book doesn’t cover the just-released iPhone SDK from Apple, but rather the unofficial ADK for “jailbroken” iPhones. Strikes me as a weird thing to publish a book about, but perhaps I’m vastly underestimating the long-term demand for jailbroken iPhone software. (Via Chris Foresman.)