Linked List: April 2, 2008

Wednesday, 2 April 2008

RIM More Than Doubles Year-Over-Year Quarterly Profit ★

With financial results like these, you can see why Apple is making a strong play for the enterprise smart phone market. But so far, the iPhone and BlackBerry are both growing:

An analyst with Canaccord Adams, Peter Misek, called it a “monster quarter” and said RIM had benefited from Apple’s introduction of the iPhone, which brought attention to the smart phone market.

“People are staring to realize, ‘Why should I buy a Razr when I can buy a BlackBerry or an iPhone?’ I think the iPhone was the single biggest blessing RIM ever had,” Mr. Misek said.

Change We Can Believe In ★

Beautiful new coinage in the U.K.; horrible new five-dollar bill here in the U.S.

Not for Everyone ★

The Macalope on a remarkably sense-free ComputerWorld story about a “Mac fan” who switched back to Windows. Bonus points for the neologism “jacktastic”.

Smaller Is Better ★

Good Firefox 3 tip from Colin Barrett.

Python-by-Example ★

“This guide aims to show examples of use of all Python Library Reference functions, methods and classes.” (Via Simon Willison.)

Fortune: ‘Apple’s New Campus Still a Long Way Off’ ★

I’d sort of forgotten about this, but it’s been two years since Jobs announced the project at a Cupertino City Council meeting, and there haven’t been signs of progress since.

Update: Several readers vaguely familiar with the greater Cupertino area inform me that while new construction has yet to begin, several hundred Apple employees already work in the existing buildings on the land Apple purchased.

John Nack Announces Lightroom 2.0 Public Beta ★

Oh my, this sounds sweet:

Lightroom 2 adds a Retouch tool right within the Develop module. That means you can paint regions of the image to dodge, burn, saturate/desaturate, adjust contrast, and more. Edits are stored as metadata, just as all other LR adjustments are stored, and are applied directly to your raw images.

Also includes 64-bit support on Leopard and Vista. (Aperture 2.1 doesn’t do 64-bit.)

Update: More info in this announcement on the Lightroom Journal site, and don’t miss the numerous links at the bottom of Nack’s post.