Linked List: April 3, 2008

Thursday, 3 April 2008

When I commented on the ugly new U.S. five dollar bill the other day, several readers wrote in to argue that the bill should not be criticized, because some of the changes which have made it uglier were made for the benefit of people with low vision. That’s bullshit. Accessibility is an important and worthy goal, but it is not at odds with good design. We should settle for nothing less than beautiful and accessible currency. This isn’t it.

Nicholas Carr on Dell Three Years Ago ★

Prescient essay by Nicholas Carr three years ago, predicting the problems that have plagued Dell since:

[Then-CEO Kevin] Rollins dismissed Apple’s mega-selling iPod as a “fad,” calling it a “one-product wonder,” and he pooh-poohed the eye-catching Mac mini as inconsequential. Rollins’s comments are more than uncharacteristic. They’re troubling — and not just for their snippiness. They raise real questions about how well Dell understands the home market.

Via Jim Kerstetter.

Regarding 64-Bit Windows Market Share ★

Regarding my question about how many Windows users are using the 64-bit version of the OS (which requires entirely different drivers and apps), John Nack has some data from Adobe:

By the way, in the spirit of sharing info where public, I’ll note that we surveyed 1,600 Photoshop customers last summer and found that roughly 4% were using a 64-bit version of Windows.

As he points out, though, there’s a chicken-and-egg problem — surely that number will go up after Adobe ships the 64-bit version of Photoshop, because it’ll be a compelling reason to switch to the 64-bit version of Windows.

Why I Think Apple Is Making a Nice Profit From the iTunes Store ★

Me, back in September (after the launch of the Amazon MP3 Store), on why I think Apple is making more money from the iTunes Store than many people think:

And, as if that weren’t enough, I suspect Apple makes a nice chunk of change on the other $.70 of each song sold. Assuming Apple issues payments to the record labels only periodically — weekly, monthly, quarterly — Apple gets to hold onto that money in the interim, during which time they earn interest on it. It doesn’t require a high interest rate to make a lot of money on two billion dollars flowing through your hands.

In short, while Apple doesn’t earn much at all on the sale of a single song, they make up for it in volume.

iPhone Price Drop in Germany ★

T-Mobile, the German iPhone carrier, has dropped the price on new 8 GB models to as low as €99 (about US$155, including taxes). Interesting, especially when combined with the reports that iPhones are in short supply at many Apple Stores. (Thanks to DF reader Sebastian Niesen.)

Apple: iTunes Store Top Music Retailer in the U.S. ★

So does anyone still think the iTunes Store is just a loss leader for selling iPods?

Casio Exilim EX-F1 ★

David Pogue reviews the Casio Exilim EX-F1, a $1,000 camera that can shoot up to 60 still images per second, and up to 1,200 frames per second of video. Sounds like it’s not that great a camera overall, though.

On First Installing Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 6 ★

Jens Alfke on the experience of installing Photoshop Elements 6 on the Mac:

But not quite the installer; more like the warm-up act. It got me in the installin’ mood by asking me to give it root privileges, then launched some other process with an identical Dock icon, which put up a progress bar. An installer so slow, it has to put up a progress bar while it launches! Finally after about 15 seconds, both icons vanished from the Dock, and I started to get nervous. Had the installer crashed? No, after a few more seconds to build tension, the real installer came up.

Every other product team at Adobe needs to study and copy the Lightroom installer. It’s the only Adobe product with a nice installation experience I’ve seen since the ’90s.

Apple Passes Wal-Mart, Now Number-One Music Retailer in U.S. ★

Sales numbers for January: Apple 19%, Wal-Mart 15%, Best Buy 13%, Amazon 6%.

On Twitter ★

Tim Bray:

I think that with Twitter, something important is happening. But I’m having trouble figuring out what.

John Siracusa: ‘Rhapsody and Blues’ ★

John Siracusa on Adobe’s “Photoshop CS4 will be 64-bit only for Windows” news:

Here are the two poles of this world of hurt:

Blame Apple: If Apple had not discontinued the 64-bit port of Carbon, Adobe could have shipped Photoshop CS4 as a 64-bit Mac OS X application as planned. At WWDC 2006, there were many sessions about developing 64-bit Carbon applications. At WWDC 2007, 64-bit Carbon was canceled. Adobe found this out the same time everyone else did, at WWDC. By canceling 64-bit Carbon so suddenly, Apple screwed Adobe.

Blame Adobe: The death of Carbon was inevitable. Adobe should have seen it coming and planned accordingly. It’s been clear for years that Cocoa offers many advantages to Mac application developers. Adobe should have started its Cocoa port of Photoshop years ago. By willfully ignoring Cocoa for so long, Adobe screwed Apple.

Adobe’s 64-Bit Roadmap ★

Adobe’s John Nack:

The Lightroom news naturally raises the question: What’s Adobe doing with Photoshop? In the interest of giving customers guidance as early as possible, we have some news to share on this point: in addition to offering 32-bit-native versions for Mac OS X and 32-bit Windows, just as we do today, we plan to ship the next version of Photoshop as 64-bit-native for Windows 64-bit OSes only. […] (Our goal is to ship a 64-bit Mac version with Photoshop CS5, but we’ll be better able to assess that goal as we get farther along in the development process.)

What happened? In short, Apple cancelled 64-bit Carbon:

As we wrapped up Photoshop CS3, our plan was to ship 64-bit versions of the next version of Photoshop for both Mac and Windows. On the Mac Photoshop (like the rest of the Creative Suite, not to mention applications like Apple’s Final Cut Pro and iTunes) relies on Apple’s Carbon technology. Apple’s OS team was busy enabling a 64-bit version of Carbon, a prerequisite for letting Carbon-based apps run 64-bit-native.

At the WWDC show last June, however, Adobe and other developers learned that Apple had decided to stop their Carbon 64 efforts. This means that 64-bit Mac apps need to be written to use Cocoa (as Lightroom is) instead of Carbon. This means that we’ll need to rewrite large parts of Photoshop and its plug-ins (potentially affecting over a million lines of code) to move it from Carbon to Cocoa.

It’s a great post; Nack does a good job dispelling any potential notion that this is a sign that Adobe’s commitment to the Mac is in any way flagging.