Linked List: April 9, 2008

Wednesday, 9 April 2008

Pierre Igot on Safari Tab Dragging 

Would have saved me some typing if I’d seen this before.

DF RSS Feed Sponsorship 

Only two weeks left through June.

Renderance 

Here’s a surprising advantage for Firefox 3 over Safari 3: typographic niceties like kerning and specifying font weights in CSS.

Measuring the Color of Light 

James Duncan Davidson explains that whole “color temperature” thing.

Harper’s: ‘Worst. President. Ever.’ 

Results of a George Mason University survey of historians:

96 percent of the respondents place the Bush presidency in the bottom tier of American presidencies. And was his presidency (it’s a bit wishful to speak of his presidency in the past tense — after all there are several more months left to go) a success or failure? On that score the numbers are still more resounding: 98 percent label it a “failure.”

(Via Kottke.)

Waxy.org Redesigns 

Nice work from my friend Andy Baio — a ground-up redesign that looks and feels just right.

Notes on Note-Keeping Software 

Khoi Vinh is digging Yojimbo. Smart man.

TechCrunch on L’Affaire HuddleChat 

Mike Arrington claims not to see the problem with HuddleChat, and a slew of commenters at TechCrunch are with him, more or less arguing that it’s ridiculous to claim that 37signals somehow owns the concept of web-based group chat. Which is stupid, because no one made that argument. (Does Artie MacStrawman have a web-app cousin?)

Consider, say, Movable Type and WordPress. WordPress came along with a free (beer and freedom) package that does the same basic thing as Movable Type and took a big chunk of the market away. But I’ve never seen anyone call WordPress a rip-off or clone of Movable Type. Why? Because it isn’t. It’s an original implementation of the same basic idea. A new implementation of the same concept is competition; a clone of an existing implementation is a rip-off.

Also, Arrington writes:

And why, since HuddleChat is not an official Google product, was it Google that made the decision to pull it down and not the developers who created it? Google was very careful to say that they were not affiliated with HuddleChat while it was up — that, apparently, wasn’t the case.

Arrington, who’s an attorney, ought to know better. Under California law, Google owns the rights to any product created by Google employees. It may well be that HuddleChat went live without approval from anyone high up on the org chart, but it was most definitely a Google-owned product.

Google Takes HuddleChat Down 

Pete Koomen, a Google product manager for the Google App Engine team, in a comment at ReadWriteWeb on a post about the HuddleChat/Campfire controversy:

A couple of our colleagues here built HuddleChat in their spare time because they wanted to share work within their team more easily and thought persistent web chat would do the trick. We’ve heard some complaints from the developer community, though, so rather than divert attention from Google App Engine itself, we thought it better to just take HuddleChat down.

Good for them. It really was beneath them, and it was clearly distracting from the otherwise effusive coverage surrounding Google App Engine.