Linked List: April 25, 2008

Friday, 25 April 2008

Major upgrade for SintraWorks’s PDF editing utility. New stuff includes AppleScript support, font info, improved annotation tools, and the ability to create and edit PDF outlines. PDFClerk is a terrific Mac-style alternative to Acrobat. €35 (roughly US$56) for a new license, but SintraWorks sent over a coupon code for DF readers: use “Daring” and save 25 percent through the end of the weekend.

Simon Brocklehurst Asks: ‘Did Apple Make a Mistake Choosing Objective-C for iPhone SDK?’ ★

Short answer: No.

Longer answer: (a) Most developers suck. Apple doesn’t care if they “can’t” or “won’t” write iPhone apps because they can’t or won’t learn Objective-C, because any developer who would say that is unlikely to write a worthwhile iPhone app. Picking up a new programming language is not hard. Picking up a language like Objective-C, which is only slightly expanded from regular old C, is even easier. I have never once met a good programmer who wasn’t willing and able to learn new languages. (b) Apple didn’t choose Objective-C for the iPhone arbitrarily; it’s inextricably tied to Cocoa Touch, and Cocoa is the entire foundation of the iPhone UI. (c) Apple doesn’t want existing “mobile” apps written in other languages recompiled for the iPhone any more than they wanted command-line DOS apps recompiled for the original Mac.

‘Editor Note’, Eh? ★

I agree with TUAW’s Michael Rose on this one: MacUpdate putting an “editor note” pimping their Parallels bundle on their entry for VMware crosses whatever line they’ve ostensibly drawn between their roles as an editorial source (app listings) and software publisher. Crummy move.

Why We Are the Biggest Obstacles to Our Own Growth ★

Nice little essay by Reginald Braithwaite:

How do I know when to hold fast and when to try something new? I don’t. Sometimes when a bunch of people are doing something, and my gut tells me they’re mistaken, I override my gut and try it, I go along with what everybody else is doing.

YouTube: Stanley Kubrick Interview ★

Excerpts from a 1966 interview with Kubrick by Jeremy Bernstein. The interview is audio-only (the complete whole of which is available on the CD that comes with Taschen’s fantastic but no-longer-in-stock The Stanley Kubrick Archives), but the excerpts are set to still photos of and by Kubrick. (Via — who else? — Jim Coudal.)

‘Sort of’, Eh? ★

Digital Arts:

“We’ve expressed our intent to do this and our desire, really, to work with Apple to build a JVM (Java Virtual Machine) for the iPhone and we’re sort of moving forward with that,” said Eric Klein, Sun vice president of Java marketing, this week.

(Via MacDailyNews.)

‘Mad Men’ Season One DVD Packaging ★

Perfect design.

The Crazy Baseball Fan Rule ★

Dave Winer:

Every so often a beer-drunk fan will run on the field during a baseball game causing a delay while the cops chase him down. Back in the days of streaking sometimes these fans would run out on the field naked.

You’ll never see one of these scenes on TV because there’s a rule that the broadcasters are not allowed to follow the drunk baseball fan onto the field. If they were to broadcast the drunk fan, the theory goes, that would just encourage more people to do it, meaning more delayed games, annoyed players, offended fans and busted streakers.

MacUpdate Parallels Bundle ★

My thanks to MacUpdate for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote their “Parallels Bundle” — 10 Mac apps with a retail value of $475, on sale together for $65. You get: Parallels Desktop, BannerZest, Sound Studio, Leap, DVDRemaster Pro, MenuCalendarClock, Hazel, StoryMill, Art Text, and Typinator.

I paid $80 just for Sound Studio alone a few weeks ago, so clearly it’s a damn good deal. And, to be clear, all licenses are full licenses with normal upgrade paths. The promotion runs through Tuesday, so, as they say on TV, act now.

Steve Yegge Goes Deep on Focus-Follows-Mouse and Mac OS X ★

Steve Yegge, frustrated by Mac OS X’s lack of support for Unix-style focus-follows-mouse, tries to implement it himself, and explains in great detail why he couldn’t quite get it to work. It’s a great read. (You can tell Yegge’s a recent switcher, though, by the way he spells “OS X” as “OS/X”, which, as John Siracusa quips, is like toilet paper stuck to a shoe.)