Linked List: May 5, 2008

Monday, 5 May 2008

Apple Denies Rumors of Selling Off Pro Apps ★

Richard Townhill, Apple’s director of marketing for professional video applications: “I can categorically state, on the record, that is not the case.”

Unicode Wins ★

Good news from Google regarding text encodings on the web:

Just last December there was an interesting milestone on the web. For the first time, we found that Unicode was the most frequent encoding found on web pages, overtaking both ASCII and Western European encodings—and by coincidence, within 10 days of one another.

(Via Andy Baio.)

AP Mobile News Network ★

Very nice MobileSafari-optimized news site from the Associated Press. Be sure to check out the Settings page, which lets you configure the stories that appear on the home page. (Thanks to Steve Curtis.)

I Box in Yellow Gox Box Socks ★

I think Scott Stevenson is making this more complicated than it is. Borders around text on a web page can look good (and Theocacao is a fine example), but they’re never necessary, and when done ham-fistedly, create a Russian doll effect — a box within a box within a box. In print, you’ve got two boxes at a minimum: the page, and the text itself; on the web, you’ve got the browser window and the text. That’s enough boxiness for anyone. The key is to remember that a column of text, by itself, forms its own box. See Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style if you need further convincing.

Yahoo Stock Plunges After Microsoft Backs Off ★

At this writing it’s trading at about $24 a share, a 20 percent drop from Friday. But that’s not bad, given that their stock was at $19 prior to the Microsoft takeover bid.