Linked List: May 29, 2008

Thursday, 29 May 2008

Uncontacted Amazon Tribe Photographed 

Someone needs to let these people know about the upcoming new iPhone.

Redmine 

Open source bug-tracker written in Rails. It’s the one Panic is going with after yesterday’s “Which web-based bug trackers should we consider?” question from Steven Frank.

‘Darth Vader. Only You Could Be So Bold.’ 

But how bold?

iPong 

Three-player networked Pong for the iPod Touch, purportedly written in “about an hour”. (Via Andy Baio.)

‘Virtually on Parity’ 

Steven Poole dissects the revisions Microsoft made to their “Five Misunderstood Features in Vista” paper. As a company, their copywriting is roughly on par with their user interface design.

Revision3 Servers Brought Down by MediaDefender 

“Anti-piracy” company MediaDefender flooded Revision3’s BitTorrent tracker with over 8,000 SYN packets per second.

Weird Windows in Adobe Fireworks Public Beta 

Check out the oddball windows in the new Fireworks beta from Adobe. Custom close/minimize/zoom buttons and toolbar buttons where the title text should go. Not visible in the screenshot is the way window resizing works: you drag from window edges, just like in Windows.

Mac users are complaining in Adobe’s forum, and Windows users are too. Adobe seems to be moving in a direction with most of their apps where they’re following neither Mac nor Windows conventions, but rather making up their own Adobe UI conventions, which conventions few of their users seem to like.

Update: Looks like this new Adobe-style window title bar might be coming to Photoshop, too. Check out this video where John Nack demos an in-development version of Photoshop, starting around the 18:00 mark.

Scott Stevenson Interviews Aaron Hillegass 

On the occasion of the publication of the third edition of Hillegass’s Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X, which is generally regarded as the best getting-started-with-Cocoa book on the market. Hillegass:

It is difficult to explain how the NIB file (and a few other scary ideas) create leverage. It is that leverage that enables one guy in his basement to compete with a team of engineers at Microsoft or Adobe. It is like I showed a chain saw to a early American colonist, and he said, “Can I cut down the tree without starting the engine? I don’t like the noise. Maybe I can just bang it against the tree?”

Keyboard Maestro 3.1 

Nice update to one of my very favorite utilities.

Taking Things Apart 

John August, asked by a working screenwriter how he can keep improving throughout his career:

My advice for you is to dedicate one day a week to disassembling good movies. Take existing films (and one-hour dramas) and break them down to cards. Think of yourself as an ordinary mechanic given the task of reverse-engineering a spaceship. Figure out what the pieces do, and why they were put together in that way.

I think this true for any craft.