Linked List: June 2, 2008

Monday, 2 June 2008

Scaring People With Flash’s ‘fullScreen’ 

Devilishly clever; this would fool most people. And as Simon Willison points out, “This opens up opportunities for cunning phishing attacks that simulate the chrome of the entire operating system.”

The Ache 

Trish Deitch, who worked for Sydney Pollack as a story editor:

Finding the spine of a story like “Out of Africa” was important to Sydney for many reasons, the most important of which was that it led to what he called “the ache.” The ache is self-explanatory if you’ve seen Sydney’s films. It is the ache of having one chance at deep love in a lifetime of shallow loves, and losing it too early. It is the ache of perfect, private union destroyed by terrible, worldly circumstance. For Sydney, the ache was about the way that the things we hold most dear always elude us.

(Via Michael Sippey.)

Gigabyte M704 

New “ultra-mobile PC” hardware. I love the way some marketing genius noticed the gap in the keyboard and decided to fill it all in with ugly decals.

Macworld: Writing Tools We Use 

Interesting video from Macworld editorial director Jason Snell on the various writing tools in use at Macworld, including Google Docs and SubEthaEdit for live collaboration.

Cultured Code Hints at iPhone Version of Things 

Dig those prototypes — a big part of iPhone app design is the physical size of the screen and the elements on it. But it’s worth noting that they still haven’t gotten the Mac version of Things to 1.0 yet.

Leopard Security Configuration (PDF) 

240-page PDF book from Apple, filled with security configuration information for Leopard. (Via Ernest Prabhakar.)

Bo Diddley With Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers 

Live at The Fillmore in San Francisco a few years ago.

Bo Diddley Dies at 79 

CNN:

Guitarist George Thorogood, a Diddley disciple, put it more bluntly.

“[Chuck Berry’s] ‘Maybellene’ is a country song sped up,” Thorogood told Rolling Stone in 2005. “‘Johnny B. Goode’ is blues sped up. But you listen to ‘Bo Diddley,’ and you say, ‘What in the Jesus is that?’”

Keyboard Shortcut Consistency 

John Nack on the dilemma faced by Adobe regarding shortcuts like Command-H in Photoshop: Photoshop has been using Command-H for “Hide Selection” since the early ’90s, but starting with Mac OS X 10.0, Apple established the same shortcut as the system-wide standard for hiding the current application. Stick with tradition and the app feels broken to new users (who expect Command-H to mean hide); switch and you break the habits of loyal long-time users.

Bare Bones solved this problem perfectly with BBEdit, which traditionally used Command-H for the Search → Find Selected Text command. What they did is intercept Command-H the first time you used it on Mac OS X, and presented a dialog box that asked which of the two commands you wanted to use that shortcut for. A one-time interruption, everyone is happy.

Don’t Touch 

Cognitive Daily conducted a 900-person survey asking people whether they allow friends to examine and play with their new gadget purchases, and if so, for how long. The results show a significant difference between Windows users (who are more likely to allow their new stuff to be played with) and Mac and Linux users (who are more likely to be stingy with their gadgets).

They miss the obvious explanation for the discrepancy: Mac and Linux users are a self-selecting group of people who tend to care about their computers. There are many Windows users who care about their computers, too (and I suspect those Windows users gave answers to the survey that were similar to those from Mac and Linux users), but most people who don’t care deeply about their computers use Windows.

Twitter Team Answers Architecture Questions 

Jack Dorsey and Biz Stone from Twitter show ten times more grace than I would in answering several “Do you still beat your wife?”-style questions from Mike Arrington.