Linked List: July 21, 2008

Monday, 21 July 2008

Apple Shares Fall in After Hours Trading ★

Rex Crum, reporting for MarketWatch:

However, Apple’s shares fell 9% in after-hours trading as the company gave one of its typically conservative fourth-quarter earnings forecasts that fell short of Wall Street analysts’ expectations. A similar event took place following the company’s prior quarterly report in April, when a conservative forecast sent the stock tumbling despite strong results for the period.

Now’s a good time to re-read the piece I linked to over the weekend from Andy Zaky on Wall Street’s misguided obsession with Apple’s conservative guidance numbers.

TechCrunch Is Building a Web Tablet ★

They don’t know what the components will cost and they’re going to use volunteer labor to write the software, but they’re hoping it costs $200 or so and to have a prototype ready soon. Good luck with that.

Macworld Live Coverage of Apple’s Q3 2008 Conference Call ★

Here’s the answer to a question about Steve Jobs’s health:

“Steve loves Apple, he serves as CEO at pleasure of Apple’s board and has no plans to leave. Steve’s health is a private matter.”

Good answer.

Apple Reports Record Third Quarter Results ★

Apple:

The Company posted revenue of $7.46 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.07 billion, or $1.19 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $5.41 billion and net quarterly profit of $818 million, or $.92 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. Gross margin was 34.8 percent, down from 36.9 percent in the year-ago quarter. International sales accounted for 42 percent of the quarter’s revenue.

Apple shipped 2,496,000 Macintosh computers during the quarter, representing 41 percent unit growth and 43 percent revenue growth over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 11,011,000 iPods during the quarter, representing 12 percent unit growth and seven percent revenue growth over the year-ago quarter. Quarterly iPhone units sold were 717,000 compared to 270,000 in the year-ago-quarter.

41 percent year-over-year growth in Mac sales. Astounding. Where does this growth end?

iPod sales are up, too, which is interesting, given the iPhone. (These iPhone numbers are irrelevant, in that this year’s numbers cover the quarter leading up to the iPhone 3G, for much of which time iPhones weren’t even available for sale. And last year’s numbers for Q3 only covered the first two days the iPhone was available for sale.)

The History of AppleScript (PDF) ★

Fascinating 37-page paper on the history of AppleScript, written in 2006 by one of AppleScript’s original creators, William R. Cook. If you’ve ever wondered why AppleScript is the way it is, this is the best explanation I’ve ever seen.

News to me is that Apple originally developed an alternative “Professional” dialect, wherein this bit of English AppleScript:

the first character of every word whose style is bold

could be written like this in the Professional dialect:

{ words | style == bold }.character[1]

What a shame they abandoned that.

Peter Merholz Interviews Michael B. Johnson of Pixar ★

Michael B. Johnson, on Pixar’s practice of creating a complete prototype of every film before starting work on the actual movie:

We’d much rather fail with a bunch of sketches that we did (relatively) quickly and cheaply, than once we’ve modeled, rigged, shaded, animated, and lit the film. “Fail fast,” that’s the mantra. With a team of 10-20 people (director, story artists, editorial staff, production designer and artists, and skeleton production management) you can make, remake, and remake again a movie that once it hits 3D will take an order of magnitude more people to execute. The complexity of the task does not ramp up linearly.

Johnson leads one of Pixar’s internal software tools team — his annual lunchtime talks at WWDC fill to standing-room only.

End of the Line for ‘Ebert and Roeper’ TV Show ★

The show hasn’t been the same since Gene Siskel died — he and Ebert were simply perfect together. But the basic format was brilliant for a TV show for film criticism. (Via Andy Ihnatko.)

Sony’s Amazing Crapware-Free PC ★

Ed Bott:

Sony is finally taking on its crapware problem. For the past two months, I’ve been using an astonishingly light and agile Sony VAIO notebook and loving every minute of it. The best part of all was that this machine was absolutely, completely, unequivocally crapware-free, which meant I was able to be productive within a few minutes of unboxing.

Good for Sony, but Bott’s enthusiasm is like being amazed after buying a sandwich that wasn’t spit in.

Icahn Drops Proxy Fight, Yahoo Puts Him on Board ★

Yahoo to Carl Icahn: “You’re an idiot, your ideas for what we should do are wrong, welcome to our board.”

iPhone Native Apps — The Great Leap Backwards? ★

John Allsop arguing that most of the native iPhone apps he’s looked at would be better off as web apps. He has a good point but overstates his case.

He mentions Cocktails as an example that could have been an iPhone web app a year ago with “a little bit of CSS”, and links to PocketBar, an iPhone web app that serves the same purpose. But Cocktails is far slicker and far faster than PocketBar. That may not be worth $10 to most people, but it’s worth $10 to me.

(Via Ajaxian.)

Tim Bray on Mobile Software Development ★

Tim Bray, gloomy on the prospects of mobile software development:

But there’s a little problem and a big problem. The little problem is that I don’t wanna learn Objective-C and I don’t wanna learn a whole new UI framework. I acknowledge that lots of smart people think Objective-C and Cocoa are both wonderful, and quite likely they’re right. I don’t care. I’m lazy; I know enough languages and enough frameworks. You’re free to disapprove, but there are a whole lot of people like me out there.

The big problem is this: I don’t wanna be a sharecropper on Massa Steve’s plantation. I don’t want to write code for a platform where there’s someone else who gets to decide whether I get to play and what I’m allowed to sell, and who can flip my you’re-out-of-business-switch any time it furthers their business goals.

These are both reasonable objections to writing native iPhone software. But there is never going to be a phone with a native API framework that isn’t new. Sure, most do and perhaps will continue to use Java as the language, but I’d say that learning Cocoa Touch (the framework) is a far bigger obstacle than learning Objective-C (the language), especially for someone like Bray, who knows C.

But the big thing Bray seems to be overlooking is mobile web app development. If your primary concerns are like his — (a) not wanting to learn new languages and frameworks, (b) not wanting your software distribution under anyone else’s control, and (c) not wanting to be tied to one proprietary device — web app development solves all three.

Good News, Eh? ★

Sprint Connection:

The iPhone shortage may be good news for Sprint, which launched the iPhone-challenging Samsung Instinct in June.

Yes, the more iPhone customers AT&T signs up, the better it gets for Sprint.

The Fallacy of Choice ★

The Linux Hater’s Blog:

So not only does the addition of so many choices alienate would be users, it also makes it difficult for developers to create tested, working configurations. It’s a double whammy. Obsession with providing choice at every level actively works against efforts that would otherwise push Linux to provide what the mainstream wants.