Linked List: July 29, 2008

Tuesday, 29 July 2008

A List Apart: The Survey for People Who Make Websites, 2008 ★

A List Apart:

Remove the web, and billions in trade disappear. Websites enable people who can’t walk to run to the store. They bring knowledge and freedom of thought to places where such things are scarce; make every person with a connection a citizen of the world; and allow every citizen to be heard.

Yet nobody bothered to conduct a serious inquiry into the working conditions of people who make websites until A List Apart launched its first survey in 2007.

If you work in this racket, you should take it.

App Count ★

Philip Elmer-DeWitt:

The number of offerings on the App Store — the venue for independently produced programs that helps distinguish Apple’s smartphone from all others — hit 1,001 on Monday night.

The total app count isn’t that interesting to me, because the majority of the apps are just plain crap. The real question is how many apps in the App Store are actually of decent quality. My guess is around 100. (Sturgeon’s Law at work?)

Dell Studio Hybrid PC ★

Nice industrial design from Dell. (That’s a sentence I didn’t expect to write today.) The bamboo model looks particularly nice. (Via Jon Hicks.)

Lightroom 2.0 ★

Detailed release notes for the first major update to Adobe’s outstanding photo management app.

iPhone NDA: Doing More Harm Than Good ★

Good piece by Chris Foresman on the frustration developers face working under the NDA that covers the iPhone SDK. I think this is the nut of it:

“I don’t know of any successful platform that developers can’t actually talk about online,” added Brent Simmons of NewsGator.

How Cool Is Cuil? ★

Rory Cellan-Jones shows just how far Cuil has to go to truly rival Google.