Linked List: August 1, 2008

Friday, 1 August 2008

Hard to Believe Some People Thought The Wall Street Journal Would Go to Hell After Rupert Murdoch Bought It 

The Wall Street Journal ran a 1,400-word news article today addressing the issue of whether Barack Obama is “too physically fit” to be elected president. Reporter Amy Chozick’s source for this nonsense? An anonymous comment on a Yahoo message board thread that she herself started.

I especially enjoy seeing a Wall Street Journal reporter sign off with a “Thanks!”.

C4[2] 

Wolf Rentzsch’s very fun, very smart Mac developer nerd conference is back for a third edition. The session line-up looks terrific. My understanding is that it’s already nearly sold-out, so I’d act quickly if I hadn’t registered already. Here’s my write-up from last year’s C4[1].

Update: Sold out.

The Talk Show, Ep. 24 

A half-hearted run through the last month worth of news, including the new iPhone and MobileMe.

HoudahSpot 2 

My thanks to Houdah Software for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. HoudahSpot 2.2 is a terrific search utility for Mac OS X. It uses Spotlight for the back-end, but provides its own interface for queries and results, which interface is better than Mac OS X’s built-in Spotlight interface in every single way. Complex queries are easier to build and more precise. Simple queries, using HoudahSpot’s new “Blitz Search” feature, feel much faster than with the Spotlight menu item, because HoudahSpot doesn’t mimic Apple’s asinine “start trying to show results after you’ve typed a single character” behavior.

Check out Houdah’s screencasts for more info on how it works. HoudahSpot costs €15 (US$23 at this moment), but DF readers can save 20 percent using the coupon code “DF2008”.

Nullriver NetShare 

This story is downright bizarre. Nullriver — the company that spearheaded the Installer.app jailbreak installer project — created an App Store app called NetShare, which enables an iPhone to share its EDGE or 3G Internet connection with a Mac or PC via Wi-Fi. That seems like a crazy app to build, given that there’d seemingly be no chance that Apple would accept it. But Apple did accept it, and it appeared on the App Store yesterday, selling for $10, and it apparently works as advertised.

Soon thereafter, though, NetShare disappeared from the store. Assuming that Apple does not wish to allow phone network tethering, it seems crazy that this app got through in the first place. The name alone — let alone the product description, or the fact that it came from the creators of Installer.app — makes it very clear what it does.

Update: As of this moment, NetShare is back in the App Store. I just bought a license a moment ago, as did Andy Baio.

Flip Ultra vs. Creative Vado 

You know the picture quality of a camera is bad when it’s described as “not quite good enough for YouTube”.

McCain Makes Historic First Visit to Internet 

The Borowitz Report:

In a daring bid to wrench attention from his Democratic rival in the 2008 presidential race, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) today embarked on an historic first-ever visit to the Internet.

Perhaps the Name ‘Jongeorge’ Was Already Taken 

Neven Mrgan on the new Palringo multi-network IM app for the iPhone.