Linked List: August 29, 2008

Friday, 29 August 2008

Matt Haughey:

I have a feeling that if you’ve only seen blogs in the past five years (which is probably 95+ percent of people reading blogs today) you consider comments to be de rigueur and they are entirely divorced from the original concept of a conversation between the reader and the author of the original post. It’s not an intimate conversation, it’s just another content management feature available to you on the web.

Drobo ★

My thanks to Data Robotics for sponsoring this week’s Daring Fireball RSS feed. Their original Drobo was a terrific and innovative storage device. Their new second-generation Drobo, with FireWire 800, is even better. Drobo features data redundancy, instant expansion to more storage, and plug-and-play ease of use. For more info, here’s Macworld’s 4.5-mouse review of the original Drobo.

Mad Men Gets All the Details Right — Except One ★

Andrew Hearst on the art direction of Mad Men:

The art direction is so immersive that there are no clangy wrong notes to distract you from the rich psychological world the characters inhabit.

Until the show ends, that is. When the last frame flickers off the screen and the credits start to roll, careful observers — okay, just the font freaks — will notice a curious thing: The end credits are set not in the iconic sans serif used in the opening-credits sequence, and not in, say, Helvetica, which was designed in 1957 and became popular soon thereafter, but in Arial, the controversial Helvetica knockoff that Monotype cobbled together in the late 1980s to avoid paying license fees on Helvetica.

Now That’s Gratitude ★

The page is in Dutch, but DF reader Rene Brouwer sent the following translation:

27 year old Frisian developer Eric Wijngaard won $275,000 in Google’s Android Developer Challenge for his ‘PicSay’ application.

In an interview with a Dutch website he says he likes Google’s SDK but “What I really wanted to do was develop an iPhone app. The iPhone SDK wasn’t out yet, though.”

Asked what he would do with the cash, his response was “I guess I could invest it in my software company, but first I want to port PicSay to the iPhone.”

Here’s a Google translation of the whole article.

Update: Wijngaard objects to the above translation.

Android Market ★

Eric Chu:

Developers will be able to make their content available on an open service hosted by Google that features a feedback and rating system similar to YouTube. We chose the term “market” rather than “store” because we feel that developers should have an open and unobstructed environment to make their content available. Similar to YouTube, content can debut in the marketplace after only three simple steps: register as a merchant, upload and describe your content and publish it. We also intend to provide developers with a useful dashboard and analytics to help drive their business and ultimately improve their offerings.

I have a tangentially related question. I wonder whether anyone is planning to create an iPod Touch-like Android device? Something without the phone features but with Wi-Fi.

Red 3K Scarlet ★

Upcoming (“early 2009”) prosumer-range camera from Red. Sign me up. (Via Uncrate.)

Apple Adds ‘Blocks’ to Clang ★

Chris Lattner, who manages the Clang, LLVM, and GCC groups at Apple, announces Blocks support for Clang. Blocks are, more or less, closures for C and Objective-C — and Clang, the C language front-end for LLVM, will soon be Apple’s replacement for GCC.

Android Developer Challenge Gallery ★

Generous cash prizes — 10 developers were awarded $275,000; another 10 got $100,000. Most of the apps look interesting, but I can’t say any of them really jumps out to me.

Update: Not much visual consistency in the UIs, either. This gets back to the iPhone having no SDK until March, and the App Store not debuting until a year after the original iPhone. By the time the SDK arrived, developers had a sense of what an iPhone app should look and feel like. With these initial Android apps, developers created apps without ever being able to use them on an actual phone.

Instant Messaging Market Share by Country ★

Interesting data. AIM leads in the U.S., but not by much. MSN and Yahoo lead in most of the rest of the world.

Adam Engst on BBEdit 9 ★

Adam Engst:

Another related feature that has changed significantly, and for the better, is BBEdit’s Find Differences. In BBEdit 8.5, Bare Bones added the capability to display which characters within a line were different between two similar files. That was huge for us, since it enabled us to use BBEdit in conjunction with the Subversion version control system to work with TidBITS articles. Though code may have relatively short lines, a line of prose is a paragraph, and without knowing what within a paragraph has changed, knowing only that two paragraphs are not the same isn’t particularly helpful. In BBEdit 9.0, Bare Bones has enhanced the Find Differences feature such that it not only shows the changed lines, and the changed characters within each line, it also lets you see and replace individual spans of differing characters within each changed line.

This, along with the live word count and auto-completion that ties into the system-wide dictionary, makes BBEdit an even better tool for prose than before.

Michael Tsai on BBEdit 9 ★

I forgot to mention the new non-modal Find dialog in my blurb yesterday.

Some Quick Comparisons Between the New Kodak Zi6 and the Flip Ultra ★

I got my Kodak Zi6 last week, and have been shooting footage side-by-side with my Flip Ultra. Here are two examples I’ve posted to Vimeo. Be sure to turn on the HD option for the clips from the Zi6. More soon.