Linked List: September 2, 2008

Tuesday, 2 September 2008

Advice From James Baker on Selecting a Vice Presidential Nominee ★

James Baker, former secretary of state and long-time Bush family counselor, on the lesson to be learned from Bush 41’s selection of Dan Quayle:

The best way to handle a proposed vice presidential nominee who has not been tested in national or big-state politics or high appointive office — and I have the obvious benefit of hindsight — is to float the name a few weeks before the convention and let the games begin. By opening gavel, the candidate will have run the gauntlet of press scrutiny or opposition research, or have dropped out. This approach wouldn’t necessarily work in a contested convention, and, unfortunately, it eliminates the drama of dropping the name at the convention. But it would pretty well guarantee that the news from the convention would not be dominated by questions about the vice presidential selection.

Jesper on Chrome ★

“Google Chrome is a funny creature.”

How Far Along Is Chrome for Mac? ★

Google engineer Amanda Walker on the status of Mac (and Linux) versions of Chrome:

Right now, both are in the “pieces build and pass tests, but there’s no Chromium application yet.” While we’re working hard and fast on catching up to the Windows version, we’re not setting an artificial date for when they’ll be ready—we simply can’t predict enough to make a solid estimate, and we expect to learn a lot from the Windows public beta as well.

In other words, not very far along.

Chrome UI Notes ★

I don’t have a copy of Windows handy, so I haven’t used Chrome yet. Just gleaning from the screenshots and from notes John Siracusa (who is using it) sent me via IM:

Overall, the UI takes minimalism much further than Safari. Google has rethought far more of the standard “web browser” conventions that we’ve been saddled with since Netscape 1.0.
No menu bar. Just two pop-up menus in the toolbar: a “document” and a “wrench”.
No persistent status bar. Just a “status bubble” that pops up contextually.
Tab dragging works the way I wish Safari’s did: you can drag a tab out of a window no matter which direction you initially drag, but there are 40 pixels of vertical slop space before it switches from “rearrange tabs within window” to “move to another window” mode.
No bookmarks menu or window. You create bookmarks by clicking the “star” button in the toolbar; after that, you retrieve them by typing their name, URL, or text from the page content in the location field.

Chromium Developer Documentation ★

Developer documentation for Google’s new Chrome browser. Most interesting to me is the User Experience section:

In the long term, we think of Chromium as a tabbed window manager or shell for the web rather than a browser application. We avoid putting things into our UI in the same way you would hope that Apple and Microsoft would avoid putting things into the standard window frames of applications on their operating systems.

Google Chrome vs. Safari 3.1 Rendering Comparison ★

Faruk Ates compares the just-released Google Chrome to Safari 3.1 for Windows:

Sadly, it seems the WebKit build that Google Chrome uses has been mutilated to an extent: the text-shadow property has been stripped out (Why?!) and, worse, the CSS border-radius rendering is not anti-aliased (Why?!?!).

Gmail Account Hacking Tool ★

This is why it matters that MobileMe’s web apps don’t use SSL.

PleaseDressMe ★

New t-shirt search engine.

Annual New iPod Event: Next Week ★

“Let’s Rock” is the invitation theme.

Getting Closure With Objective-C ★

Drew McCormack on the new “blocks” feature Apple is adding to C and Objective-C.

Killer Kowalski, Wrestler, Dies at 81 ★

One of the original stars of professional wrestling.