Linked List: September 4, 2008

Thursday, 4 September 2008

The first Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gates commercial for Microsoft. Not a bad skit, but I’m not sure how this does anything for the Microsoft brand. Makes Gates seem cool, though.

USB Hub Slows Down iPhone Syncing? ★

With both my original iPhone after upgrading to the 2.0 OS and with my iPhone 3G, syncing with iTunes has been a lugubrious affair, typically taking an hour or more. After quipping about it on Twitter today, Scott Paterson directed me to this write-up of his, describing how his hours-long syncs were reduced to 5 minutes after switching from plugging his iPod into a USB hub to a direct connection on his Mac.

I use a USB hub, too. I tried the direct connection, and damn if it didn’t complete a full sync in five minutes.

Update: A lot of readers are reporting that even without a hub, they still get hour-plus iPhone sync times. Could be that my fast syncs yesterday were the result of having just completed a full sync and backup earlier in the evening.

The Story Behind Google Chrome ★

Niall Kennedy’s comprehensive look at the people and the teams Google has assembled to build Chrome.

Steven Levy: Inside Chrome ★

Good line from Steven Levy’s behind-the-scenes look at Google’s Chrome project:

Speed may be Chrome’s most significant advance. When you improve things by an order of magnitude, you haven’t made something better — you’ve made something new.

iPhone Stencils for OmniGraffle ★

Along the lines of this library of iPhone UI elements for use mocking up interfaces in Photoshop, Patrick Crowley has released a comprehensive set of stencils for use with OmniGraffle.

Objective-J and Cappuccino Released ★

JavaScript library and web app framework modeled after Objective-C and Cocoa released as open source. See them in action in the Keynote-esque 280 Slides.

‘MLB At Bat’ Adds Gameday ★

One of my favorite iPhone apps gets even better.

Nikon D3 Shutter Release in Super Slow Motion ★

Nice frame-by-frame animation from Jeffrey Friedl and Marianne Oelund illustrating how an SLR works. (Thanks to Jacob Rus.)

Apple Rejects Fart-Joke iPhone App ★

MacRumors has a story on Pull My Finger, an iPhone App that plays a variety of fart sounds. The demo video shows that the app is clearly well done for what it is — it even vibrates the phone while it toots — but Apple rejected it:

We’ve reviewed your application Pull My Finger. We have determined that this application is of limited utility to the broad iPhone and iPod touch user community, and will not be published to the App Store.

With all the absolute crap that has made it into the store, which includes apps based on nothing more than sample code from Apple’s SDK, it seems ridiculous for Pull My Finger to be rejected on these grounds. The current number one app in the store is Koi Pond, which is utterly useless but extremely well-done.

I’ve already heard from a top-tier developer this morning who, in response to this story, is dropping an idea for a very cool iPhone app out of fear that the work to create it would be for naught as Apple might reject it.

Google Chrome’s Full List of Special about: Pages ★

If Apple did this, the pages would feature good graphic design.

jParallax ★

Stephen Band:

Parallax turns a selected element into a ‘window’, or viewport, and all its children into absolutely positioned layers that can be seen through the viewport. These layers move in response to the mouse, and, depending on their dimensions (and options for layer initialisation), they move by different amounts, in a parallaxy kind of way.

Very cool. Try the demo and you’ll be impressed. (Thanks to Daniel Bogan.)

The Torrances ★

Art by Kirk Demarais. (Via Coudal.)