By John Gruber
Mux — Video for developers
Linked List: September 30, 2008
Tuesday, 30 September 2008
- Esquire: ‘Steve Jobs and the Portal to the Invisible’ ★
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Long piece for Esquire by Tom Junod. Doesn’t cover new ground, but it’s a good attempt to place Steve Jobs — his influence and lasting impact on the world — in context.
My only significant gripe is that Junod trots out the old the Mac got crushed because Apple kept the Mac closed and the DOS/Windows PC was open chestnut, and attributes the decision to Jobs’s penchant for control. But Junod also acknowledges that Jobs was ousted from Apple in 1985, just a year or so after the original Mac shipped. Whatever happened to the Mac between 1985 and 1996 had nothing to do with Jobs.
- Dell Opens Movie Store With One Title ★
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Heck of a job, Bucher.
- Stainless 0.1 ★
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Very impressive work from Mesa Dynamics: Stainless is a new multi-process WebKit-based browser for Leopard, inspired by Google Chrome. Same basic architecture as Chrome, in that each browser tab gets its own process. It’s a “technology demo” at this point, missing all sorts of stuff like bookmarks, history management, and even shortcuts for switching between tabs, but it definitely works.
Incomplete though it may be, what’s there now is very nice. The tabs offer better dragability than Safari’s, and I love the visual feedback for a tab in “private” mode.
- Using iPhone-Optimized Web Apps on the Mac ★
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Dan Cederholm is using Hahlo (an iPhone web app Twitter client) on his Mac, via Fluid.
- NIN Edition of Tap Tap Revenge ★
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This is a brilliant idea: a licensed version of Tap Tap Revenge with a visual theme and music from a specific band. I predict big sales and lots of press about it. Why settle for selling music when you can sell games? No surprise that Trent Reznor is ahead of the curve on this.
(The announcement also notes that Tapulous has hired my good friend and former Joyent colleague Bryan Bell.)
- The Survey That Squashed AAPL ★
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Philip Elmer-DeWitt takes a close look at the IT purchasing-plan survey that sparked the dramatic sell-off on Apple’s stock yesterday:
So there are indeed signs of a cooling trend for Apple, but it’s not at all clear that they justify an 18% drop in its share price. Dell, by comparison, dropped 5.9% on Monday and its ChangeWave chart is disaster.
In short, it seems like Apple’s stock took a disproportionate hit for a downward turn in IT purchasing industry-wide. Plus, quite obviously, it was the single worst day in 20 years for a bad forecast about any publicly-traded company to be released.
- Technologizer’s iPhone Survey Results ★
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Unsurprising but interesting nonetheless. For example, 97 percent of respondents were running the updated 2.1 OS; I don’t think any other cell phone maker could get that sort of number. It’s a testimony to Apple’s tight iTunes/iPhone integration. Also, three-quarters of respondents have downloaded 10 or more apps from the App Store.
- Differences Between Google Update Engine and Sparkle ★
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Google Groups thread with comments from Google’s Greg Miller and Sparkle creator Andy Matuschak.
- Focus and Recompose ★
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Duncan Davidson has a splendid, illustrated explanation regarding the shortcomings of focus-and-recompose. A good follow-up to his piece about the shortcomings in the auto-focus system in Canon’s just-announced EOS 5D Mark II.
- Apple Selling Unlocked iPhones in Hong Kong ★
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From an AP report on Apple’s official unlocked phones in Hong Kong:
“Phone 3G purchased at the Apple Online Store can be activated with any wireless carrier,” it said on the site.
Offering free shipping, the 8-gigabyte phone goes for $5,400 Hong Kong dollars ($695) while the 16-gigabyte version costs HK$6,200 ($798).
Since the global rollout in July, Hong Kong buyers could only purchase the multimedia phone from Hutchison Telecommunications International Ltd. with a two-year mobile contract, even though the device was widely available on the black market.
At those prices — roughly $700/800 for 8/16 GB, respectively — I would presume it’s just as profitable for Apple, if not more so, than the subsidized iPhones including the carrier kick-back.
But why only in Hong Kong? Why not sell unlocked iPhone 3Gs at those prices everywhere? Is it that Hong Kong consumers are particularly willing to spend $800 on an unlocked phone? Or is it that the black market was particularly strong there?