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Linked List: November 14, 2008

Friday, 14 November 2008

Favorite No More 

Here’s a YouTube clip from Steve Jobs’s 2007 Macworld Expo keynote, where he announced the iPhone. It’s the segment where Jobs demos the iPhone’s phone features. He calls Jonny Ive (who’s sitting in the audience), then Phil Schiller calls Jobs, and Jobs merges the two calls into a conference call.

Then, starting around the 5:15 mark, Jobs shows off the Favorites list. He starts by adding Phil Schiller to his favorites list. Then he shows how to delete an entry. Guess who?

Brent Simmons’s Advice for Would-Be Indie Developers 

Brent Simmons:

But you have to actually build it. You have to work every day. You have to sit in the chair and stay seated. And sleep and come back to the chair. You need to wear out that chair and then buy a new one and then wear out that one.

John C. Welch on Apple’s Enterprise Strategy 

John C. Welch:

Here’s the simple truth: Enterprise hates surprises. It’s not what they want. Enterprise wants predictability. They want to know when, what, how much, and that it will be all new and cool, yet change nothing. (Yes that’s contradictory. Have you ever tried to use “Enterprise Software?” Winning usability awards is so not happening there.) And they want to know everything in detail a year ahead of time. Can anyone seriously imagine how long Apple would survive under that model? Right, not long.

Failing Hard Drive Sounds 

Some of the most terrifying noises known to man.

BBEdit 9 

My thanks to Bare Bones Software for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Bare Bones describes BBEdit 9 as “the leading professional HTML and text editor for Mac OS X”. I describe it as “the app in which I do all my work”.

BBEdit is highly scriptable, both with AppleScript and with shell scripting languages like Perl, Python, and Ruby. It has the best search-and-replace features in the business. New in 9.0 are features like text and clipping completion, a new Projects feature that lets you group associated files — including those on SFTP servers — together in one window, and the ability to edit files directly from within disk browser and search results windows. If it were legal in Pennsylvania I’d marry BBEdit.

John Markoff, reporting for The New York Times:

Users of the free application, which Apple is expected to make available as soon as Friday through its iTunes store, can place the phone to their ear and ask virtually any question, like “Where’s the nearest Starbucks?” or “How tall is Mount Everest?” The sound is converted to a digital file and sent to Google’s servers, which try to determine the words spoken and pass them along to the Google search engine.

The search results, which may be displayed in just seconds on a fast wireless network, will at times include local information, taking advantage of iPhone features that let it determine its location.

Is it really going to be more convenient than just typing out “how tall is mount everest” in the Safari search field? I’m highly skeptical.

And why did Google do this for the iPhone before doing it for Android?

Red Digital Cinema’s New Camera Announcements 

I’d like to see Red do more shipping and less pre-announcing. Still, though, these sensor sizes are astounding — the biggest will shoot still images at 261 megapixels.

High Quality YouTube Video Hack 

Jason Kottke shows how to embed higher-quality versions of YouTube videos.