By John Gruber
Mux — Video for developers
Linked List: November 24, 2008
Monday, 24 November 2008
- Gizmodo Reviews Opera Mini 4.2 Beta for Android ★
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Doesn’t sound fully baked. And using the Android hardware Back button this way sounds like it’s completely against the Android interface guidelines. Something like this wouldn’t fly on the iPhone. (Opera Mini is the cross-platform mobile-optimized version of Opera that I wrote about a few weeks ago.)
- Tack Sharp ★
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New photography podcast by Duncan Davidson and Dan Benjamin. Don’t let the “.tv” domain name fool you, it’s an audio show.
- Contacts App No Longer Cheats With Dynamic ‘default.png’ ★
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Tom Insam notes that the iPhone Contacts app no longer uses the dynamic default.png cheat — it simply launches and starts much faster than it used to.
- Testing the ‘Broken Windows’ Theory of Crime ★
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Interesting experiment testing the theory that signs of visual disorder, such as litter and graffiti, encourage crime and other acts of disorder. (Via Gus Mueller.)
- Benchmarking After Effects CS4 on Mac OS X and Windows Vista ★
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Kevin Schmitt benchmarks Adobe’s After Effects CS4 on Leopard and Vista. The results are ugly:
Cripes, the Mac OS X version of After Effects is absolutely smoked again, and the results are slightly worse than last time in places. Either Adobe isn’t tuning After Effects on the Mac at all, or tuning the buhjeezus out of the Windows versions. Hell, even single process rendering on Vista generally spanks multiple processes on Leopard, for the love of Pete.
- 2nd Generation iPod Touch Faster Than iPhone? ★
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According to Touch Arcade, the second-generation iPod Touch has a faster CPU than the iPhone 3G, original iPhone, and original iPod Touch. Update: Any developers out there who own a new iPod Touch could test this by running Craig Hockenberry’s hardware info code.
- Pointer Fun With Binky ★
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A programming video that entertained my four-year-old son as much as it did me. (Via Jeff Atwood.)
- Making ‘Iron Man’ ★
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Terrific set of behind-the-scenes photos by Jeff Bridges during the making of Iron Man.
- HandBrake 0.9.3 ★
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Not sure why the version number tweak is so minor; this seems like a major update:
HandBrake is no longer limited to DVDs: it will now accept practically any type of video as a source. This massive enhancement was achieved by tapping into the power of libavcodec and libavformat from the FFmpeg project.
I agree with Michael Tsai: Handbrake is the easiest way I know to convert video (especially from DVDs) for use on iPhones, iPods, and non-hacked Apple TVs. (Via Mat Lu.)
- Kara Swisher: Twitter Rejects Acquisition Offer From Facebook ★
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She reports that Facebook offered to acquire Twitter for $500 million in Facebook stock, but the Twitter board (wisely) wanted cash. I’m not sure I’d sell a sandwich in exchange for Facebook stock.
- iPhone Developer Paying for Five-Star App Store Reviews Via Mechanical Turk ★
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Brian X. Chen:
The developer of Santa Live, a jokey iPhone app for kids, appears to have posted a listing on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk offering to pay $4 for the highest-rated reviews on Apple’s iPhone App Store. “So for this hit, all you have to do is download the application ($1.99) and then leave a 5 star review for the app in iTunes or the App Store,” said the posting, which has now been taken down, but is preserved here by a screenshot taken by “Techtistic”, a reader of The Unofficial Apple Weblog.
The developer’s name is Adam Majewski. I saw a similar request that Majewski posted to Mechanical Turk on November 14, where he was offering only $2 (just one penny more than the cost of the app) and only asked for the app to be downloaded and reviewed, without specifying that the review be positive.
- TaskPaper 2.0 ★
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Major update to Hog Bay Software’s $30 list-based task manager. I’m not sure what to make of it. I like that it’s quite a bit simpler than OmniOutliner (and miles simpler than OmniFocus), and I like that it’s less structured than Things.
But it feels like an outliner without outlining features. I don’t think a task manager needs to be hierarchical, but if it is hierarchical (that is, if tasks can have sub-tasks, and sub-tasks can have sub-sub-tasks, etc.) then I expect to be able to fold and unfold sections of the hierarchy with disclosure triangles. TaskPaper doesn’t do that, other than allowing you to hoist (in outlining terms) a top-level project.
Definitely worth a look, especially if you’re not entirely satisfied with whatever you’re using now for task management.