By John Gruber
Mux — Video for developers
Linked List: December 3, 2008
Wednesday, 3 December 2008
- Apple Removes Poorly-Worded Anti-Virus Support Page ★
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Jim Dalrymple:
A support page on Apple’s Web site recommending users purchase antivirus software for their Macs received a lot of attention over the past couple of days, but on Tuesday Apple removed the page from its Web site.
“We have removed the KnowledgeBase article because it was old and inaccurate,” Apple spokesman Bill Evans, told Macworld. “The Mac is designed with built-in technologies that provide protection against malicious software and security threats right out of the box.”
The support document in question read, “Apple encourages the widespread use of multiple anti-virus utilities so that virus programmers have more than one application to circumvent, thus making the whole virus writing process more difficult.” Yes, that could be interpreted as meaning they recommend that Mac users install multiple anti-virus packages. No, that is not what they meant.
- The Coming Credit Card Debacle ★
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Joe Nocera publishes a letter from a banking executive describing the insanity of the U.S. credit card industry.
- Notes From Adobe Installer Management ★
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The first step to fixing any problem is acknowledging it. This is a remarkably honest look at the state of Adobe’s installers from the people responsible for them. (How can you not love an article that describes John C. Welch as “colorful and not very shy”?)
Wouldn’t it be great if there were someone at Apple writing a weblog like John Nack’s?
- Vlingo ★
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New free voice recognition app for the iPhone. (It’s been available for the BlackBerry for a while.) Lets you do things like voice dialing, web searches, and dictating updates to Facebook and Twitter.
It’s inevitably going to be compared to Google Mobile. Accuracy-wise, it seems to be as good or better. And with the Twitter/Facebook updates and voice dialing, Vlingo does more. Google Mobile has the “just lift to your ear and talk” feature, and Vlingo doesn’t, but given that Google implemented that by using undocumented APIs, it seems unfair to hold it against Vlingo.
- Amazon Mobile for iPhone ★
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Official Amazon iPhone app, available now as a free download from the App Store. In addition to shopping, it has an interesting “Remembers” feature: snap a picture with your iPhone, and it gets saved to your Amazon account. Plus, Amazon sends the image to a team of humans to identify what it is and offer links to similar items for sale at Amazon. (I presume it’s powered by Mechanical Turk.) And, yes, it seems safe to presume this is why Amazon rejected Mazo.
Weird web-design note: Nearly the entire web page, including text, is made of JPEG images. I guess that’s one way to make pages that display properly in IE.
Update: Via Andy Baio, proof that it’s Turk-powered. Also worth mentioning SnapTell, an app Andy showed me a few weeks ago that does the image-recognition trick for any book, game, or DVD.
- Apple Tells Court It Believes Someone Is Behind Psystar; Adds New Claims, Including DMCA Violation ★
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Groklaw on the latest in Apple’s legal battle against would-be Mac cloner Psystar.