Linked List: December 15, 2008

Monday, 15 December 2008

On Leaky Abstractions and Objective-J 

Francisco Tomalsky on the thinking behind Objective-J. Its relationship to JavaScript is very much the same as that of Objective-C to C — a strict superset.

Paul Thurrott on the State of Windows Mobile 

Paul Thurrott:

As I noted previously, I did meet with Windows Mobile this week. They’re good people, smart people, and they seem to understand the issues. They also seem to value the business market more than the consumer market, but that might only be because that’s what they pretty much offer at this point. I will be writing more formally about Windows Mobile by the end of the year, but I wanted to at least mention one thing I found vaguely alarming. When asked about the success of the iPhone and how that impacts Windows Mobile, I was told that the iPhone “validated” Microsoft’s approach. That’s some weird combination of revisionism, wishful thinking and, perhaps, delusion.

It could well be that this “the iPhone validates our approach” thing is just bullshit doublespeak — that the Windows Mobile team knows full well just how bad a position they’re in at this point but they can’t bring themselves, or are not permitted to, admit it publicly.

But if that’s truly the mindset of those leading Microsoft’s Windows Mobile team, that’s delusion, and they’re pretty much dead. Microsoft’s response to the original Macintosh, Windows 1.0, appeared by the end of 1985. Their response to the iPhone is nowhere to be seen.

The Morning News Annual 2008 

The best pieces from The Morning News in 2008, collected in a handsome 200-page volume.

MobileMe Service Updates 

Perhaps the biggest change with 10.5.6 is with regard to the periodicity of MobileMe syncing:

Contacts, calendars, and bookmarks on a Mac sync automatically within a minute of the change being made on the computer, another device, or the web at www.me.com; Mac OS X 10.5.6 is required.

Undrln 

Sort of like Digg or Reddit but for advertising and graphic design.

Tweetie 1.1 

Speaking of Tweetie, version 1.1 is out. It now supports a custom ‘tweetie:’ URL scheme:

If you’re in Safari and want to post a link, just tap on the URL field and type the text “tweetie:” (without the quotes) before the URL. So for example if you’re at http://google.com, change it to tweetie:http://google.com. When you hit “Go”, Tweetie will launch, automatically shrink the link using bit.ly and bring up a new compose view so you can type a message and post it to Twitter.

There are instructions for creating a bookmarklet to automate this here, but it’s a lot easier to just create the bookmarklet in Safari on your Mac and then sync it to your iPhone.

BBEdit 9.1 

There’s lots new in 9.1, including major improvements to the built-in FTP/SFTP features, but the most notable change is this:

BBEdit now includes a copy of Consolas Regular, an excellent antialiased code editing font. This font is licensed from Ascender Corporation for use only with BBEdit. […]

The factory default font is now Consolas-12. If you never chose a default font before, your documents may now display in Consolas-12. If this is not to your liking, adjust the display font accordingly in the “Editor Defaults” preferences.

Notable because (a) Consolas is my favorite anti-aliased coding font, by far; and (b) the previous default font, Monaco 9, remained unchanged dating all the way back to BBEdit’s public debut in April 1992.

(Preemptively answering the inevitable question: I use Monaco 10 for text documents, but Consolas 12 for shell worksheets.)

Taiwan iPhone 3Gs Are SIM Unlocked Out-of-the-Box 

Joining those from Hong Kong.

Fast Scrolling in Tweetie With UITableView 

Loren Brichter, author of Tweetie:

Cutting to the chase, here’s the secret: One custom view per table cell, and do your own drawing. Sounds simple? That’s because it is. It’s actually simpler than dealing with a ton of subviews of labels and images, and it’s about a bzillion times faster (according to my informal tests).

Includes example code.

Lawrence Lessig: ‘The Made-Up Dramas of the Wall Street Journal’ 

Lawrence Lessig on a story in today’s Wall Street Journal that misrepresents Lessig’s own views on net neutrality.

Scott Rosenberg:

The Google Blog Search results have generally been the fastest and most useful tool of this kind (Google displaced Technorati, which had long served in this role, some time ago). But a couple of months ago Google Blog Search started becoming pretty much useless. Instead of only reporting links from the “main” blog content, it reported all links on a blog page, including the so-called “sidebar” or blogroll, where many bloggers place a lengthy static list of blogs they read. So this means that, for instance, every time JD Lasica adds a new post to his blog at Social Media, which includes Wordyard in its blogroll, I get a new listing in the Google Blog Search for Wordyard, even though the post has nothing to do with Wordyard.

I noticed this immediately. Google Blog Search went from being incredibly useful to utterly useless for me. Google Blog Search results for links to daringfireball.net now include every single update from any site that links to the Markdown Syntax documentation, for example.

Mac OS X 10.5.6 Update 

Various bug fixes.

Palm’s Next-Generation OS, Nova, to Debut at CES 

I hope it’s great. I bet it’s not.