Linked List: December 18, 2008

Thursday, 18 December 2008

‘Steve Jobs Didn’t Make the First Macworld, Either’ 

David Bunnell, founder of Macworld magazine, on the first Macworld Expo in 1985.

Is a Netbook a Cheap Laptop? 

Dave Winer argues no, that “netbooks” are something new. I do agree that what people are calling netbooks are more than just inexpensive — they’re small and lightweight. I think my disagreement is merely semantic, though.

The innovation isn’t that it’s a new product category. The innovation is that people are now willing to make trade-offs against performance. For the entire history of the PC industry, computers have been too slow, so trade-offs were made in favor of faster CPUs: higher prices and heavier laptops. But today, for many common tasks, the type of CPU you get when you build a $400 lightweight laptop is fast enough. That’s the breakthrough.

Weightbot 1.2 

Speaking of Tapbots, they just released version 1.2 of Weightbot, their iPhone app for tracking your weight. It’s a simple premise with an absolutely splendid user interface. I think it’s up there as one of the very nicest apps on the platform.

In fact, it might be of as much interest to iPhone UI designers as it is to anyone trying to lose weight. It doesn’t just look good, it sounds good. It feels more like a game than an app, and very much in a good way. Even the Help screen is exquisite.

The Latest App Store Cheat 

Paul Haddad from Tapbots on the latest App Store cheat: SEO-style keyword gaming in the app’s description text. Apple should just kick these developers out of the store — how can this be defended as anything other than cheating?

Update: For exhibit A, check out the app descriptions for every single app in the store by developer Andrew Borland. Each contains this exact paragraph at the end:

Customers who purchased this game also liked:
Enigmo, Bejeweled, Moto Chaser, Super Monkey Ball, Poker, Spore, Ocarina, iHunt, Guitar, Scrabble, Solitaire, Tanzen, iFish, Shazam, Loopt, Tetris, Poker, iBeer, FieldRunners, AIM, Remote, Facebook, Star Wars, Trace, Guitar Rock Tour, Flick Fishing, Touchgrind, wurdle, Night Camera, and Koi Pond.

Not only is this flagrant keyword spam (Borland’s junky-looking apps now show up in the results when you search for the names of the popular apps he lists) but it’s also phrased in a way to make it seem like the list of apps is generated by the App Store’s recommendation engine.

Apple Gets a Letter From Mom 

Tonya Engst:

You are old enough to realize that the world does not revolve around you. Macworld Expo is our family’s annual reunion. You don’t go to reunions because they are convenient, or because they are cheap. You go to reunions because you are a member of the family, and that’s what families do.

Good piece, but I’ll bet Steve Jobs doesn’t go to family reunions.

Ski Lodge 1.0 

New $5 iPhone app by David Watanabe. I don’t even ski and I want to buy it, that’s how cool it looks.

Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes 

Fabulous: Jon Ronson’s documentary Stanley Kubrick’s Boxes — “A biography of a remarkably talented man as seen though the rich collection of material he left behind” — is now available in its entirety on Google Video. I posted a few still frames from the film in July, regarding Kubrick’s collection of notebooks and stationery.

(Via Andy Baio.)

Apple Buys Stake in Mobile Graphics Chip Designer 

Apple bought a 3.6 percent stake in British chip designer Imagination Technologies, makers of the PowerVR mobile graphics line.