Linked List: January 3, 2009

Saturday, 3 January 2009

Mike Ash:

One extreme is that private APIs should never be used, period, full stop. They’re bad, don’t want to touch them, don’t even acknowledge that they exist. The other extreme is that they’re fine and dandy, use them like you’d use anything else.

As with most things, I believe the truth lies somewhere in the middle. But where, exactly, and how do you determine if something is worth using?

Acorn 1.5 ★

Free update to Flying Meat’s excellent up-and-coming $50 image editor. The big new feature is the all-new brush tool (and custom brush designer). Full release notes here.

‘I Shipped All That Shit Off to Stanford’ ★

Steven Levy:

It’s the 25th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh, but Steve Jobs’ eyes are dry. At the company headquarters in Silicon Valley, where he was presenting a set of new laptops to the press last October, I mentioned the birthday to him. Jobs recoiled at any suggestion of nostalgia. “I don’t think about that,” he said. “When I got back here in 1997, I was looking for more room, and I found an archive of old Macs and other stuff. I said, ‘Get it away!’ and I shipped all that shit off to Stanford. If you look backward in this business, you’ll be crushed. You have to look forward.”

I think this attitude is one of the keys to Jobs’s long-term success.

(Via Chris Foresman.)

Bells and Whistles ★

Nicholas Jitkoff hints at Google Mobile’s secret “Bells and Whistles” settings panel. Useful — I actually like being able to open web pages within the app itself.