Linked List: January 28, 2009

Wednesday, 28 January 2009

AOL Layoffs ★: AOL still exists?
What Happened to iPhone Push Notifications? ★: Dan Moren:

We put in a call to Apple to find out the reason why, but unless you’re new to this whole scene you won’t exactly be flabbergasted to hear that the company was about as communicative as your average sullen teenager. The company’s approach appears to be pretending that the system was never announced in the first place — you won’t find any notice of it on Apple’s site, save for the plaintive cries of users wondering what happened to it.
How to Write a Book ★: Steven Johnson, guest-blogging at Boing Boing, on how he writes his books:

My word processors have varied over the years: I swore off MS Word after Mind Wide Open, and used Nisus Writer for Everything Bad and Ghost Map; had a quick dalliance with Pages, and then actually returned to the latest version of Word for Invention. But the one constant for the past four books has been an ingenious piece of software called Devonthink, which is basically a free-form database that accepts many different document types (PDFs, text snippets, web pages, images, etc). It has a very elegant semantic algorithm that can detect relationships between short excerpts of text, so you can use the software as a kind of connection machine, a supplement to your own memory. I wrote about this several years ago for the Times Book Review, and I still get emails from people every couple of weeks asking about the software. (The Devonthink guys should put me in an infomercial.)
‘Veering Away’ ★: Grant Hutchinson is leaving Veer, which he co-founded seven years ago and has helped steer ever since. Grant is one of the good guys, and Veer is a terrific success story.
‘Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu’ ★: John Updike on Ted Williams’s final home game at Fenway Park in 1960, for The New Yorker. So good.
Zeldman’s Recession Tips for Web Designers ★: Jeffrey Zeldman:

Bad times are hard on overweight companies and over-leveraged start-ups, but can be kind to freelancers and small agencies. Clients who once had money to burn and big agencies to help them burn it suddenly consider the quality of work more important than the marquee value of the business card. Fancy offices and ten people at every meeting are out. A close relationship with an individual or small team that listens is in.
Apple Concept Designs From the Early ’90s ★: A lot of it is cool in a sci-fi sort of way, but none of this stuff was even close to practical at the time. One of the first things Steve Jobs did when he returned to Apple was put an end to “concept” designs, and focus the entire company on making actual, real products. (Via Steven Sande.)
Studies Find High-Fructose Corn Syrup Contains Mercury ★: I’m sure the HFCS industry will soon let us know that a little mercury never hurt anybody.