Linked List: February 3, 2009

Tuesday, 3 February 2009

Shawn Blanc Reviews ‘Things’ 

Detailed review of both the Mac and iPhone versions of Cultured Code’s Things.

‘Communicating With Code’ 

Paul Buchheit:

We did a lot of things wrong during the 2.5 years of pre-launch Gmail development, but one thing we did very right was to always have live code. The first version of Gmail was literally written in a day.

Bill Keller’s BBColors Color Schemes 

I haven’t mentioned it in a while, but BBColors is a hack I put together a while back that lets you save and load text coloring schemes for BBEdit and TextWrangler. Bill Keller just published a few nice schemes for use with it.

Spacesick Is Making Something Cool Every Day 

The whole set is cool, but my favorites are the series of imagined novelizations of movies. E.g.: Highlander, Face/Off, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and The Temple of Doom. And of course, Caddyshack.

How Twitter Was Born 

Dom Sagolla on the origins of Twitter.

Don’t Work for Assholes 

Derek Powazek:

Nine times out of ten, the first impression someone gives you is exactly who they are. We choose not to see it because we need the money, or we want the situation to be different. But if someone rubs you the wrong way at the first meeting, chances are, it’s only going to get worse.

‘Peeling Cucumbers on the Front Stoop’ 

Nice piece by Dave Pell.

Crackulous, Automated App Store Piracy Tool 

The biggest downside to the App Store from an anti-bootlegging perspective is that the FairPlay DRM protection is applied the exact same way to all apps. So if you figure out how to crack one, you now have a working method to crack them all. So what’s now common with jailbreakers are tools like this to allow you to create completely unlocked versions of any app from the App Store.

The other factor is that this has been going on for months, and is getting worse, but so far there’s not been a single indication that Apple cares or plans to do anything about it. I suspect we’ll soon start seeing high-profile App Store apps that take matters into their own hands and attempt to detect whether they’re running on a jailbroken phone, and, if so, quit.

‘I Lego N.Y.’ 

Christoph Niemann represents iconic elements of New York City in Lego. My favorite is the “regular coffee”.

Worst Installer Ever 

John C. Welch on the installer for Garmin Communicator:

Yeah. That’s right. It kills Firefox and Safari, without warning, without dialog, without any kind of “You might have been working on something, I’ll ask you if I can do this”. Nope. None of that shit. You run this installer, bang, Safari and Firefox are dead.

Twitter Chatter During the Super Bowl 

Fabulous data visualization by Matthew Bloch and Shan Carter for The New York Times.