Linked List: February 24, 2009

Tuesday, 24 February 2009

Alex Payne on Weblog Comments (and ‘Everything Buckets’) ★

Alex Payne:

I think people do their best writing when they’re forced to defend their ideas on their own turf. It’s one thing to leave a comment on someone else’s blog, but quite another to put your argument in front of your own readers. It forces a level of consideration that, without fail, results in a higher quality exchange of ideas.

June, Eh? ★

Rex Crum, reporting on analysts’ thoughts on Apple:

Shaw Wu of Kaufman Bros. holds a buy rating on Apple’s stock. However, on Tuesday, he trimmed his second-quarter revenue estimate on Apple to $7.7 billion from $7.8 billion, and left his $1.06 a share earnings target unchanged. Wu said Apple’s Mac business looks weak in the current quarter, and he isn’t expecting the line of iMacs to be refreshed until June, at the earliest.

I say March. Let’s see who’s closer.

Atlas ★

280 North’s new web-based IDE and visual interface tool for the Cappuccino framework. What Cappuccino is to Cocoa, Atlas is to Interface Builder. Impressive.

I still think building web apps that look and act like fake desktop apps is the wrong way to go, but if anyone is going to prove me wrong on that, it’s probably going to be these guys.

Good Example of Firefox as Bad Mac App ★

It looks like you can customize menu key shortcuts using the Keyboard Shortcuts panel in System Prefs, but the custom bindings don’t work, and the factory shortcuts continue to apply, even though they no longer appear in the menu bar.

Safari 4 Benchmarked: 42 Times Faster Than IE 7, 3.5 Times Faster Than Firefox 3 ★

Feels snappy, that’s for sure.

Magic Johnson: ‘When I Played, Larry Bird Was the Only One I Feared’ ★

I love how this highlight reel is just as much about Bird’s passing ability as his scoring. (I have a framed photo here in my office of Bird and Dr. J choking each other.)

Rogue Amoeba Is Hiring ★

Full-time openings for a Cocoa UI engineer and user interface designer at one of the leading Mac development shops. Great opportunity for a rock star UI designer.

Apple’s PR for Safari 4 ★

I didn’t notice this morning that the marketing name for WebKit’s new JavaScript engine has been changed from SquirrelFish to Nitro.

Safari 4 Hidden Preferences ★

You can switch back to the old-style tab bar with one of them, and restore the old “progress bar inside the location field” feature with two others. I’m willing to give the new-style tabs at least a week — don’t be a chicken and switch back already. (Via Matt Gemmell.)

Update: The site has crapped out, alas. Caius Durling has put the highlights here.

DoubleTwist ★

DoubleTwist, the universal media hub from a team led by Jon Lech Johansen, is now available as a public beta for Mac OS X. Interesting and ambitious: DoubleTwist acts as a sort of universal digital hub — imagine if iTunes worked not just with iPods and iPhones, but with portable players from other manufacturers. E.g. the demo movie shows DoubleTwist syncing video to an Android phone. And DoubleTwist acts as a social networking service, for exchanging photos, video, and audio files with friends and family.

In addition to handling device communication, it also handles any necessary format transcoding to move audio and video from your Mac to your gadgets. The UI looks very polished, and it seems to integrate very well with existing iTunes and iPhoto libraries. The overall wow factor is high.

Also interesting: it’s Mac-only, at least for now. This is the sort of thing that ten (or maybe even five) years ago would have shipped for Windows first. Update: Ends up there is a Windows version, which did ship first, albeit in very different form.

Safari Dev Center ★

Tons of new web developer documentation and tutorials from Apple, to go along with the release of the new Safari 4 public beta.

Pre-Release iPod for Sale on eBay ★

Mike Evangelist:

I’ve decided to part with my rare pre-release first generation iPod. While I was at Apple, I was one of a bunch of internal testers for the iPod. When the testing was done, all the volunteers had a chance to trade in their beta iPods for ‘real’ ones, but I never got around to it. So I still have the pre-release unit.

Update: And, just like that, it’s gone, pulled by eBay at Apple’s request.

(Thanks to Joe Clark.)

Marco Arment on ‘RSS’ as a Feature ★

In response to Daniel Jalkut’s observation that today’s new Safari 4 beta doesn’t have any significant new RSS features, Marco Arment astutely observes:

RSS is valuable, but like other underlying technologies and data formats of the internet (HTML, HTTP, IMAP, MPEG-4), it needs to be packaged into consumer-friendly and consumer-relevant concepts, terms, and products.

Exactly.

Gmail Down for Four Hours ★

Seems back to normal now.

Oh No You Didn’t ★

Chris Messina tweets:

Safari 4 looks effing amazing but breaks 1Password. Fail.

Assuming he’s right and 1Password indeed doesn’t (yet) work in Safari 4, let’s just get things straight. 1Password’s Safari integration is an input manager hack. There are no supported plugin APIs to enable what 1Password does. Apple can’t “break” something they never supported in the first place.

New Safari 4 Beta ★

New Safari 4 beta, available for both Mac and Windows. Browser tabs are a new style, now on top of the window. The history window now offers a Cover Flow view. And there’s a new feature, “Top Sites”, that gives you a visually impressive Cover-Flow-esque fan of favorite sites to choose from. The address field (née “location field”) and search field are now smarter — the search field, for example, offers Google Suggest-powered as-you-type results.