Linked List: March 6, 2009

Friday, 6 March 2009

Yahoo’s free web search app for the iPhone. Looks good.

Dieter Bohn’s “unboxing” video for the new Sprint Treo Pro spends a lot of time demonstrating the new IE6 browser for Windows Mobile. This is Microsoft’s latest and greatest mobile browser experience. Jump to around the 3:20 mark to get right to the IE6 segment.

Sifter ★

My thanks to Sifter for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Sifter is a “hosted bug and issue tracker designed equally for technical and non-technical people”. That’s a bold goal, and I think Sifter has hit the mark. Bug/issue tracking systems are notoriously complex — they’re typically developer tools written for and by engineers. Sifter is different — it’s a “do less, but do it way better” sort of web app. And it passes the eat-your-own-dogfood test: the Sifter team uses Sifter itself for their bug/issue tracking.

The best part: Sifter offers a 30-day free trial, so you can try it out before spending a dime.

‘Not Ideal’ ★

Washington, D.C. has long been a bastion of BlackBerry fanatics. The new touch-screen Storm, though? Not so much.

Renegade App Stores for the iPhone ★

Yukari Iwatani Kane:

Apple Inc. faces a growing threat to its iPhone business, as renegade stores spring up online to sell unauthorized software for the device.

The developer behind some popular iPhone software on Friday plans to open a service called Cydia Store that could potentially sell hundreds of iPhone applications that are not available through Apple’s official store. Users must download special software that alters their iPhones before they can run these programs.

The idea of for-pay jailbreak app stores is an interesting development, for sure, but I think it’s a stretch to call it a threat to Apple’s iPhone business. It’s a threat to Apple’s App Store business, but Apple’s main mobile business is selling actual iPhones and iPods.

Talking to Your iPod ★

Regarding my suggestion last week that Apple should add spoken menus to the display-less iPod Shuffle — allowing you to hear things like song playlist names — it occurs to me that speech could work the other way too. If the Shuffle had a microphone of some sort it could take verbal commands from you. I’d hate to sit next to someone on an airplane barking “Play, next, next, pause” throughout an entire flight, but it might be pretty cool for people who use their iPods while running or biking.

Acclimated to Severe Turbulence ★

Philip Greenspun:

This evening’s New York Times was worrisome. An inset box showed that the S&P 500 had fallen 4.25 percent for the day, wiping out roughly a year of investment returns. A few months ago this would have been the top story. Today, however, it did not even make the front page.

For context, consider this, from Harper’s Index:

Number of times in 2008 that the S&P 500 closed up or down 5 percent in a single day: 17

Number of times between 1956 and 2007 it did this: 17