By John Gruber
WorkOS launches auth.md — an open protocol for agent registration.
Linked List: March 26, 2009
Thursday, 26 March 2009
- NewTeeVee Reports BlackBerry May Launch TV Episode Service ★
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Liz Gannes:
By downloading content in the background over Wi-Fi, RIM would avoid clogging 3G networks. Downloaded programs would be ready to play when users want to watch them on the go. [...] By contrast, TV.com’s long-form shows iPhone app chops up episodes into clips and strings them together, with different versions of each clip encoded for 3G and Wi-Fi (the Wi-Fi quality is way better). The BlackBerry content experience would offer reliable, full-length, high-quality over-the-air (well, Wi-Fi) premium video downloads.
Sounds like a great idea, especially considering that BlackBerry’s top-of-the-line touchscreen device, the Storm, doesn’t even have Wi-Fi support.
- Another Awkward New Microsoft Ad Campaign ★
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Odd new Microsoft commercial, which purports to show a real person named Lauren trying to find a new 17-inch laptop for under $1000. She goes into “the Mac store” and comes out disappointed, because — and this is true — the only sub-$1000 laptop comes with a 13-inch display. But then she says, “I’m just not cool enough to be a Mac person.” One can only assume that it’s intended as an anti-elitist insult, but the bottom line is that Microsoft is explicitly reinforcing the idea that Macs are cool, which strikes me as a very odd tactic. The theme of the commercial seems to be “PCs: Computers for Losers”.
But here’s my favorite part from Andrea James’s report on the ad campaign for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
Lauren is, apparently, a “real” person and not an actress. She works as an office manager but is also a member of the Screen Actors Guild.
I’m sure all sorts of people who aren’t actors are members of the Screen Actors Guild. Some people join unions just for fun. Update: AP reporter Jessica Mintz says Lauren is an actress.
- JavaScript Performance on iPhone OS 3.0 ★
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A few weeks before the iPhone 3G and iPhone OS 2.0 shipped last summer, the WebKit team announced their new hot-rodded JavaScript engine — then called SquirrelFish, now renamed Nitro. WebKit performance was dramatically improved in iPhone OS 2.0, both for HTML rendering and JavaScript execution, but the new SquirrelFish/Nitro JavaScript engine was far too new to be included yet. I.e. the significant JavaScript improvements were yet to come. I published a piece on this that included a simple recursion depth test to indicate whether a JavaScript interpreter might be Nitro.
Wayne Pan has braved the NDA waters and published JavaScript benchmarks for iPhone OS 3.0, and they are impressive — with results ranging between 3× and 10× faster than iPhone OS 2.2. And I’ll confirm that MobileSafari on iPhone OS 3.0 passes my simple “could be Nitro” recursion depth test.
In short, JavaScript performance on iPhone OS 3 is way faster.
- Leaked Photos of Tesla Model S Sedan ★
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Check out the roof. (Updated link to point to Gizmodo; Flickr took down Kevin Rose’s originals.)
- WWDC 2009: June 8–12 ★
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Last year’s sold out, and iPhone mania is far greater now than then, so I wouldn’t wait long to book a ticket.
- Infographic-Style Retelling of Little Red Riding Hood ★
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Great work by Tomas Nilsson. (Via Bryan Bedell.)
- Rowmote ★
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Another cool app that lets you use your iPhone as a remote control:
Rowmote controls Front Row, Airfoil Video, Boxee, iPhoto, iTunes, Quicktime, DVD Player, Keynote ’08 and ’09, PandoraJam, Plex, Powerpoint 2008, Skim, Spotify, and VLC. Rowmote 1.3+ also has preliminary eyeTV support (channel changing and volume control).
- Scrabble and Other Games Have Overvalued Points ★
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Carl Bialik:
A trio of words — one that’s slang for pizza, another defined as a body’s vital life force and a third referring to a snoring sound — have conspired to change the game of Scrabble.
“Za,” “qi” and “zzz” were added recently to the game’s official word list for its original English-language edition. Because Z’s and Q’s each have the game’s highest point value of 10, those monosyllabic words can rack up big scores for relatively little effort. So now that those high-scoring letters are more versatile, some Scrabble aficionados would like to see the rules changed — which would be the only change since Alfred Butts popularized the game in 1948.
In short, if they’re going to change the list of allowed words, they should change the letter scoring values.
(Via Kottke.)
- There’s Something About Boxee ★
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600 fans showed up for a Boxee event in New York Tuesday night. Smells to me like Boxee is going to go big, soon.
- Buzz Andersen: ‘What We Can Learn From MacHeist’ ★
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This is the smartest thing I’ve ever read regarding MacHeist. I wish I’d written this.