Linked List: April 24, 2009

Friday, 24 April 2009

Malcolm McDowell on Stanley Kubrick ★

“Wasn’t quite the right place for Stanley.”

Macworld Interview With Tweetie Creator Loren Brichter ★

Loren Brichter:

One of the fantastic things about Twitter clients is how easy it is for users to jump from one to another. Just type in a username and password and off you go. It’s possible for anyone to write a Twitter client nowadays and have the opportunity to completely blow everyone else out of the water.

Tapbots ★

Mark Jardine and Paul Haddad go full-time on Tapbots:

I think it’s nothing short of amazing that we are able to support ourselves with $0 investment (other than time) and all of it $1-$3 at a time.

There remains much to criticize about the App Store, but indeed there is much to be amazed about, too.

Look at This Fucking Hipster ★

Aptly-named web site of the day.

Microsoft Surface First-Run Experience ★

Gordon Miller on the user experience of setting up a new Microsoft Surface — a $17,000 touchscreen computer that, by design, does not respond to touch input when you first turn it on.

Update: They’ve pulled the original article, so I’ve updated the link to Google’s cached version.

Regarding the PSD File Format ★

From the source code comments for Xee, an open source Mac image viewer:

Earlier, I tried to get a hold of the latest specs for the PSD file format. To do this, I had to apply to [Adobe] for permission to apply to them to have them consider sending me this sacred tome. This would have involved faxing them a copy of some document or other, probably signed in blood. I can only imagine that they make this process so difficult because they are intensely ashamed of having created this abomination. I was naturally not gullible enough to go through with this procedure, but if I had done so, I would have printed out every single page of the spec, and set them all on fire. Were it within my power, I would gather every single copy of those specs, and launch them on a spaceship directly into the sun.

(Via David Weiss.)

The Skeptical Hypochondriac ★

New weblog by Dave Pell on health-related topics. From the About page:

This blog is Oscar Goldman and you’re Steve Austin. Reading it is like taking a chug from the fountain of youth and realizing it not only works, it tastes exactly like a McDonald’s Shamrock Shake.

Love the design by Brian Moco, too.