Linked List: April 30, 2009

Thursday, 30 April 2009

iPhone vs. Netbook in Extreme Rally Car Typing Challenge ★

What I’d like to see (seriously) is a comparison in typing speed between experienced iPhone and BlackBerry (or other hardware mobile keyboard) users.

Flickr Co-Founder Stewart Butterfield and Architect Cal Henderson Working on Stealth Start-Up ★

Kara Swisher:

According to several sources I spoke to, Henderson was actually not laid off at Yahoo, but is leaving to start a new company — in the social-gaming arena, I am told — with Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield.

That’s what I’ve heard, too, except I heard Henderson left Flickr weeks ago.

Apple Profiles Twitter ★

Un-bylined (as usual) profile of Twitter at Apple.com:

Twitter’s meteoric rise to ubiquity is proof positive that the world, in all its complexity, is eager to embrace simplicity.

BusinessWeek’s Peter Burrows: Next iPhone Will Shoot and Edit Video ★

Peter Burrows:

[My] gut tells me Apple will make the iPhone a one-stop studio for recording, editing, viewing and sharing your own videos. Actually, more than my gut. I’ve spoken with a source that is familiar with Apple’s plans for the next iPhone, which may well be announced at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference in early June. Evidently, shooting video is as easy as it is with a Flip, the ingenious device made by Pure Digital (recently purchased by Cisco).

CRT Emulation for the Atari VCS ★

What a great idea: Ian Bogost commissioned computer science students to modify the Atari 2600 emulator Stella to simulate the visual display of an old CRT television. (Via Andy Baio.)

The Kindle 2 and iPod Shuffle Perform a Scene From ‘The Wrath of Khan’ ★

Hilarious. (Via Ged Maheux.)

iPhone Dominates JD Power Consumer Smartphone Ratings ★

The only category it didn’t score well on was “battery aspects”.

Harry Kalas Calls Springsteen Grand Slam ★

I can listen to this over and over.

DF RSS Feed Sponsorship ★

If you’ve been thinking about sponsoring the DF RSS feed, a scheduling change has opened up the week of May 11-18, and there’s still one open week remaining in June. If you have a product or service you’d like to promote to Daring Fireball’s audience of Apple nerds, designers, nitpickers, perfectionists, and connoisseurs of fine sarcasm, please get in touch.

Update: The week in May has been taken; July is still wide open.

Flickr Hit by Yahoo Layoffs ★

Om Malik:

Yahoo layoffs have started and seem to have hit the Flickr team. Many engineers from the service have been either laid off or are leaving on their own. Rev Dan Catt, Ashot Petrosian and Neil Kandalgaonkar were amongst those who tweeted about their exits. Catt for instance is moving back to UK. I am told Cal Henderson, Flickr Architect [and] a rock star developer, also left, though I have not been able to confirm that.

I’m pretty sure Henderson has indeed left Flickr.

Clearly these are hard times for Yahoo, but as Om says, cutting the Flickr team doesn’t make sense. Flickr is exactly the sort of product Yahoo needs to build on.

The Detroit of Software ★

Exactly right:

The point isn’t MICROSOFT SUXXX0RS!!! AAPL ROOLZ!!!, though if you had to boil it down to four words those ones are much closer to true than to false. Rather, the problem is that Microsoft is the Detroit of software. It makes big, ugly, dangerous, resource-hogging crap, and its “success” is based on… its “success”.

Palm Pre Gets the iSuppli Bullshit Treatment ★

So according to BusinessWeek it’s a “peek under the hood” even when the peekers haven’t yet examined the outside of the device, let alone the inside.