Linked List: May 15, 2009

Friday, 15 May 2009

Groceries 

My thanks to Sophiestication for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote the new 2.0 release of Groceries, the excellent grocery list manager for the iPhone and iPod Touch. Groceries has a beautiful look and feel, and a slew of convenient features. Check out the screencast to see it in action. (Also: there’s a preference setting to use Helvetica instead of Marker Felt.)

Groceries is on sale for a limited time for just $1.

Rumors Regarding Background App Support in iPhone 3.0 

Dan Frommer reports:

Here’s two potential scenarios we’ve heard. Treat these as anecdotal rumors for now, as we don’t know how realistic they are.

  • Apple might allow users to select two apps that can run in the background.
  • Apple might selectively allow some apps to run in the background. We assume that developers could apply for permission to run in the background, and that Apple might approve or deny them based on the resources they need and how well they behave with the operating system’s stability.

Ordinarily I wouldn’t link to something as sketchily sourced as this, but: I heard something very similar from a decent (but second-hand) source back in January during Macworld Expo. What I heard then was that Apple was working on a vastly improved dock for your most-frequently used apps, and that there’d be one special icon position where you could put a third-party app to enable it to run in the background. Take it with a grain of salt, though: my source in January described it as an idea Apple was working on, nothing more.

The major limiting factor right now is RAM. There just isn’t much left for third-party processes on the current hardware’s 128 MB.

New ‘Get a Mac’ Ads 

This one, I think, is clearly a response to Microsoft’s recent ads, and a good one.

About Those iPhone App Store Revenue Numbers  

Good analysis from MG Siegler. (Hiring Siegler is the smartest thing Arrington has done at TechCrunch.)

FTC Cracks Down on Car-Warranty Robocalls 

These dirtbags were calling my cell phone a couple times a week last year. (Via Josh Marshall.)

What a Two-Hour Google Outage in North America Looks Like 

Google’s official explanation was very weird. I’m not saying a two-hour outage, even from Google, is deadly serious. But the jokey analogy to a NY-to-SF flight being re-routed to Singapore is strained — if I were on a North American flight re-routed around the world to Asia, I wouldn’t assume it was an inadvertant misconfiguration. I’d assume the pilot had gone insane.