Linked List: May 28, 2009

Thursday, 28 May 2009

Jon Rubinstein and Roger McNamee Interview at AllThingsD Regarding the Palm Pre ★

I’m linking to John Paczkowski’s notes from the interview, but they have a nine-minute video of highlights as well, and the video includes a new Pre demo.

New Yorker iPhone Cover Boosts Sales for Brushes App ★

Jenna Wortham on Steve Sprang’s Brushes, the iPhone app used by artist Jorge Colombo to paint this week’s New Yorker cover:

The novelty and popularity of the cover has provided a healthy boost in sales for the 32-year-old who works shifts in a coffee shop when he’s not developing applications for the iPhone and Mac.

On Monday, Mr. Sprang said the application had its highest selling day since it was first released into Apple’s App Store in August, with 2,700 copies at $4.99 apiece flying off the virtual shelves.

Update: Via email, Steve Sprang tells me:

I just wanted to mention that the NYTimes article you’re linking to has many errors and misquotes. The primary one being that I don’t work in shifts at a coffee shop. I do occasionally take my laptop to the coffee shop to work (the source of the confusion), but I am not employed there.

Not that there’s anything wrong with serving coffee — I love coffee and the people who make it — but it did strike me as odd that someone who’s doing pretty well selling software would need a side job like that.

Google Expects 18 Android Models by Year’s End ★

That’s a big jump, since there are only two right now, and just one — the G1 — that’s available in the U.S.

Chrome Extensions ★

Slides from Aaron Boodman’s presentation on the upcoming Chrome extension API at the Google I/O conference. Looks very good, and very Google-y: Chrome extensions are simply signed bundles of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, taking advantage of HTML5 features for drawing and database storage.

Introducing Typekit ★

Jeffrey Veen announces Typekit:

That’s where Typekit comes in. We’ve been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license. We’ve built a technology platform that lets us to host both free and commercial fonts in a way that is incredibly fast, smoothes out differences in how browsers handle type, and offers the level of protection that type designers need without resorting to annoying and ineffective DRM.

Launching this summer. If this is even half as good as it sounds, it’s going to be awesome. The one eyebrow-raiser for me, though, is that they’ve announced the project without naming a single participating foundry.

Palm Pre Syncs Music With iTunes ★

Philip Elmer-DeWitt:

Plug a Pre into a Mac and it syncs, seamlessly, with Apple’s (AAPL) iTunes.

In fact, the iTunes Store treats the Pre just as it would an iPod or an iPhone with one exception: it can’t handle old copy-protected songs.

Questions: Does it also sync with iTunes on Windows? If you add a song to your Pre elsewhere, will it sync back to your Mac? Or is it one-way?