Linked List: August 4, 2009

Tuesday, 4 August 2009

The Smoking Gun Unmasks Criminal Telephone Prank Ring ★

Terrific investigative reporting from The Smoking Gun unmasks the perpetrators of a series of cruel and dangerous telephone pranks. (Via Glenn Fleishman.)

Ironic Sans: The Google Voice Speed Dial Bookmarklet Generator ★

David Friedman:

I’ve put together a web app at http://www.ironicsans.com/gv that generates bookmarklets for anyone you want to call with Google Voice, allowing you to organize your contacts as Safari bookmarks. You can arrange them in folders, and then dialing from your bookmarks is as simple as dialing from your normal Contacts app: just tap to dial!

I tried it out and it works like a charm. And it’s proof that you don’t even need a native app to place Google Voice calls from your iPhone. By blocking these apps, Apple and AT&T are simply making it a bit more inconvenient to use Google Voice.

The HTML 5 Equilibrium ★

Jeremy Keith:

The WHATWG process isn’t democratic. There’s no voting on issues. Instead, Hixie acts as a self-described benevolent dictator who decides what goes into and what comes out of the spec. That sounds, frankly, shocking. The idea of one person having so much power should make any right-thinking person recoil. But here’s the real kick in the teeth: it works.

HTML 5 Canvas and Audio Experiment ★

Fabulous HTML 5 demo using the new canvas and audio elements (and using the aforelinked Modernizr library.)

NeXTStep Icons Still in Mac OS X Leopard ★

The NeXT screenshot camera icon is still in Snow Leopard, too. Are there any others?

Modernizr ★

New open source JavaScript library by Faruk Ateş that handles browser detection for cutting edge CSS 3 and HTML 5 features.

Jonathan Alter: U.S. Heathcare System Is Just Fine As-Is ★

Satire cuts through the rhetoric.

Pagehand 1.0.4 ★

“An elegant little word processor” is the perfect slogan for this new app by Ross Carter — a $40 writing app for Mac OS X with a thoughtful UI designed to stay out of your way, with a focus on helping you produce beautiful typographic output. The native file format is PDF, so there’s no document format lock-in.

I know it sounds crazy to launch a new word processor today. But Pagehand is a labor of love, and is definitely worth a look.