Linked List: August 12, 2009

Wednesday, 12 August 2009

Smoking Apples’s Roundup of iPhone Notes Apps ★

Jonas Wisser has a good survey of the current field of iPhone notes apps. He comes to the same conclusion I did: Simplenote is the best. But there are several others worth a look, especially if you don’t like Simplenote’s minimalism. E.g., Notespark, which finally supports SSL for syncing.

How iPhone Sudoku Grab Works ★

iPhone Sudoku Grab is a 99-cent iPhone app that lets you snap a photo of a printed Sudoku puzzle, then lets you play it or just shows you the solution. Developer Chris Greening explains how it works. (Via Andy Baio.)

Snow Leopard Goes GM ★

What I’m hearing is that it went GM last Friday and could be on sale by Friday August 28.

The Impossible Cool ★

Just what it says on the tin. Outstanding.

Goodnight, Suite RISC ★

John Nack:

It’ll probably come as no surprise that Adobe is following Apple’s lead & going Intel-only with the next generation of the Creative Suite. That is, CS4 is the last version that’ll run on PowerPC-based Macs.

Texas Judge Blocks Microsoft From Selling Word ★

Patent trolling at its worst.

Stephen Hawking and Britain’s NHS ★

Stephen Hawking: “I wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS. I have received a large amount of high-quality treatment without which I would not have survived.”

The Guardian has a series of good articles comparing the health care systems in the U.K. and U.S. My favorite so far is this one, which puts the facts to a series of claims circulating in the U.S., and lists the bad along with the good (e.g., breast cancer survival rates are significantly higher in the U.S.)

What’s weird to me about this focus on the NHS from conservatives here in the U.S. is twofold: (a) the current reform proposals are not at all like the U.K. system; and (b) the NHS is quite popular in the U.K. — if it were as bad as these U.S. conservatives claim, don’t you think Britons would be up in arms about it?

Microsoft, Nokia Team to Put Office Apps on Mobile Phones ★

Prediction: Microsoft, gunning for market share, eventually tries to pull a Yahoo on Nokia and get them to switch to Windows Mobile.

Lance Ulanoff: ‘Love My BlackBerry Bold, Hate AT&T 3G’ ★

It’s not just iPhone owners.