Linked List: September 8, 2009

Tuesday, 8 September 2009

Financial Times: No Beatles/iTunes Announcement Tomorrow 

Joseph Menn, reporting for The Financial Times on tomorrow’s Apple music event:

The San Francisco event will come the same day as the release of the remastered  Beatles catalog, although that material itself won’t be available via Apple’s online store iTunes.

“Conversations between Apple and EMI are ongoing and we look forward to the day when we can make the music available digitally. But it’s not tomorrow,” Ernesto Schmitt, EMI’s global catalog  president, told the FT’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson.

Sprint Pulls $99 Palm Pre Special Offer Six Hours After It Started 

John Paczkowski on a very odd special offer from Sprint.

Leonard Lin on Two Months With the Palm Pre 

I love reviews like this — ones written after the novelty has faded and the experience has settled in. Even better, Lin has experience with the iPhone and an Android phone to compare against.

Flickr iPhone App 

New official iPhone Flickr client (iTunes link). I love the home screen interface; it’s a really nice design. You open it up and it shows you Ken-Burns-style zoom-and-pan animations of your friends’ photos. But man, is this app crashy for me. Crashed when I tried to upload an image. (Then it worked.) Crashed when I tried to snap a new photo from within the app. Tried twice again, crashed twice again. Three strikes and it’s out.

And for browsing pictures from friends, it’s not as good as the iPhone-optimized m.flickr.com web site. For the social aspects of Flickr, this app just doesn’t feel very Flickr-y.

Creating a ‘Make Title Case’ Service in Snow Leopard 

I made one just like this the day I installed the WWDC Snow Leopard seed. (My personal shortcut for this service: Command-Shift-T.)

Before Apple Introduced the iPhone 

Nice piece by Kontra at Counternotions, putting the current Apple/iPhone criticism in context:

So for a more reasoned perspective, let us take a breath and remember what the world was like before Apple introduced the iPhone:

  1. Carriers ruled the industry with an iron fist
  2. To access carriers’ networks handset makers capitulated everything
  3. Carriers dictated phone designs, features, apps, prices, marketing, advertising and branding
  4. Phones were reduced to cheap, disposable lures for carriers’ service contracts