Linked List: September 28, 2009

Monday, 28 September 2009

Merlin Mann:

Each release of the Adobe apps I use (and used to so depend on) feels less stable, more bloated, and — easy as this was to overlook for a REALLY long time — increasingly less Mac-like. Or at least less OS X-like. They feel like sketches of OS X applications, drawn from memory.

I’ve written before about how “non-Mac-like” is often a non-specific insult, that it really just means “I don’t like that”. But in a way, that’s exactly what’s wrong with the modern Adobe CS suite. It does all sorts of things Mac users don’t like.

Jamie Zawinski: ‘My Ongoing Kafka-Esque Nightmare of Dealing With Palm and Their App Catalog Submission Process’ ★

Still might be better than trying to accomplish the same thing in Apple’s App Store.

Apple and the Environment ★

Comprehensive reporting of the total environmental impact of Apple’s operations and products.

BusinessWeek has more:

Apple’s real goal is to change the terms of the debate. Company executives say that most existing green rankings are flawed in several respects. They count the promises companies make about green plans rather than actual achievements. And most focus on the environmental impact of a company’s operations, but exclude that of its products.

WebOS 1.2 Does Not Restore iTunes Syncing ★

I hope for Palm’s sake that they’ve given up on this.

Loren Brichter on Tweetie 2.0 for iPhone ★

Loren Brichter on the imminent Tweetie 2.0 for iPhone:

It contains a metric ton of new stuff. There is full persistence — not just caching tweets for offline reading, but remembering where you are in the app. You could be viewing a conversation of a tweet of a recent mention of one of your followers, quit the app (or get a phone call), and when you come back, the entire UI stack is restored.

I’ve been using it for a few weeks, and there’s a ton of new stuff (all of it copiously detailed by Brichter), but the persistence is the one that means the most to me. The effect is that you can leave Tweetie at any point, use another app, then go back to Tweetie, and it’s almost as though you never left. Feels like switching, rather than quitting/relaunching.

Maximum PC on Thermaltake’s Level 10 PC Chassis ★

This is the first interesting PC design in recent memory that isn’t even vaguely an Apple rip. And it’s a true design — a rethinking of how things work, not just a layer of decoration.

Hacking Snow Leopard’s Weather Widget to Show the Last Time It Was Updated ★

Back in 2005, I published a piece explaining in detail how to hack the then-current version of Apple’s Dashboard Weather widget to show a time stamp indicating when the data had last been updated. Unsurprisingly, those instructions broke in a subsequent revision to the Weather widget. I never bothered to do it again because, starting with Leopard, the Weather widget’s refresh latency reached a point where it no longer seemed necessary.

However, I know some people — especially those on high-latency network connections — still enjoy this hack. For them, TJ Luoma has kindly posted updated instructions for hacking the Weather widget on Snow Leopard. There’s even a shell script that applies all the necessary patches in one fell swoop.

Peter Cohen: ‘Home Sharing Is iPod Touch’s Killer App for Families’ ★

It’s been the case all along that iPhone apps have the same sharing policy as DRM-protected music and video from the iTunes Store: you can share them between up to five computers registered with the same iTunes account credentials. What’s new now is that iTunes 9 makes it easy and obvious how to do so, right within iTunes itself.

Update: Server was fireballed for a bit, but is back up now.

William Safire’s Favorite New Yorker Cartoon ★

Great choice.

Yankees Win A.L. East Title ★

In the sweetest way: completing a three-game sweep of the wildcard-bound Red Sox.