Linked List: September 29, 2009

Tuesday, 29 September 2009

Ben Galbraith on Palm and Jamie Zawinski 

Ben Galbraith, newly-named director of developer relations at Palm, acknowledges Jamie Zawinski’s problems attempting to publish free WebOS apps.

John Lloyd Inventories the Invisible 

Smart, funny talk from TED.

Dropbox iPhone App Now Available 

Requires OS 3.1, alas, so it won’t install if, say, you’re hanging on to OS 3.0.1 so as to keep using samizdat AT&T tethering.

App Store Rejection of the Week: iSinglePayer 

From the app’s developer:

iSinglePayer, an iPhone application that advocates for single- payer health care reform was rejected from the App Store by Apple because it is “politically charged.” The application displays charts and bullet points about single-payer health care systems, and it allows users to call members of congress. iSinglePayer even calculates your local congressperson using GPS, and displays the amount of money donated to each congressperson from the health sector.

It’s the blatant inconsistency that grates — there are far more “politically charged” apps already in the App Store.

Gizmodo Has Purported Photos of Upcoming Microsoft ‘Pink’ Phones 

Two phones, both sliders with hardware keyboards. One looks a bit like the Pre, the other like every other horizontal slider on the market. The software is from the team Microsoft assembled when they acquired Danger. Who knows, maybe the software is great. (I hope it is.) But how many different mobile OS platforms does Microsoft need? Their mobile strategy is a convoluted mess already with Windows Mobile and Zune, and they’re going to add another?

Cleversimon Summarizes Charlie Brooker 

Cleversimon on this curious piece by Charlie Brooker:

Charlie Brooker’s thesis is “I hate Windows, but I hate strawmen Mac evangelists more, so I’m going to marinate in my misery just to stick it to these imaginary fanboys. I’m unhappy and unproductive, and I’m going to stay unhappy and unproductive — that’ll show ’em.”

(Via the Macalope.)

Update: Clearly, yes, Brooker is not entirely serious, and I’m aware that his schtick is that of the angry contrarian who hates everything. But that doesn’t negate the truth of Cleversimon’s summary.

Speaking of Adobe’s Problems 

There have been some classics at Adobe UI Gripes lately. Think about the fact that someone wrote and approved this dialog box.

So You Think You Can Tell Arial From Helvetica? Quiz 

An important quiz from David Friedman at Ironic Sans. I got Toyota wrong, so, shamefully, only scored a 19/20.

Update: Consolation for my fellow got-them-all-except-Toyota-ers: It’s debatable whether Toyota’s logo counts as Helvetica. Look at those crazy round O’s.

BusyCal 1.0 

BusyMac’s alternative to iCal has shipped. Built-in calendar sharing (BusySync compatible), Google Calendar syncing, superior handling of to-do items, way better UI for creating new events — BusyCal is simply better than iCal in every imaginable way. $40 per computer, with a 20 percent discount for multiple copies and, best of all, a $10 upgrade price for registered users of BusySync.

Update: Here’s BusyMac’s list of top five reasons to use BusyCal instead of iCal.

Entitlement 

Jeff LaMarche has a sharp response to this goofy rant by Patrick Jordan complaining that the upcoming Tweetie 2, which costs just $3, is not a free upgrade for existing users.

Two thoughts:

  • If you don’t think it’s worth $3, don’t buy it.
  • Keep in mind we’re talking about $3 for an app that only runs on handheld devices that cost at least $200, most of which come with a $70/month service.
Zipcar’s iPhone App Launches 

This is one of those things that, from the perspective of my childhood, feels like The Future. A great idea well-done, from the clever gang at Small Society.

Scott Stevenson Is Writing a Cocoa Book for O’Reilly 

I’m looking forward to this one. Sounds like he’s given a lot of thought to one of the toughest problems facing anyone writing a Cocoa book: how much C do you assume the reader knows?

I decided to teach a core set of C concepts that apply directly to Mac and iPhone programming, leaving out the archaic C conventions that Cocoa has better answers for. So this book has only two chapters on C. They focus on just the parts that you need to be a productive Cocoa programmer.

There’s already a web site dedicated to the book, and it’s available as an O’Reilly “Rough Cut”.