Linked List: October 19, 2009

Monday, 19 October 2009

Dan Lyons Apparently Thinks Yours Truly Hasn’t Heard About the Redesigned Plastic MacBooks, Redesigned (‘Impressive’) iMacs, Updated Minis (Including One That Ships With Mac OS X Server), the Multi-Touch Magic Mouse, and, as the Wildcard I’m-Not-Sure-I-Really-Believe-It-Myself Out-There Rumor, Maybe Even Some Sort of Mentioned-Nowhere-Else-But-in-This-Very-Headline Multi-Touch Trackpad Gadget for Desktop Macs That Apple Is Set to Release Tomorrow Morning ★

Unseemly for the Fake Steve character to be so wrong (or, frankly, even to care) about what I know.

Apple Reports Fourth Quarter 2009 Results ★

Another record quarter:

The Company posted revenue of $9.87 billion and a net quarterly profit of $1.67 billion, or $1.82 per diluted share. These results compare to revenue of $7.9 billion and net quarterly profit of $1.14 billion, or $1.26 per diluted share, in the year-ago quarter. […]

Apple sold 3.05 million Macintosh computers during the quarter, representing a 17 percent unit increase over the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 10.2 million iPods during the quarter, representing an eight percent unit decline from the year-ago quarter. Apple sold 7.4 million iPhones in the quarter, representing seven percent unit growth over the year-ago quarter.

More Macs and more iPhones than in any previous quarter in history. In a worldwide recession. With the holiday quarter still to come. Yowza.

Update: Check out those after-hours numbers on the stock price: up 7 percent as I type this.

Upcoming BlackBerry Watch? ★

This is a prank, right? Why would the display occupy so little of the surface?

Fake Steve on Microsoft’s Collapse ★

Nice Fake Steve piece by Dan Lyons, simultaneously providing spot-on business analysis of Microsoft’s slide into technical irrelevance and media analysis of this profile by Ashlee Vance from yesterday’s Sunday New York Times, which (the NYT profile) was remarkably negative. Be sure also to read his follow-up on the Times’s “objectivity” straitjacket.

Genesis Does What Nintendon’t ★

Forerunner of Verizon’s “iDon’t” campaign? (Thanks to DF reader Aditya Sood.)

Boy Genius Report on the Motorola Droid ★

BGR has hands-on first impressions of the Droid:

It’s thin. Just slightly thicker than an iPhone 3GS and the thinnest QWERTY-slider we’ve ever seen.

That makes me wonder just how thin they could make one without a hardware keyboard.

Mozilla Working on Mystery iPhone App ★

Om Malik:

Earlier today when I interviewed Mozilla CEO John Lilly onstage at the Play conference, an annual confab organized by the students of the Haas School of Business at the University of Berkeley, he hinted that the company was going to launch a brand new application for the iPhone, though he declined to reveal any details. “Mozilla will release an app to the iPhone App Store in the next few weeks,” Lilly said. “It’ll surprise people.”

Malik guesses that it has something to do with Weave, Mozilla’s still-in-progress sync service. That’d be my guess as well. But I strongly doubt that they’re working on a mobile web browser, as Kevin C. Tofel guesses here. Tofel points to the fact that Apple has approved numerous third-party web browser apps, but what he overlooks is that all of those apps are using the iPhone’s system-standard WebKit framework for rendering and JavaScript. And none of those browsers run in the background, like MobileSafari does. If Mozilla is working on an iPhone browser of some sort using the system WebKit framework, no problem. And I suppose it’s possible they’re working on an iPhone port of their Fennec mobile rendering engine — but I’d be flabbergasted if Apple were to approve that.

There are third-party web browser apps in the App Store, but there are no third-party HTML rendering engines or JavaScript interpreters.

Regarding the Pricing of the Wolfram Alpha iPhone App ★

Wolfram has released a native iPhone app for their Wolfram Alpha “computational knowledge engine”. It looks good, but what’s getting the most attention is the price: $50. MG Siegler says it should be $5 or $10. Rafe Needleman says it’s overpriced.

I haven’t bought it, but I’m glad they’ve set the price high. There’s widespread consensus that the current race-to-the-bottom in App Store pricing discourages the development of deep, significant applications. If all anyone is buying are quick-hit apps, then all anyone will make are quick-hit apps. We can’t have it both ways, folks. By pricing the app at $50, Wolfram is clearly saying, “This app is significant.”

It’ll be interesting to see how they do on the top-grossing list. Maybe it won’t work, but I’m glad to see someone try.

Emoji RubyGem ★

New Ruby gem by Ryan Orr, making sense out of the emoji chaos:

There are 3 carriers (NTT DoCoMo, SoftBank & Au by KDDI) who’ve all created their own set of emoji glyphs in differing areas of the private-use range Unicode character space. Basic emoji supports 176 glyphs plus an additional 76 for C-HTML 4.0 for a total of 252. The iPhone — which uses the SoftBank implementation — supports 471 emoji glyphs and to top it off, Apple and Google have been working on a standards proposal for inclusion in ISO/IEC 10646 which proposes 722 glyphs in total. Confused yet? Right then.

With millions of mobile phones supporting emoji & Internet connections, web developers want to take advantage of the extended glyphs in the data they send to mobile devices but in the Ruby community there doesn’t seem to be a clear library that implements all 4 standards. Hence Emoji for Ruby.

Roger Ebert on ‘Rashomon’ ★

Ebert on Rashomon:

Its very title has entered the English language, because, like “Catch-22,” it expresses something for which there is no better substitute.

Raphaël: Open Source JavaScript Vector Graphics Library ★

Impressive work by Dmitry Baranovskiy. Many of the demos work just fine on the iPhone, too. (Via Andy Baio.)