Linked List: October 23, 2009

Friday, 23 October 2009

My thanks to Edovia for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote TouchPad, their excellent remote control track pad/keyboard for iPhones and iPod Touches. Just turn on screen sharing on your Mac (in the Sharing panel of System Prefs), and you’re ready to go. For mouse control, TouchPad works just like a track pad, and its keyboard includes Mac-specific keys like Control, Option, Command, Tab, and Escape.

It also has a dedicated remote control mode for use with Front Row. If you have a Mac Mini hooked up to your TV, you’re nuts if you don’t have TouchPad.

Regular price is $3.99, but TouchPad is currently on sale for $1.99 on the App Store.

MG Siegler’s App Store Hypocrisy Update ★

Heck of a job, Apple.

(Includes semi-NSFW screenshots from an “Asian Boobs” app Apple did accept into the store.)

Pre-Order Link for Magic Mouse From Amazon ★

Get a multi-touch mouse, skip the sales tax, and make me rich with Amazon kickback lucre.

AdMob’s August 2009 Mobile Metrics Report ★

Perhaps the most telling thing in these numbers: Windows Mobile has the same share as WebOS. The full report is available in PDF format.

Zed’s Dead, Baby. Zed’s Dead. ★

Apple’s official project to port ZFS to Mac OS X has been canned:

The ZFS project has been discontinued. The mailing list and repository will also be removed shortly.

The writing’s been on the wall for this ever since 10.6 shipped with less support for ZFS than 10.5. There was unofficial “kinda sorta works” support for ZFS in 10.5, but none in 10.6.

Word on the street in Cupertino is that dropping ZFS wasn’t an engineering decision, but a legal one, and it might have had something to do with Oracle’s acquisition of Sun. I don’t know if it was a problem with the terms of the CDDL license, general distrust/dislike for Oracle, or what — only that the word came down from legal that ZFS was a no-go. Update: Perhaps it was the NetApp patent lawsuit against ZFS.

The flip side is that I’ve heard that Apple’s file systems team is full steam ahead on their own next-generation file system. And, perhaps not coincidentally, they’re hiring.

Rob Enderle on the Magic Mouse ★

Rob Enderle on Apple:

Their big news this week was a couple of PCs, a new keyboard and a multi-touch mouse. This last will likely go down in history as one of the lamest devices yet as they should know, given the iPhone, that touch is connected to the screen and not anything else. They likely would have done better putting fir [sic] on the damn thing and building it to fart the star spangled banner at least that would have been patriotic.

I’m coming around to the idea that Enderle’s really a genius and his doofus routine is a Stephen Colbert-esque schtick.

Feel That Microsoft Retail Excitement ★

YouTube video of Lisa Seigneur, a manager at Microsoft’s new Scottsdale Arizona retail store, giving away free Zunes yesterday to the six customers who showed up early.

Where was she two years ago? Selling iPods to Oprah and Bono as a manager at Apple’s Michigan Avenue store in Chicago.

New Round of ‘Get a Mac’ Ads Directly Take on Windows 7 Launch ★

Apple’s pushing the “if you have to go through a major migration to upgrade, why not just upgrade to a Mac?” angle. If you stop and think about it, it’s really rather odd for a company to be adding to the hype surrounding a major product launch from a competitor. But this is exactly what I was getting at last week when I wrote that Windows 7 might be good for both Microsoft and Apple.

GitHub Flavored Markdown ★

The specific case of “user myopia” in the aforelinked piece from Jeff Atwood was related to Markdown formatting for submissions to Super User. Markdown’s popularity — still growing — is incredibly gratifying. But I never intended for it to be used by people who don’t actually know the Markdown formatting rules. I created Markdown for my own use, and, well, I know the formatting rules pretty well.

For use in situations like user-submitted comments, GitHub Flavored Markdown is a superior variant. It changes just three rules from regular Markdown, all of which make for a better set of formatting rules for people who don’t even know the rules.

Jeff Atwood on ‘User Myopia’ ★

Jeff Atwood:

The plain fact is users will not read anything you put on the screen.

That’s a good rule of thumb to keep in mind. It’s not that you shouldn’t bother using words, or that you shouldn’t sweat the details on your UI copywriting, but simply that you should keep in mind that many users won’t read a damn one of them.

Lukas Mathis on Whether iPhone Settings Should Go in the Settings App ★

Lukas Mathis:

If you can at all avoid them, don’t offer preferences.

If you absolutely need to offer preferences, put them into your app.

It’s a subtle distinction, but it’s worth noting that in iPhone OS, they’re called settings, whereas in Mac OS, they’ve always been preferences. Settings are often unavoidable — things like usernames and passwords for online services must be adjustable.

And as for which way the wind is blowing, note that even Loren Brichter, who created the SettingsAreInTheSettingsApp.com web site back in December 2008, has moved the settings for Tweetie 2 out of the Settings app and into Tweetie itself.