Linked List: November 13, 2009

Friday, 13 November 2009

Thanks to BusyMac for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote BusyCal, their new alternative to iCal. On their web site, they say “Think of it as iCal Pro”. That’s a bold statement, but that’s exactly what BusyCal is. It does nearly everything iCal does, does it better, and adds so much more. The biggest feature is sharing calendars — both on the local network and across the Internet. BusyCal contains all the features of BusySync, which I’ve raved about for years.

BusyCal also offers: a superior event-editing interface, recurring to-dos, a list view, and it syncs with Google Calendar and the iPhone. I consider BusyCal a must-have utility.

Through 1 December 2009, DF readers can save 20 percent off BusyCal with coupon code “DARINGFIREBALL”.

Fighting Fantasy Gamebook Flowcharts ★

Per yesterday’s link regarding the Fighting Fantasy series of gamebooks, and my desire to see their decision trees mapped out as info-graphics, DF reader Neil E. Hobbs kindly pointed me to this collection of SVG flowcharts. Excellent.

(Note: I couldn’t get the SVG images to render properly using Safari, but they seem to render fine in Firefox and Opera. They’re enormous. For those of you using browsers where they don’t render, I’ve exported the map for the first book, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, as a GIF file here.)

NASA Mission Finds Water on Moon ★

Kenneth Chang, reporting for the NYT:

The satellite, known as Lcross (pronounced L-cross), slammed into a crater near the Moon’s south pole a month ago. The impact carved out a hole 60 to 100 feet wide and kicked up at least 24 gallons of water.

“We got more than just whiff,” said Peter H. Schultz, a professor of geological sciences at Brown University and a co-investigator of the mission. “We practically tasted it with the impact.”

Do Music Artists Fare Better in a World With Illegal File-Sharing? ★

Fascinating data assembled by The Times Online, indicating that music artists are making more money in the post-file-sharing era than before, because of a big jump in live performance revenue. The only group that is making less revenue is the record labels.

(Terrible choices on the chart colors, though. Almost impossible to discern the different shades of blue. Update: Reader Chris Moore put this clarified version up on Skitch.)

Today’s XKCD ★

Apt.

App Store Four-Month-Long Wait for a Bug Fix to Be Accepted of the Week: Airfoil Speakers Touch 1.0.1 ★

[Update: Rogue Amoeba’s site was down, but is now back up.]

Rogue Amoeba submitted a small bug fix update to Airfoil Speakers Touch in July. It wasn’t accepted until this week. The reason: when you use it to stream audio from a Mac on your local network, it (a) shows a picture of the type of Mac doing the streaming, and (b) shows a small icon of the app on the Mac playing the audio. Version 1.0 did these things and was in the Store. Version 1.0.1 did the exact same things and was not accepted.

Paul Kafasis:

Rogue Amoeba no longer has any plans for additional iPhone applications, and updates to our existing iPhone applications will likely be rare. The iPhone platform had great promise, but that promise is not enough, so we’re focusing on the Mac.

At a certain point good developers are just going to say, “I don’t need this.” Also, judging from the comments on the piece from die-hard defenders of the App Store, there’s clearly a misconception about where these images of Mac computers and app icons are coming from. These images — which, yes, are copyrighted by Apple — are not stored within the Airfoil Speakers Touch application. They are being sent from Airfoil on the Mac over the network, live, as the audio streams. Airfoil on the Mac is using public APIs to get these images. It’s petty nonsense. It’s like if you wrote a VNC client for the iPhone and Apple rejected it because when you connect to the display of a remote Mac, you can see Apple trademarked icons in the Dock. The UI problem Rogue Amoeba solved was the question of which computer your iPhone Airfoil client is connected to. Which computer? This computer, look at it. Apple, of all companies, should know that a visual solution is better than a textual one.