Linked List: December 10, 2009

Thursday, 10 December 2009

Daring Fireball RSS Feed Sponsorship 

Lately, the weekly DF RSS feed sponsorships have been sold out 10 or more weeks in advance. If you don’t want to wait that long, you’re in luck: some last-minute scheduling changes have opened up the next two weeks. If you have a product or service that you’d like to promote to Daring Fireball readers, get in touch.

Update Now sold out through the end of February.

Airlock 

New $7.77 utility for Mac OS X — uses Bluetooth to detect when your iPhone or iPod Touch is nearby, and locks/unlocks your Mac accordingly. Clever. (Via Joseph McLaughlin.)

The Invisible: ‘A Piece With a Lot of Screenshots About the Close Tab Behaviour in Google Chrome’ 

Excellent, detailed analysis by Basil Safwat regarding some very clever UI design in Chrome’s tab-closing behavior.

(But he’s wrong that it excuses putting the close buttons on the right. It’s a grammar thing — in the Mac UI grammar, close buttons go on the left. Even if you buy Safwat’s “least-funky behavior” argument, I’d argue that Chrome’s clever (but subtle!) tab-resizing-on-close behavior is far less funky than putting close buttons on the right side of a Mac app. I think Google put them on the right simply to stay consistent with its Windows, Linux, and Chrome OS variants — putting cross-platform consistency over Mac OS consistency. Update: And “Firefox does it too” is not a ringing endorsement for good Mac UI design. Firefox is a poster child for crummy fake-Mac-UI cross-platform ports.)

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 11 

“Hang on to your wigs and keys.”

Editor & Publisher Folds 

Speaking of the collapse of the newspaper industry.

Curious iPhone App of the Week (iTunes Store Link) 

“Google Wave” — a $1 iPhone app from developer David Crampton that seems to be nothing more than a web view that loads Google’s Wave web site.

Amazon Offering Free On-Demand Movies With Purchase of Blu-ray or DVD 

Interesting offer from Amazon:

When you purchase select DVD and Blu-ray titles from Amazon.com you will also receive an Amazon Video On Demand standard definition version as a gift with purchase. You’ll be able to instantly enjoy the video on demand version on your Mac, PC, compatible device or compatible TV when it is available.

But if you’re buying a Blu-ray disc, why would you want to watch a standard-def On Demand version?

David Pogue on the Nook 

Bleh.

Walt Mossberg on the Nook 

Eh.

Jeff Richardson on Dragon Dictation for iPhone 

Jeff Richardson:

Simply dictate a message to your iPhone and, almost instantly, your voice is transcribed with amazing accuracy. With one tap you can send the transcription to an e-mail. You can dictate a message to your iPhone a heck of a lot faster than you can tap a message on the iPhone keyboard, even if you are a good iPhone typist, so with Dragon Dictation you can save a lot of time writing messages or other text. And for a limited time, this amazing app is free. All I can say is, wow.

The app truly is impressive — it’s both faster and more accurate than I imagined possible.

Gorillacam 

Free iPhone camera app from Joby (makers of the excellent Gorillapods), adds things like a level indicator, time-lapse, and a self-timer. I wish the built-in Camera app had a level indicator.

TeuxDeux 

Clever, simple, date-based online to-do app from Swissmiss and FictiveKin.

‘Twilight of the American Newspaper’ 

Elegiac essay in Harper’s by Richard Rodriguez. (Via Dean Allen.)

Nokia Confirms New York and Chicago Flagship Stores Are Closing in Early 2010 

Same deal with the London store — big expensive stores that failed to generate sales. Chris Ziegler at Engadget writes:

The way we saw it, these stores were never about sales; they were about exposing Nokia to the public and vice versa in a cool, hip environment, and regardless of how you feel about the company’s handsets, they’d effectively accomplished that with the flagship strategy.

What kind of store is not about sales? That’s like saying you’ve got a pen that isn’t about writing.