Linked List: December 11, 2009

Friday, 11 December 2009

VMware Fusion 3 

My thanks to VMware Fusion 3.0 for again sponsoring the DF RSS feed.

I still remember the PowerPC days, running Windows on my Mac via VirtualPC for web browser testing — amazed that it worked, but cursing the wretched performance. The ability to run native x86 virtualized OSes is perhaps the best single result of Apple’s switch to Intel processors. If you need to run Windows apps on your Mac, VMware Fusion is without question the best way to do it. Fantastic performance and a great Mac interface.

Just $79.99 for a new license, and just $39.99 to upgrade to 3.0 from a previous version.

Last Chance for This Batch of DF T-Shirts 

Today’s your last chance to order a DF t-shirt for this go-around. We’ll be printing new shirts to cover all the orders from this week over the weekend, so if you want one, be sure to get your order in tonight.

These shirts are top-notch, and could win an award for Best T-Shirt Representing the Brand of a Weblog, if there were such an award and if I were the sort of person who entered such contents. There isn’t and I’m not, but that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t look good in these shirts, because you would.

Update: Now closed. Thanks to everyone who bought one.

Widespread AT&T Outages in San Francisco 

Related to the last item.

Fake Steve’s Not-So-Brief Chat With AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson 

Exactly.

Matt Haughey Is Selling PVRblog.com on eBay 

No reserve price, either. 180,000 RSS feed subscribers, according to Feedburner. Can’t wait to see what it goes for. Update: PVRblog was literally an AdSense case study.

2009 Eddy Award Winning Apps 

Great choices from Macworld for the year’s best software: BusyCal, Bento, Dropbox, Things, PDFPen, ClickToFlash, Braid, RipIt, Logic Express, Acorn, Picasa, Painter, and FontExplorer X.

‘I Am Locking the Wikipedia Article on Our Sex Life’ 

Alan Trotter at McSweeney’s. (Via Coudal.)

Dan Frakes’s 2009 Mac Gems of the Year 

I use a bunch of these.

T-Mobile Users Can Bill Android Market Purchases to Their Phone Bill 

Also via Tim Bray, and I agree with him: this could be a big deal.

Bada Development Fundamentals (PDF) 

Developer introduction to Samsung’s upcoming proprietary mobile OS. C++, not Java. I can’t remember the last new consumer-facing system I’ve seen using C++ as the default language. (Via Tim Bray.)

Update: I forgot about the game consoles: Xbox 360, PS3, and Wii all have C++ APIs as their default.

Arrington’s Bad JooJoo 

Mosspuppet on the Arrington/Crunchpad/JooJoo saga.

Apple Relaxing App Store Policy Regarding Use of Private APIs? 

At least one developer got a note from the review team calling out a private API call, but the app was accepted and they asked for the private API call to be removed in the next update.

I think it’d be a huge mistake to assume this means private API calls are now allowed, but flexibility is a good thing.

Update: Here’s another one.

Apple Says Nokia Wanted Cross-License for Apple iPhone Patents 

Engadget’s Nilay Patel is reading Apple’s filing, and I think he’s found the heart of the disagreement:

Apple says Nokia’s patents aren’t actually essential to GSM / UMTS, denies infringing them, and says they’re invalid and / or unenforceable anyway. Apple also says Nokia wanted unreasonable license terms for the patents, including a cross-license for Apple’s various iPhone device patents as part of any deal, which Apple clearly wasn’t willing to do.

The big question about this dispute all along has been why Apple didn’t just license Nokia’s GSM/UMTS patents. Supposedly every other GSM phone maker (or at least all the other major ones) does, and they’re relatively cheap. The answer is that Nokia didn’t just want licensing fees from Apple: they wanted cross-license rights to Apple’s own iPhone patents.

Full Text of Apple’s Counterclaim Against Nokia 

John Paczkowski has the full text of Apple’s filing, including a list of the patents Apple claims Nokia is infringing.

Apple Files Countersuit Against Nokia 

Jim Dalrymple:

Apple on Friday said it had launched a countersuit against the world’s largest cellphone maker, Nokia.

According to Apple, Nokia is infringing on 13 of its patents. Apple’s lawyer was very blunt in his statement concerning the case.

“Other companies must compete with us by inventing their own technologies, not just by stealing ours,” said Bruce Sewell, Apple’s General Counsel and senior vice president.

I wouldn’t want to fuck with Apple Legal.