Linked List: December 15, 2009

Tuesday, 15 December 2009

Microsoft Acknowledges MSN China Copies Code and Features From Plurk ★

Microsoft:

We are obviously very disappointed, but we assume responsibility for this situation. We apologize to Plurk and we will be reaching out to them directly to explain what happened and the steps we have taken to resolve the situation.

Android Market Only Open to Developers in Five Countries ★

Swedish mobile developer wants to sell apps in the Android Market but can’t, because you can’t create a Google merchant account in Sweden.

Dan Bricklin’s Note Taker ★

Speaking of new iPhone apps by famous creators, Dan Bricklin — who invented the spreadsheet in the early ’80s — has an iPhone app called Note Taker. Instead of typing, you write on screen as though your finger is a stylus. In practice, it’s even crazier than it sounds. It doesn’t attempt to translate your handwriting to actual text (à la the Newton) — you just get an image of your handwriting. It’s downright wacky — I can’t imagine how this is faster for anyone than using the on-screen keyboard.

Lou Zoom ★

Large-type front-end to the iPhone contact database. Designed by Lou Reed. Yeah, that Lou Reed.

Update: Fireballed; here’s a link to it in the App Store if you can’t get his site to load. And so yes, today’s the day I knocked over Lou Reed’s web site.

Pastebot ★

New iPhone app from the guys at Tapbots: a clipboard manager for stored images and snippets of text. Done with the usual Tapbots visual (and audio) panache. And the really cool thing: they have a Mac counterpart that lets you transfer your clipboard contents from the Mac to iPhone and vice versa. Slick. $2 cheap.