Linked List: December 17, 2009

Thursday, 17 December 2009

Craig Mod: 16 Days in the Himalayas With a Panasonic Lumix GF1 

I love this: a photo essay and camera review together in one piece. Truly remarkable. Regarding the advantages of small viewfinder-less cameras, Mod writes:

About halfway through the trip I realized something strange was happening — the people I photographed were looking me in the eyes. Indeed, they could see my eyes! I had spent so long traveling with a DSLR strapped to my face that I had forgotten about true eye contact.

For better or worse, a camera without a viewfinder is less intimidating. You are no longer half-human half-camera. You’re all human with a tiny play thing in your hand.

So true.

Palm’s Project Ares 

Palm launches public beta of their IDE for writing Mojo apps for WebOS. The whole thing is browser based — works in Safari, Chrome, and Firefox — and looks pretty slick.

Disappointing Quarter From Palm 

It’s safe to say at this point that the Pre, although not a dud, is not a hit. And Palm needs a hit.

Strong Quarter From RIM 

And strong guidance for next quarter.

Apparent Software’s Problems With PayPal 

Horrendous.

More From Fake Steve on AT&T 

More Dan Lyons than “Fake Steve” in this one:

But at some point, and I think it will be soon, the network operators will have to compete, for real, based on quality of service.

The fact that AT&T is already bonking, here in the first five minutes of a 60-minute game, is terrifying. It’s their own fault, of course. Go look at their financial statements and open up the Financial Operations and Statistics Summary and look at capital expenditures over the past eight quarters. I’m no math whiz, but it looks like capex has gone down by about 30% over the time period. Scroll down a bit to the Wireless section and check out data revenues — they’re up 80% over the same period.

There’s simply no excuse for the quality of service AT&T is providing.

Chromium Bug Report: Close Tab Button on the Wrong Side 

Google’s Nicholas Jitkoff on the placement of Chrome’s tab’s close buttons on Mac OS X:

We have decided to keep the close boxes on the right to avoid having them compete with favicons.

Safari doesn’t include per-tab favicons, so there’s no reference design from Apple. I say put the favicon on the left, and have it (the favicon) change into a close button when the mouse hovers over the tab. (Adium does this, but with IM status indicators rather than favicons.) Safari already only shows the tab close buttons when you hover. Update: iChat puts its close-this-chat buttons on the right, but iChat doesn’t have tabs — it has a sidebar list.

There Is No Page Fold 

True. (Via Sam Soffes.)

The Bygone Bureau’s Best New Blogs of 2009 

A slew of great new sites.

Give Me Back My Google 

Re: today’s prior link on crummy Google search results, Give Me Back My Google is a front end to Google web search by Oliver Humpage that filters out affiliate link and product comparison sites from the results. (Via Kevin Maguire.)

Andrews & Dunham Damn Fine Tea 

My thanks to Andrews & Dunham Damn Fine Tea for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote their damn fine tea. They’ve got high standards, eschewing the shotgun approach and instead offering just a few limited-edition varieties of tea at a time. And they have wonderful, stylish branding and packaging to match their high-quality product. Order now for a last-minute holiday gift idea.

Paul Kedrosky:

Over the weekend I tried to buy a new dishwasher. Being the fine net-friendly fellow that I am, I began Google-ing for information. And Google-ing. and Google-ing. As I tweeted frustratedly at the end of the failed exercise, “To a first approximation, the entire web is spam when it comes to appliance reviews”.

I’ve noticed this too, for numerous competitive areas of consumer products. And Google’s conflict of interest is clear: all of the spammy pages clogging the results for such searches display AdWords or other keyword-based advertising. What would solve the problem — but Google is unlikely ever to offer — is an option to show results only from pages that don’t have keyword-based ads.

Counternotions: ‘Google’s Mad Dash to Microsoftdom’ 

Kontra on just how Microsoftian Google is starting to look from a strategic standpoint. He makes a good point about the potential for the Nexus One to piss off existing Android licensees — it could drive them back into the arms of Microsoft and Windows Mobile, even though Windows Mobile was the stated rival of Android at the outset.

What’s happened, of course, is that in the two years since Android was announced Windows Mobile has collapsed and the iPhone is on a meteoric rise.