Linked List: January 5, 2010

Tuesday, 5 January 2010

NYT: Steve Ballmer to Unveil Microsoft/HP ‘Slate-Type Computer’ Tomorrow at CES 

Maybe it’s awesome.

I Can’t Believe Walt Mossberg Is Going Along With Google’s Marketing Line That the Nexus One Is Part of a New Device Category Called ‘Super-Smartphones’ 

Or “superphones” or whatever. I really like the looks of the Nexus One — clearly the best Android phone to date, and almost certainly the best mobile device in the world next to the iPhone 3GS — but why invent a silly new term on top of the already plenty-vague “smartphone”?

Update: Ends up Mossberg has been using this term for a while. What’s next? Ultra-smartphones? Über-smartphones? Super-duper-smartphones?

Quattro Wireless Confirms Acquisition by Apple 

CEO Andy Miller is now vice president of mobile advertising at Apple.

Eric Jacobsen on Busted iPhone-Optimized Web Site Redirects 

Very annoying, and getting worse in my experience.

Unison 2.0 

Major update to Panic’s gorgeous Usenet client for Mac OS X. Even if you don’t use Usenet, it’s interesting just to see the UI details, like, say, the green demo period expiration reminder in the window title bar, and the section headers in the source list. Lovely work.

NSConference 2010 

Indie developer conference — one-day for iPhone, two-day for Mac — being held in Atlanta February 21–23 (and in the U.K. February 1–3). Good speaker lineup, including Wolf Rentzsch and Aaron Hillegass.

Om Malik Interviews Google’s Mobile Chief Andy Rubin 

Regarding Android partners like Verizon and Motorola being upset about the Nexus One:

“People shouldn’t focus too much on the device (Nexus One),” said Rubin. “What’s more important is the strategy behind the devices.”

Yes, what better way to get the press not to focus on a device than to hold a big press conference to announce a device, talk about how great it is, and give one away to everyone who attends?

Cinch 

$7 window management utility from Irradiated Software. Drag any standard window to the left or right edge of a screen to resize it to fill that half of the screen, or drag to the top of the screen to zoom it full-screen. A clever, simple Mac take on Windows 7’s “window snap” feature. See also: SizeUp, sort of a big brother to Cinch. (Via Andy Ihnatko on MBW.)

Nexus One Tech Specs 

Highlights include the 1 GHz Snapdragon CPU, 512 MB of RAM (the iPhone 3GS only has 256), a second microphone used for noise cancellation, and 720x480 video from the camera. Only on T-Mobile today, but they’ve announced that it’s coming to Verizon “this spring”. (Mark Pilgrim’s live-tweet coverage offers a good run-down of the highlights from the press event.)

LaunchCodes: Creator Code Support for Snow Leopard 

New $5 utility by Ross Carter and Patrick Thomson. LaunchCodes partially restores the pre-10.6 behavior of setting default applications for files based on HFS creator codes (rather than the 10.6 behavior of relying solely on file name extensions). It does this with no hacks, just good clean by-the-book cleverness.

It’s not perfect, though, as Michael Tsai explains.

Consumerist Exposé on Best Buy PC ‘Optimization’ 

Consumerist:

When the Consumer Reports engineers compared three “optimized” computers to ones with default factory settings, there was no performance improvement. In one case, an optimized laptop actually performed 32% worse than the factory model.

It’s also a bait-and-switch tactic, to get you to pay $40 more than the advertised price.

Three Billion Served 

Apple announces the three-billionth download from the App Store:

“Three billion applications downloaded in less than 18 months — this is like nothing we’ve ever seen before,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “The revolutionary App Store offers iPhone and iPod touch users an experience unlike anything else available on other mobile devices, and we see no signs of the competition catching up anytime soon.”

Walt Mossberg Reviews Litl, the Cloud-Based Laptop 

A terrific idea, but performance and battery life aren’t there yet.