Linked List: January 20, 2010

Wednesday, 20 January 2010

WSJ: ‘Apple Sees New Money in Old Media’ ★

WSJ report by Yukari Kane and Ethan Smith, very light on substance but chock full of interesting rumors regarding The Tablet and deals with book, magazine, and newspaper publishers to sell content through iTunes. Also this, near the end:

Apple has also been planning a revamp of its iTunes music service by creating a Web-based version of it that could launch as soon as June, say people familiar with the matter. Tentatively called iTunes.com, the service would allow customers to buy music without going through the specialized iTunes program on computers and iPhones.

Star Wars Opening Crawl, Using Only HTML and CSS ★

Guillermo Esteves just made my day. You can even select the text as it goes by.

Update: Works on MobileSafari on the iPhone. (Does not work in Android 2.1’s Browser.)

The White House Has an iPhone App ★

Includes live video streaming for the president’s public events. (They’ve got a device-neutral mobile web site in the works as well.)

New York Times to Charge Frequent Readers of Web Site Beginning in 2011 ★

Richard Pérez-Peña, reporting for the NYT:

Starting in early 2011, visitors to NYTimes.com will get a certain number of articles free every month before being asked to pay a flat fee for unlimited access. Subscribers to the newspaper’s print edition will receive full access to the site without extra charge.

Romenesko has the memo from Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger.

Count me in with Dave Winer’s take, though:

My opinion, the NYT will never implement the paywall they talked about today. If they were going to do it, they’d just do it.

Amazon Switches to 70-30 Revenue Split for Kindle ★

Shh. Do you hear that? Off in the distance. It sounds like a freight train from Cupertino coming down the track.

Amazon hears it.

Speaking of Wednesday ★

Today’s the day for Indie Relief: loads of great software, all proceeds to Haitian earthquake relief.

‘Today Is Wednesday’ ★

“No coupon codes. No minimums. No bullshit.”

BumpTop for Mac ★

Remember BumpTop, the sort-of 3D desktop file manager that shipped for Windows back in October? The Mac version shipped today, for $29. It’s interesting. I’ve had the beta versions for a few weeks, and I can vouch that it doesn’t feel like a Windows app ported to the Mac; it feels like a real Mac app.

But: I quickly realized I had no need for it. I found it fun to play with, and the “piles” idea is something that has been rumored for the Mac dating back to the aborted Copland project in the 90s — and it actually is very nice to have a way to group related file system objects together without putting them into a folder which itself is a file system object and which introduces another layer of hierarchy. The thing is, I don’t just want better file management for my desktop. I want better file management everywhere. BumpTop is a Finder alternative that only handles one folder: ~/Desktop/. And the 3D stuff, with a weird perspective on “walls”, just seems silly.

If you spend a lot of time dealing with files and folders on your desktop, though, it’s definitely worth a look.