Linked List: January 30, 2010

Saturday, 30 January 2010

Flash’s Decline on Lifehacker, From 2006 to 2010 ★

Gina Trapani:

Because its readership represents a mixed group of both Mac and Windows users — albeit more tech-savvy ones than your average internet surfer — I ran the numbers for Lifehacker, which currently gets about 39 million visitors a month. As you can see in the chart above, the number of Lifehacker visitors without Flash installed nearly tripled from 2.32% in 2006, to 6.07% in 2009.

Gina quotes this tweet from me today, where I mentioned that for January 2010, 32 percent of DF web site visitors do not have Flash enabled. A little over 7 percent of web visitors were using MobileSafari. I suspect most of the rest have Flash installed, but not enabled thanks to things like ClickToFlash for Safari and Flashblock for Firefox.

The iPad and Chrome OS Netbooks Are on a Collision Course ★

Good observation from MG Siegler: the iPad and Google’s forthcoming Chrome OS netbooks are aimed at the same space — that between smartphones and PCs.

One major difference: Apple’s iPhone and iPad are clearly on the same page technology-wise and concept-wise, whereas Android and Chrome OS are not. The iPad’s popularity (obviously, at this point, measured in terms of interest rather than sales) is propelled by the success of the iPhone and the UIKit App Store. Let’s say Android has a banner year — that the Droid and Nexus One and whatever other handsets are coming in the next few months sell like hotcakes. How does that help sell Chrome OS netbooks, which are neither conceptually nor technically compatible with Android?

That doesn’t mean Android and Chrome OS can’t both succeed. But they exemplify how Google seems like a federated company.

The Omni Group: iPad or Bust ★

Ken Case:

Yes, we already had a big year planned for 2010, with several long-anticipated major product releases — but we think iPad is really important: important enough to spend some time juggling our plans to figure out how we can introduce five new iPad apps.

Yes. Five. We want to bring all five of our productivity apps to iPad: OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, OmniPlan, OmniFocus, and OmniGraphSketcher.

As one wise friend observed to me this week, AppKit may be the next Carbon. UIKit is the frontier.

Bunch of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger ★

The Onion:

“He had a real impact on the literary world and on millions of readers,” said hot-shot English professor David Clarke, who is just like the rest of them, and even works at one of those crumby schools that rich people send their kids to so they don’t have to look at them for four years.

That $50 Billion Annual Revenue Thing ★

I think it has something to do with this.

Update: Throw Google and Intel into the mix as well. And, to be fair, note that however close their revenues are getting, Microsoft is still way out ahead in terms of net income — the margins on software are better than hardware.

Getting Used to the Blue Legos ★

Merlin Mann on what Lee Brimelow’s iPad demo would have looked like if it had itself been rendered in Flash instead of a JPEG.

Future Shock ★

Fraser Speirs gets it:

What you’re seeing in the industry’s reaction to the iPad is nothing less than future shock.

Sunset ★

Adios, Sun Microsystems.