Linked List: February 22, 2010

Monday, 22 February 2010

How John Dowdell Wants Apple to Talk 

Here’s how John Dowdell of Adobe “would prefer Apple communicate”:

Get your CEO to either talk, or not. Put some skin in the game, put your rep on the line with attributed statements. The lack of confirmation, denial, or clarification from Apple PR about rumored quotes from The Great Man is telling.

What a great idea. Respond to every rumored quote attributed to Steve Jobs with a confirmation, denial, or clarification. I’m sure Apple will get right on that.

Flash Player Content, Mouse Events, and Touch Input 

Mike Chambers, responding to this piece at Roughly Drafted, shows that the only mouse events Flash Player doesn’t have on touchscreens are those for right and middle buttons, and scroll wheels. Hover and mousemove events do work. The problem, though, for a hypothetical Flash plugin that renders pages within web pages (as on traditional desktop browsers), is how to tell whether a tap-and-drag within a Flash element is supposed to scroll the entire web page or be passed as a mouse movement event to the Flash element. It can’t do both, and it can’t read the user’s mind. (You can see these problems with straight HTML in MobileSafari today — it’s cumbersome to scroll a <textarea> field within a web page because a single finger tap-and-drag within the <textarea> control still scrolls the entire page, not the text content inside the control.) This is one reason why, when you play a movie embedded in a web page on MobileSafari, it always switches you to a full-screen movie player view. Perhaps you could do that with a mobile browser Flash plugin, but except for Flash content that was designed to fit on a small screen, how do you allow the user to both scroll/pan the content and pass mousemove and hover events to the underlying content? I’m interested to see how the upcoming Android Flash Player solves this.

It’s not so much that you can’t use mouse-centric UIs on a touchscreen, but that they’re inherently awkward.

Flash, Google, VP8, and the Future of Internet Video 

Jason Garrett-Glaser, currently lead developer of x264, on the state of Internet video. Thoughtful, detailed, insightful analysis.

Ngmoco Buys Freeverse 

Freeverse is a long-standing Mac developer and publisher.

Filed Away for Future Claim Chowder 

Peter Ha, writing for Time:

But it’s a brand-new decade, and Microsoft is about to leapfrog Apple — and every other player in the cell-phone world — with the launch of Windows Phone 7 (WP7).

Jackass of the Week: Scott Moritz 

Scott Moritz, last month, reported that the iPhone was going to Verizon this summer. He also reported, in an “exclusive”, that the iPad would debut on Verizon. Now, rather than admit to being wrong, he’s framing it as Apple having delayed it for another year. (Via MacJournals.)

Total Tweets Per Day 

Especially remarkable considering how much more reliable Twitter has been for the last year or so.

Correction of the Week 

Appended to the bottom of this item by the NYT’s Dave Itzkoff, regarding David Remnick’s upcoming biography of Barack Obama:

An earlier version of this post misquoted Mr. Remnick on his comparison between the book and a New Yorker article he had previously written. He said the book would not be a “pumped up” version of the article; he did not say that it would not be a “pimped out” version of the article.

(Via David Kurtz.)

Free Software Foundation’s Open Letter to Google Regarding VP8 

Free Software Foundation to Google:

With your purchase of On2, you now own both the world’s largest video site (YouTube) and all the patents behind a new high performance video codec — VP8. Just think what you can achieve by releasing the VP8 codec under an irrevocable royalty-free license and pushing it out to users on YouTube? You can end the web’s dependence on patent-encumbered video formats and proprietary software (Flash).

There’s a chicken-and-egg problem with regard to client-side support for VP8, but that can be solved over time. (Hardware decoding chips, in particular. The reason H.264 playback is so smooth and uses so little power on mobile gadgets like iPhones is because of dedicated hardware.) Google hasn’t said what they want with On2 and VP8, but it doesn’t seem silly at all to think that they’d want to establish it as a truly free and unencumbered video standard.

Gregg Keizer on Randall Kennedy 

Kennedy flat-out lied about his dual-identity as late as Friday. Keizer:

But on Friday, after I confronted Barth with evidence that linked him to Kennedy — I didn’t yet know they were one and the same — he assured me that although the two had worked together in the past, and in fact, now worked together at Devil Mountain, any allegations that he and Kennedy were the same person were ridiculous.

Paul Thurrott on Randall Kennedy 

Paul Thurrott:

But what makes this delicious is that the “source” for this information was egotistical evil maniac Randall Kennedy, and I want to be clear about this description here, because calling him this makes other egoists, evil people, and maniacs look bad by comparison. Put simply, Kennedy is one of the craziest guys I’ve ever met and I state that with no sense of humor at all; the guy is nuts. Like actually crazy.

Randall Kennedy, Unapologetic, Claims Microsoft Ordered ‘Hit Piece’ Against Him and That InfoWorld Knew What Was Going On 

Kennedy has posted several comments on the ZDNet exposé, including this one:

Would you people please get down off your high horses, remove your blinders and realize this was a “hit piece” order [sic] by MS?

(I’m always wary of believing that commenters really are who they claim to be, so I’m hoping that ZDNet has verified that the comments in this thread from “Randall C. Kennedy” truly are from him.) More damning for InfoWorld is this one, however:

1. IDG knew. Galen Gruman, Executive Editor of InfoWorld knew. As did Eric Knorr. And several others. But poor Gregg Keizer — hey, the man was looking for an anti-Microsoft angle at every turn, and he let his zeal get the best of him. I honestly never meant any harm, especially to Gregg.

2. InfoWorld didn’t let me go. I resigned. In fact, up until Saturday afternoon they were still trying to salvage the situation. They didn’t want to lose 2+ million page views per year, which is what the shock jock persona they developed for me delivered.

Take all of his claims, including his accusations of IDG’s complicity, with a large grain of salt — quite obviously Kennedy’s word isn’t exactly good. (Gregg Keizer is the Computerworld reporter who frequently cited Kennedy’s alter ego “Craig Barth” as an expert source on Windows performance issues.)

Last, Kennedy claims to be semi-retired at the age of 40 and living on Mauritius, a tropical island in the Indian Ocean, famous as the only known home of the dodo.

InfoWorld Fires Randall C. Kennedy 

Eric Knorr, InfoWorld:

Integrity and honesty are core to InfoWorld’s mission of service to IT professionals, and we view Kennedy’s actions as a serious breach of trust. As a result, he will no longer be a contributor to InfoWorld, and we have removed his blog from this site.

A few of Kennedy’s recent greatest hits that DF readers may enjoy:

Going to be hard for InfoWorld to fill his shoes.

Rob Griffiths Leaving Mac OS X Hints 

Griffiths founded the site in 2000 and sold it to Macworld five years ago, but he’s remained the editor. It’s simply a great site. It’s amazing how many Google searches for how to do something on the Mac lead to a Mac OS X Hints entry with the answer.

He’s leaving to join Peter Maurer’s software company, Many Tricks.