Linked List: March 11, 2010

Thursday, 11 March 2010

Speaking of SXSW, if you’re going, you’re going to love SitBy.us, an iPhone-optimized web app from Weightshift. As they describe it:

If you’ve ever been to SXSW Interactive, you know that it can be difficult to find where your friends are sitting in a panel, particularly in the massive auditoriums and the notorious 18BCD. Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to let your friends know where you’re sitting — or find out where they are — in an easy-to-use app?

SXSW Session: ‘Online Advertising: Losing the Race to the Bottom’ ★

Speaking of online advertising, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point to Jim Coudal’s and my joint session at SXSW this weekend. Mark it on your schedule: Sunday at 3:30pm.

Why Did Nick Denton Truncate Gawker Media’s RSS Feeds? ★

Speaking of RSS and advertising revenue, Felix Salmon has a piece on Gawker Media’s decision to switch from full-text to excerpts in their feeds. He quotes Nick Denton from this comment on Lifehacker:

Gawker Media is an ad-supported company. RSS ads have never realized their potential. At the same time we sell plenty of ads on our website. So, yes, it is in our interest for people to click through if enticed by an excerpt.

Salmon, in an update, points to this comment from Matt McAlister, who says that The Guardian has seen web traffic go up after switching from excerpts to full-text feeds. I.e., even without monetizing the feeds themselves, The Guardian thinks switching to full-text feeds was a win financially.

Relative Performance of Rich Media Content Across Browsers and Operating Systems ★

These benchmarks from Mike Chambers are more interesting to me than the aforelinked ones from Jan Ozer, if only because he ran them on the same hardware. Safari once again blows away Chrome and Firefox on the Mac — especially on JavaScript/Canvas examples, but even on Flash ones. Perhaps more interestingly, his results show Flash Player doing pretty well on the Mac (in Safari) compared to Windows overall, including HD video playback from Vimeo.

Rob Foster on the Elimination of File Systems as a User-Accessible Part ★

Rob Foster, observing how family and friends use their Macs:

Because they can now actually use their computers instead of simply restarting them, I’m able to better see how they use them. And the one commonality I’ve seen is that no one knows how to use the file system.

Unfortunately for the average person, the file system is so complex that everything outside of the desktop and the documents folder appears to be a vast labyrinth which most likely hides booby traps and minotaurs.

‘Businesses Don’t Get to Pick the Timetable for When Their Preferred Model Takes a Permanent Dirt Nap’ ★

Speaking of Merlin Mann, he’s got a nice retort to Marco Arment’s piece from a few days back regarding media consumption and entitlement.

AppleInsider: iPhone OS 4.0 Multitasking Support for Third-Party Apps ★

No technical details provided. My hunch is that they’re right, though.

Html5media — JavaScript to Enable ‘video’ Element for All Browsers ★

Speaking of HTML5 video and Flash, Dave Hall has released a new GPL-licensed JavaScript project that lets you embed videos in HTML using the simple HTML5 <video> element; for browsers that don’t support HTML5 video, the Html5media script swaps in a Flash player.

Jan Ozer’s Flash Player vs. HTML5 Video Performance Tests ★

Ozer draws the conclusion that Flash Player’s access to hardware acceleration is the key advantage to its superior performance on Windows. And, indeed, the best results in the whole test were for Flash Player 10.1 on Windows. (I wouldn’t be surprised if Mac OS X eventually offers similar APIs — seems like a serious performance win.)

But there are a lot of other interesting numbers in Ozer’s results. Particularly if you look at Flash Player 10.0, which doesn’t use hardware acceleration on Windows, either. In both Chrome and Firefox, Flash uses about twice as much CPU time to render the same video on the Mac as on Windows. Flash performance is noticeably better in Safari on the Mac than it is in Chrome or Firefox — I did not know that. Video performance in Chrome for Mac — both HTML5 and Flash — is downright terrible. (YouTube ought to stop telling Mac-using Safari users to “Try YouTube in a fast, new web browser!” with a link to Chrome.)

Bottom line: Flash plays H.264 video at least twice as efficiently on Windows as on the Mac; Safari’s native HTML5 video playback is very efficient.

The whole test might need to be taken with a grain of salt though. Ozer couldn’t get Bootcamp working on his MacBook Pro, so:

I tested on the Mac using a MacBook Pro (3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo, 8 GB RAM, OS 10.6.2) while testing on Windows using an Hewlett Packard 8710w mobile workstation (2.2 GHz Core 2 Duo system running 64-bit Windows 7 with 2 GB of RAM).

Seems to me the Mac hardware was significantly faster than the Windows hardware — so I suspect his results are misleading with regard to just how much more efficient Flash is on Windows than Mac OS X.

Edison’s Motion Picture Patent Enforcement ★

Merlin Mann:

You a big fan of aggressive IP enforcement? Like to think a well-litigated market is a healthy market? Hate those little entrepreneurial nuisances like “competition from emerging media?”

Well, then, you would have loved the early 20th century. Because you had to get Thomas Edison’s permission to make any movie. Then you had to pay him.

Also via Merlin, check out the license agreement on this 1908 Edison wax cylinder. (Gorgeous type, though.)