Linked List: March 18, 2010

Thursday, 18 March 2010

Paul Thurrott’s Curiously Shifting Thoughts on Copy-and-Paste ★

Delightful catch by Chris Grande. Here’s Paul Thurrott in July 2007, regarding the iPhone:

And what’s up with the lack of cut/copy and paste? This is a basic OS feature that Apple included in the first Mac OS almost 25 years ago. It’s inexplicably missing from the iPhone, unavailable in any application or the wider system itself. Unreal.

And here’s Paul Thurrott two days ago, in a post titled “I Love Windows Phone”:

The multitasking is limited. Users will only be able to get apps from the Marketplace, and not from third parties. Gasp! Is it true that there’s no copy and paste?

No matter. Windows Phone combines those very few things that were right about Windows Mobile — primarily some business functionality — with a much wider set of new functionality that is exciting in both scope and possibility.

Unreal, indeed.

Amazon Playing Hardball With Book Publishers Over Kindle Pricing ★

Quoting a report in the subscriber-only Publishers Marketplace:

At least one independent publisher of scale was told categorically by Amazon in a recent phone call initiated by the etailer that Amazon would not negotiate agency selling terms with any other publishers outside of the five initial Apple partners. This publisher was told that if they switched to an agency model for ebooks, Amazon would stop selling their entire list, in print and digital form. In conversation, Amazon is said to have reiterated that as matter of policy they are declining to negotiate an agency model with any publisher outside of the five who have already announced agreements with Apple’s iBookstore.

“Agency model” is apparently industry jargon for publishers setting their own prices per title, rather than accepting a flat selling price set by Amazon.

I’ll echo Paul Constant’s question in response to this tactic:

So my question is this: How long is Amazon going to dick around publishers before customers start to think of their inventory as unreliable?

Web Sites That Demand Money for iPhone App ‘Reviews’ ★

Brian X. Chen:

The two sites that were most frequently mentioned by programmers who contacted Wired.com were TheiPhoneAppReview.com and AppCraver.com. Both sites appear in the top four Google search results for the search term “iPhone app review.”

Wikipedia Uses Ogg ★

Wikipedia’s media format policy:

The preferred formats are JPEG for photographic images, SVG for drawings and line-art illustration, PNG for non-vector graphic iconic images, Ogg Vorbis for sound and Ogg Theora for video.

So, there’s one major site that uses Ogg. But, I can’t say I recall ever watching video from Wikipedia, so while they’re clearly a major web site, I’m not sure it’s fair to call them a major video publisher.

Google Alleges That Viacom ‘Secretly Uploaded Its Content to YouTube, Even While Publicly Complaining About Its Presence There’ ★

Zahavah Levine, chief counsel for YouTube in its litigation with Viacom:

For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. […]

Viacom’s efforts to disguise its promotional use of YouTube worked so well that even its own employees could not keep track of everything it was posting or leaving up on the site. As a result, on countless occasions Viacom demanded the removal of clips that it had uploaded to YouTube, only to return later to sheepishly ask for their reinstatement. In fact, some of the very clips that Viacom is suing us over were actually uploaded by Viacom itself.

Astounding hypocrisy.

‘No Dashes or Spaces’ Hall of Shame ★

Calling out sites that force you to enter, say, credit card numbers, in a precise format, even though removing things like spaces and dashes is programmatically trivial. (Via Sarah Harrison.)

Dial Zero ★

Free iPhone app (also available for Android and BlackBerry) that, like the aforelinked web site, offers a database of instructions for getting a human customer service representative from a list of over 600 companies.

Storing Your Yojimbo Library on Dropbox ★

In my piece on backups earlier this week, I mentioned that I wasn’t storing my Yojimbo library on Dropbox. A bunch of Yojimbo users emailed me to tell me you can do it, and you can even use it for syncing a shared Yojimbo library between multiple Macs — if you’re careful never to run Yojimbo from more than a single Mac at a time. I don’t like having to be careful, so, personally, I wouldn’t use Dropbox with Yojimbo for syncing — but it’s worth noting that Yojimbo attempts to detect this situation, where you’ve left it running on machine A and launched it on machine B, and warns you accordingly.

However, in my case, I only ever access Yojimbo from one machine. I want to use Dropbox to store my database for off-site storage and backup. And, indeed, it seems to work just fine. You move your ~/Library/Application Support/Yojimbo/ folder inside your Dropbox folder, then create a symlink in ~/Library/Application Support/ pointing to the new location. (You have to use a symlink; an alias won’t work.)

Kindle for Mac ★

Nice to be able to read Kindle e-books on another class of machine, but this is a very un-Mac-like Mac app. Look at these dialog boxes here and here, for example. The icon is, to my eyes, the exact same as the iPhone Kindle app. The name of the app is “Kindle for Mac”, rather than just “Kindle”.

The reading experience isn’t too bad, but the type rendering is smudgy (it’s certainly not using Mac OS X’s built-in type rendering) and you can’t select text. Even worse: you can’t search. You’d be better off with scanned images of the print versions of books, because at least then you’d get high quality typesetting. In short, this is better than no Mac Kindle client at all, but it feels very junky. If Apple comes out with a Mac iBooks client, it’s going to blow this away.

Apple Homepage Tribute to Jerry York ★

Nice gesture.

Sebastiaan de With’s New Interarchy Icons ★

Looking good.

Apple Director Jerry York Dies at 71 ★

Apple:

“Jerry joined Apple’s Board in 1997 when most doubted the company’s future. He has been a pillar of financial and business expertise and insight on our Board for over a dozen years,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “It’s been a privilege to know and work with Jerry, and I’m going to miss him a lot.”

He was reportedly hospitalized for a stroke yesterday.

In Defense of Deficits ★

James K. Galbraith, writing in The Nation:

And this, in the simplest terms, explains the deficit phobia of Wall Street, the corporate media and the right-wing economists. Bankers don’t like budget deficits because they compete with bank loans as a source of growth.

(Via Aaron Swartz.)

‘Chat Roulette’ ★

A movie by Casey Neistat.

CapSee 1.2 ★

Free Mac utility that pops up an on-screen notification bezel when you invoke Caps Lock.

Dave Pell’s Head Is in the Cloud ★

Dave Pell:

Before heading to the emergency room, I climbed into the back of the ambulance where I asked her if she wanted me to call her boyfriend. She said she did, but she didn’t know his telephone number. It was lost along with her now obliterated cell phone, and she had never committed the number to memory.

GetHuman ★

How to get a real human on the phone from big companies. (Via Craig Mod.)

MoviePeg ★

Clever iPhone stand, perfect for propping up an iPhone to watch video. Got one at SXSW (black, of course) from Brendan Dawes of MagneticNorth; it has a great feel to it. (Currently shipping from the U.K., so you might want to order a couple for friends if you’re shipping to the U.S. to make it worthwhile.)