Linked List: April 16, 2010

Friday, 16 April 2010

The AP Stylebook changes “Web site” to “website”. (I switched here at DF back in October.)

My thanks to Sourcebits for again sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Sourcebits is a contract developer specializing in iPhone, iPad, mobile, Mac, and web software. Their iPhone apps have been downloaded over 4.5 million times from the App Store, and they have a growing list of Android and BlackBerry apps, too. If you’re looking for software development services, check out Sourcebits’s website for examples of their work, such as Climate, a brand-new iPhone weather app they just launched this week.

Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen on iPhone OS and Flash ★

Skip to about the 3:30 mark to get to the good part.

Short translation: “We’re counting on Google to save Flash.”

Non-Apple’s Mistake ★

Brilliant, must-read piece by Stanislav Datskovskiy:

I argue that Apple now has not one but two monopolies:

I) A nearly-total monopoly on computer (and pocket computer) systems designed with good taste.

II) A total monopoly on the Microsoft-free, hassle-free personal computer.

Mr. Jobs is indeed starting to behave like that other convicted monopolist we know and love. Yet unlike the latter, Jobs did not engage in underhanded business practices to create his monopolies. They were handed to him on a silver platter by the rest of the market, which insists on peddling either outright crap or cheap imitations of Apple’s aesthetic.

(Via Alex Payne.)

Photoshop CS5 64-Bit Benchmarks ★

Fast.

The Only Tea Party Stat You Need to Know ★

Not surprising.

Huh? ★

Electronista on RIM co-CEO Mike Lazaridis’s keynote at a conference today:

The company leader also dismissed the importance of touchscreen phones. While it’s important to give customers what they want, touch-only phones like the iPhone aren’t that popular, Lazaridis argued. He claimed that most of the people buying touchscreen phones are going back to phones with hardware QWERTY keyboards, like those that made RIM “famous.”

Apple Asks Cartoonist Mark Fiore to Resubmit iPhone App ★

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, for the WSJ Digits weblog:

The cartoonist who won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning this week says Apple has asked him to resubmit an iPhone app that it earlier rejected because it “ridicules public figures.” […]

A representative from Apple called the cartoonist Thursday and suggested that he resubmit the app, Mr. Fiore said in an interview. “I feel kind of guilty,” he said. “I’m getting preferential treatment because I got the Pulitzer.”

It’s not the Pulitzer that got him the phone call, it’s the publicity over his app’s rejection. (Of course, the publicity is largely fueled by his winning the Pulitzer.)

This sort of app should not have been rejected in the first place — shouldn’t even have been considered borderline. Resubmission and hoping for a different reviewer sometimes works in cases like this, but at this point, there’s no way for us to know whether Fiore is getting reconsidered only because of the publicity stink. It’s possible that it really is Apple’s policy to reject any app related to political satire. It’s also possible that it is not. That’s the core problem — that we don’t know.

Motorola’s Droid Problem ★

So the new king of the Android hill is the HTC Droid Incredible — Nexus One-caliber hardware with HTC’s proprietary “Sense” UI, coming to Verizon April 29.

It occurred to me today that this shows just how bad a deal this whole Android/Droid thing is for Motorola. Motorola’s only relevant phone is the Droid. But Verizon owns the “Droid” brand, and now just a few months later, Verizon’s new flagship phone in the Droid line is made by HTC, not Motorola.

I don’t know if Motorola can afford it, but they ought to be doing whatever they can to scoop up Palm.

S.E.C. Sues Goldman Sachs ★

The New York Times:

Goldman Sachs, which emerged relatively unscathed from the financial crisis, was accused of securities fraud in a civil suit filed Friday by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which claims the bank created and sold a mortgage investment that was secretly devised to fail.

Goldman’s stock is down 14 percent on the news. Couldn’t happen to a worse bunch of scumbags. (I’ll echo Tim Bray: “Pity it’s civil not criminal.”)

Unity vs. Section 3.3.1 ★

David Helgason on the Unity weblog:

Unity learned of these changes with the rest of you just last Thursday and today, there remains a great deal of uncertainty about these changes being final and what we may need to do to comply.

We’re meeting with Apple next week to discuss the matter, and our engineers have been discussing possible technical solutions as well.

New games made using Unity are still being accepted, so a finger in the wind suggests Unity is going to be deemed kosher.

App Store Rejection of the Week: Mark Fiore’s NewsToons ★

Laura McGann:

This week cartoonist Mark Fiore made Internet and journalism history as the first online-only journalist to win a Pulitzer Prize. Fiore took home the editorial cartooning prize for animations he created for SFGate, the website for the San Francisco Chronicle. […]

But there’s just one problem. In December, Apple rejected his iPhone app, NewsToons, because, as Apple put it, his satire “ridicules public figures,” a violation of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement, which bars any apps whose content in “Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable, for example, materials that may be considered obscene, pornographic, or defamatory.”

This is preposterous, pure and simple, along the lines of last year’s fiasco with the Ninjawords dictionary app being forced to excise cuss words.

Fiore has not resubmitted his app, saying he’d heard about the experiences of others cartoonists and wasn’t in a position to get into a fight with Apple. Still, he has a hunch Apple will eventually change its mind on him, as it has with other cartoon apps. “They seem so much more innovative and smarter than that,” he told me.

I think he should have resubmitted immediately, and hoped for a different reviewer. But he should definitely resubmit now, given the amount of attention this rejection is drawing. I realize this was an app, not an e-book, but Apple can’t credibly run a book store while holding any sort of policy that bans political satire.

Update: Ruben Bolling (author of the wonderful Tom the Dancing Bug) reports on Twitter that Apple has asked Fiore to re-submit his app.

App Store Rejection of the Week, Runner-Up: Scratch ★

Scratch is a well-regarded runtime geared toward allowing kids to create their own simple games and animations. They had a player app in the App Store, but it’s been removed. This is unfortunate, because it seems pretty cool, but, this is not the least bit surprising. It’s only surprising that it ever made it into the App Store in the first place.

There’s a gray zone regarding the “no code interpreters other than WebKit’s JavaScript engine” rule, but Scratch is way outside that gray zone. You can argue that the rule is wrong-headed (and you will be far from alone in doing so), but this is Apple being consistent, not inconsistent.

Apple’s intention with the “no interpreters” rule is to block meta platforms. Imagine a hypothetical arbitrary “Flash Player” app from Adobe, that allowed you to download SWF files — such an app would stand as an alternative to the App Store. What’s frustrating about Apple blocking Scratch is that Scratch doesn’t seem like the sort of thing that one could use to build software that’s even vaguely of the caliber of native iPhone apps. It’s really rudimentary stuff, focused on ease-of-programming. But what’s Apple to do? Change the rule to “no high-quality interpreters”?

The only way something like Scratch could get into the App Store would be if it used WebKit as its interpreter.

The Latest Improvements to the WebKit Web Inspector ★

Looking good.

Toys ★

Paul Graham:

At this point, when someone comes to us with something that users like but that we could envision forum trolls dismissing as a toy, it makes us especially likely to invest.

Google Backs Yahoo in Privacy Fight With DOJ ★

Declan McCullagh:

Google and an alliance of privacy groups have come to Yahoo’s aid by helping the Web portal fend off a broad request from the U.S. Department of Justice for e-mail messages, CNET has learned.