Linked List: May 6, 2010

Thursday, 6 May 2010

WWDC 2010 Is Sold Out ★

No more IT track, few scheduled Mac sessions, and it was only announced six weeks ahead of time. And it sold out in record time.

Last year’s took a month to sell out. This year’s took eight days.

Ian Bogost: ‘Flash Is Not a Right’ ★

Ian Bogost:

But what does it say about the state of programming practice writ large when so many developers believe that their “rights” are trampled because they cannot write programs for a particular device in a particular language? Or that their “freedom” as creators is squelched for the same reason?

I wonder if it doesn’t amount to an indictment of the state of computational literacy.

U.S. Mobile Phone Sales Rankings ★

John Paczkowski:

Among mobile phone manufacturers, Samsung narrowly beat out Motorola for the top spot with a fraction of a percent more than the 21.9 percent its rival claimed. LG Electronics ranked second with a 21.8 percent market share and Research in Motion, and Nokia ranked fourth and fifth with dueling 8.3 percent shares.

And where does Apple and its iPhone, which seems to have such mindshare these days, figure in the U.S. mobile OEM market? Andrew Lipsman, senior director of Industry Analysis at comScore, tells me it ranks sixth with a five percent share.

Good luck to Adobe with their antitrust complaint.

The iPad as a Family Computer ★

Chuck Hollis, VP and global marketing CTO at EMC:

All the PCs and laptops are basically not being used. All the Macs are not being used. All have been powered off.

Everyone in the family is waiting for their turn at the iPad.

William Shatner’s Stake in Priceline.com ★

The Toronto Sun:

Unofficial word on Wall Street is that Shatner, who was initially paid in Priceline shares when he became pitchman for the Internet travel website startup in 1997, is now worth a cool $600 million.

Genius.

Update 7 May 2010: Shatner says it isn’t so.

Curious ★

Tim Bray, on Google’s Android Developers Blog:

Back to Content Providers. For example, there’s one inside the built-in Messaging (A.K.A. texting or SMS) app that it uses to display and search your history. Just because it’s there doesn’t mean you should use it. The Android team isn’t promising that it’ll be the same in the next release or even that it’ll be there in the next release. […]

So, go ahead and look at the undocumented Content Providers; the code is full of good ideas to learn from. But don’t use them. And if you do, when bad things happen you’re pretty well on your own.

Andy Rubin two weeks ago, in the interview with the New York Times wherein he compared Apple to North Korea:

A lot of guys have private APIs. We don’t.

Tim Bray: ‘HTML5 and the Web’ ★

Astute.

Ben Ward: ‘Understand the Web’ ★

Ben Ward:

Perceptions of the web is changing. People are advocating that we treat the web like another application framework. An open, cross-platform, multi-device rival to Flash and Cocoa and everything else. I’m all for making the web richer, and exposing new functionality, but I value what makes the web weblike much, much more.

Brilliant essay. Must-read.

Update: Fireballed. Here’s a plain text version in Google’s cache.

Jason Snell on MLB At Bat 2010 for iPad ★

I love this app. I’ll be using it tomorrow night to watch the Yankees beat the Red Sox.

Introduction to Online Payments ★

Detailed overview of the state of online payment processing, by Sachin Agarwal.

Buying Stolen Property Is Not Journalism ★

The Sun, back in 2008:

A plot to sell intimate stolen photographs of Prince William and his girlfriend Kate Middleton has been smashed — thanks to The Sun. The snaps showed the pair relaxing on a Caribbean hol. We were offered them for £50,000, but alerted cops. One man was arrested and bailed.

The snaps — some of the most personal and intimate pictures ever taken of the couple — were offered to The Sun on a stolen camera flashcard.

Ed Bott on H.264 Licensing Costs ★

Ed Bott:

And finally, to answer one question that has come up several times in the comments to my post and in the comments over at the IE Blog: What guarantee do licensees have that MPEG LA won’t raise royalty rates by some outrageous amount when the royalty schedules come up for renewal? The current rates are fixed for five years, till the end of 2015, and are renewed again every five years for the life of the patents. That guarantee appears to be in place already in the Summary of AVC License Terms, which sets out the royalties to be paid for different uses of the technology. Here’s the language:

[F]or the protection of licensees, royalty rates applicable to specific license grants or specific licensed products will not increase by more than ten percent (10%) at each renewal.

That goes a long way toward making me feel more comfortable that the cost of H.264 content is not going to impact you and me in any significant way, even after 2016.

Michel Fortin’s Reconciling Proposal Regarding Section 3.3.1 ★

Michel Fortin:

I think Apple should just force any such translation layer or interpreter used in an application to be publicly available as open-source. If one such meta-platform ever becomes a problem, it’s easy for Apple to investigate the problem, and they can even release a fixed version themselves. It doesn’t solve all the problems people have with rule 3.3.1, but at least it’s not an outright ban of technology, and it even promotes sharing your building blocks with other developers (a good thing for the platform if you ask me).

I suspect that an open source meta-platform is indeed more palatable to Apple than a proprietary one such as Flash, but I don’t think it fundamentally changes the problems Apple sees with such layers. Apple isn’t going to support such layers itself, open source or not. And while individual developers using such layers could, in theory — in a hypothetical future scenario where the intermediary layer becomes incompatible or incomplete — fix it themselves, that’s not realistic. Developers using something like, say, MonoTouch or Flash to write iPhone apps are not signing up to be responsible for future maintenance of the entire underlying framework they’re building upon. The whole reason they want to use these intermediary meta-platforms is because they think they’re making their jobs easier.

ARM VP: ARM-Based Smartbooks Have Been Delayed by Flash Issues ★

Stop the presses — ends up it’s a bad idea to bet your platform on a software dependency outside your control.

How Apple Should Display iPhone App Icons on iPad ★

Great idea.