Linked List: May 21, 2010

Friday, 21 May 2010

My thanks to Gravity for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote Tags 2.0, their excellent tagging utility for Mac OS X. Tags lets you organize files and other items across your entire system using one comprehensive set of tags. Files in the Finder, photos in iPhoto, music and video in iTunes, messages in Mail, and much more — tag them all using the same simple tagging interface. Searching for tagged items is simple too.

Tags is a great way to group related items from anywhere on your Mac. It’s a simple premise with a well-designed, deceptively simple interface. Check out the screencast on Gravity’s website for a quick tour. Licenses start at just $29.

Kara Swisher on the Anti-Apple Focus of Yesterday’s Google I/O Keynote ★

Kara Swisher:

Two at its rival was probably appropriate. Three, welllll, okay, if you insist.

Unfortunately, the continued verbal jousts by many Google execs — including from CEO Eric Schmidt — onstage at the San Francisco developers conference at Apple got tired pretty quickly and soon felt petty, juvenile and, ultimately, made Google look needlessly defensive.

People see what they want to see. Count me in with Swisher; I think it’s weird how the App Store and iPhone OS were so clearly the central focus of a Google keynote. Judging from my email and Twitter replies, though, there are clearly many others who saw Google as racking up one solid hit against Apple after another.

Judge for yourself by watching the keynote. (Score one for Google against Apple for broadcasting keynote addresses live — can you even imagine how popular live keynote streams would be for Apple? Score one for Apple for posting their keynotes as single video files; Google posts theirs in crummy YouTube-size 10-minute chunks.)

Interesting Speculation From Sean Heber ★

Sean Heber:

They’ve been slowly training us developers to stick with the documented stuff and use their higher level APIs. They want us to accept their abstractions and work within them. This is usually rationalized under the guise of safety, compatibility, and quality control. Those are fine and acceptable reasons by themselves, but what if there’s another purpose lurking behind the curtain?

I think there’s a chance that Apple is slowly building Objective-C into a managed environment similar to Java/.NET.

‘The Empire Strikes Back’ Turns 30 ★

Mike Ryan:

I’m not sure what he could be thinking, because, as far as I’m concerned, The Empire Strikes Back is not only the perfect science-fiction movie. It might just be the perfect movie.

Ryan gives credit to director Irvin Kershner. I say the unsung hero of Empire is screenwriter Leigh Brackett. George Lucas wrote the story, but Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan co-wrote the screenplay. Why is the dialogue so good, the characters so interesting, compared to the other films in the franchise? Because George Lucas didn’t write the dialogue. Empire has more great lines of dialogue than the other five Star Wars movies combined. (My very favorite, right from the day my dad took me to see a matinee on opening weekend, was purportedly an ad-lib by Harrison Ford: “I know.”)

Among her screenwriting credits: The Big Sleep, Rio Bravo, and The Long Goodbye. Those three and Empire would make for a great film festival.

AT&T to Nearly Double ‘Early Termination Fee’ for Smartphone Contracts ★

You stay classy, AT&T.

Android Engineer Says Apple Got Complacent, iPhone Now Only ‘Third or Maybe Even Fourth’ Best ★

Cédric Beust, former Android engineer for Google:

My take on the overall situation: I think Apple got arrogant just a tad too early. They were doing great, selling iPhones by the millions despite AT&T and they decided that they had already won, so they could become complacent. They kicked out Adobe, started locking down their product even more strongly than before, stopped innovating on the music front (where is http://itunes.com? Why do I still need an ugly client for the slightest synchronization task?), fell behind both in hardware and software, and Android eagerly filled the void.

One of my tennis coaches once told me “I guess it’s okay to be arrogant if you’re the best in the world”.

Apple became arrogant before they were the best in the world, and they are now going to have to fight hard if they want to stay third or maybe even fourth.

They might as well give up.

Also, Beust says Android tethering will be free of charge:

“Dont bother with the iPad 3G, just get the cheap iPad, an Android phone running FroYo, turn on wifi tethering and you are automatically online for no extra costs.

FTC Closes Its Investigation of Google AdMob Deal ★

The FTC:

The Federal Trade Commission has closed its investigation of Google’s proposed acquisition of mobile advertising network company AdMob after thoroughly reviewing the deal and concluding that it is unlikely to harm competition in the emerging market for mobile advertising networks.

Dan Lyons Says He’s Switching to Android ★

Apple is lazy, Steve Jobs is Howard Hughes, and Android is doing to the iPhone what Windows did to the Mac 20 years ago, and Android 2.2 is great:

The new version of Android — version 2.2, a.k.a. Froyo — blows the doors off the iPhone OS. It’s faster, for one thing. It also will support Flash, something Apple refuses to do, mostly out of spite. [...]

Froyo also will let you buy songs over the air and download them directly to your phone. It will also stream songs from your music library to your phone. I don’t really use my phone as a music player that much, but still, it’s impressive that Google has this feature and Apple still doesn’t.

Google has this feature, or has announced it?

Quality Over Quantity, Indeed ★

iTeleport:

Our flagship app, iTeleport, is priced at $25 on the App Store, and our sales data shows that it’s earned more than $1,000 a day. How did we get here?

Mike Silverman: ‘Ten Ghosts of WWDC Past’ ★

12-year WWDC veteran Mike Silverman on things that used to be a part of WWDC:

These used to be an opportunity for attendees to give direct feedback to the various teams at Apple. There would be a feedback forum for each area (such as Quicktime, Core OS, Server, IT, etc.) and the session was basically an open mic where you could talk to the engineers in a structured but informal way. Best of all was the Vice Presidents Feedback Forum, where a bunch of Apple’s VPs would answer questions about anything. Can you imagine that now?

My understanding regarding the much-missed Jamba Juice is that Moscone screwed them out of it — Apple’s stuck offering food and beverages through Moscone’s vendor list, and Jamba Juice isn’t on it.

WSJ Reports on Developers Dropping Flash ★

Ben Worthen, reporting for the WSJ:

Programmers and Web designers say clients increasingly are asking that their websites or applications be compatible with Apple’s iPhone and iPad. Those sites can’t be built with Adobe’s Flash technology, which is used widely for online video and animation but which Apple has banned from its devices.

“Since the iPad came out we’ve had a lot of clients say that they just don’t want Flash on their sites,” said Chantelle Simoes, vice president at Ninth Degree Inc., a design firm in Dana Point, Calif., which has built websites for Sanyo and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Here’s the inevitable “but”:

The problem for some companies is that HTML 5 is immature and still years away from broad adoption, said Jeffrey Hammond, an analyst at Forrester Research. It also isn’t supported yet by the most widely used Web browsers, such as Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer.

Interesting use of the plural “browsers” there. Which are the other “widely used web browsers” that don’t support HTML5?

Playable Pac-Man Google Logo, Celebrating Pac-Man’s 30th Anniversay ★

The sound uses Flash, but the animation and controls are done using JavaScript — it’s pretty slow on my iPhone 3GS, but not bad at all on my iPad.

Update: There’s an Easter egg to unlock Ms. Pac-Man, and Andrew Crow reports on Microsoft’s response at Bing.

Ben Edelman Explains How Facebook Leaks User-Identifying Data to Advertisers ★

Usernames get passed along in the HTTP “Referer” header.

Android 2.2 Web Browser Running Rings Around the iPad’s MobileSafari ★

Big laughs at Apple’s expense at Google I/O.

iPad Sold Out at Many Apple Stores ★

And they still aren’t on sale outside the U.S.:

“74 percent of the stores we checked were completely sold out of all iPad models,” Munster said in a note to clients. “26 percent had some WiFi models in stock, and no stores had any 3G models available. We note that the stores have implemented a reservation system, by which customers can request to be placed on a waitlist for future iPad shipments, notified upon arrival, and given 24 hours to pick up the iPad. One Apple store representative indicated that the in-store reservation system typically takes 4-7 days.”

Where’s J Allard? ★

Mary Jo Foley:

Over the past month or so, I’ve been asking around about Allard’s whereabouts. One of my sources who has been a pretty reliable tipster in the past told me that Allard is on sabbatical and is unlikely to return to Microsoft. His name is still in the Global Address Book inside Microsoft, I hear, and his bio page is still unaltered on the Microsoft Corporate Web site, where he still is listed as Chief Experience Officer and Chief Technology Officer, Entertainment and Devices Division.

If he leaves Microsoft, I’ll bet he winds up at Google.

Catching Up ★

Mike Arrington:

With tethering and Wi-Fi hotspot features, Apple and others have some serious catching up to do.

Another sign of how bad AT&T makes the iPhone look: the iPhone OS has fully supported tethering since 3.0 shipped 11 months ago. Most carriers around the world have supported it from day one. But, because AT&T still doesn’t support it today, it’s seen as a feature where the iPhone needs to “catch up” to Android 2.2 (which hasn’t shipped yet).

The Dawes Formula ★

Keen bit of advice from Brendan Dawes.

MPEG-LA Considering Patent Pool for VP8/WebM ★

That didn’t take long.

Brandt Dainow: ‘Why iAds Will Fail’ ★

Brandt Dainow:

The iAd has no future, and neither does the iPhone/iPad. I will show why iAds must inevitably die, and how Steve Job’s strategy for iPhone and iPad will inevitably lead Apple into becoming at best a marginal niche player, at worst an ex-business.

OK, sure. (Thanks to DF reader Noah Harlan.)