Linked List: August 17, 2010

Tuesday, 17 August 2010

Sony Mocks App Store Games 

Good luck with that.

Trip Hawkins on Android as a Gaming Platform 

Trip Hawkins:

The good news is that Android is ramping up and a lot of devices are selling. Android has the potential to be a platform comparable to Apple by 2012. But as a game platform right now, Android strikes out.

Hibari 1.0 

Promising new Twitter client for the Mac by Victoria Wang. Simple, clean interface. Minimal feature set, but it has some intriguing filtering, muting, and saved search features.

Asustek CEO Blames Faltering Netbooks Sales on iPad 

DigiTimes:

Asustek Computer saw sales of its netbooks in the second quarter fall short of expectations mainly due to competition from Apple’s iPad, and has downward adjusted its target shipments for the third quarter, the traditional peak sales period, to 1.4 million units, according to company president and CEO Jerry Shen at an investors conference on August 13.

Update: I’m sure he’s wrong, though — Paul Thurrott told us that the iPad wasn’t hurting netbook sales, as did David Coursey.

Apple and RIM’s Disruption of the Mobile Handset Market 

Fascinating analysis by Horace Dediu of the last three years in the global mobile phone industry. Looking at the top seven handset vendors, Apple and RIM went from 1 and 6 percent of the total profits to 48 and 17, respectively.

Dediu posits that Android is now the OS of choice from those handset makers that have lost the most over the last three years. I’m not sure about that. For one thing, HTC isn’t included in the comparisons. For another, the biggest loser, by far, is Nokia, which is still doing its own thing OS-wise.

Kindle and iPad Displays: Up Close and Personal 

Close-up photos of the Kindle and iPad displays — plus print magazines and books, for comparison — taken with a USB microscope.

Elements 1.0 

Oh, this is juicy. New iOS app from Second Gear:

Elements is a beautiful, versatile text editor for iOS. Elements allows you to view, edit and share plain text documents on your iPad, iPhone or iPod touch. All of your data is stored on your personal Dropbox account so that it’s accessible from any device you have.

Works like a charm. Great idea. And: it’s a fat app that’s native both on the iPad and iPhone; just $4.99 in the App Store.

Rob Beschizza on the Terrible Graph Wired Uses as ‘Evidence’ That the Web Is Dying 

Rob Beschizza:

Without commenting on the article’s argument, I nonetheless found this graph immediately suspect, because it doesn’t account for the increase in internet traffic over the same period. The use of proportion of the total as the vertical axis instead of the actual total is a interesting editorial choice.

So, so stupid. It’s hard to describe just how stupid this is. The only question is whether Wired’s editors are so stupid they actually believe what they’ve written.

Translation From Sensational-Headline-Speak to English of Wired’s 18.09 Cover Story 

Wired:

The Web Is Dead.

Translation:

“We are a bunch of shitheads.”

Vimeo Releases Embeddable HTML5 Video Player 

Adrianne Jeffries:

Vimeo is releasing a “universal player” today that allows user to watch embedded Vimeo videos on mobile devices including the iPhone and iPad using the video playback capability built into the new HTML5 standard.

Vimeo will deliver the optimal player — Flash, HMTL5 or native — based on a user’s browser, as well as the appropriate video definition (HD, SD, mobile) and compression standard (H.264 or WebM, an open format developed for use with HTML5).

Vimeo has been serving HTML5 video for iOS devices for a while now, when you watch them at vimeo.com. What’s new is that they’re now doing this for Vimeo videos embedded on other sites as well. Update: Looks like YouTube is testing something similar.

(Via Cameron Moll.)

Stephen Wolfram on The Setup 

Now this is a setup.