Linked List: September 20, 2010

Monday, 20 September 2010

The Grownups’ Hour 

From a classic mid-’60s ad for Beefeater gin:

Summon the children just before you mix the martini. Announce to them that it is now grownups’ hour — and they are to pursue their play elsewhere. The martini hour is for those who are going to drink martinis.

Not coincidentally, Mondays are when I watch Mad Men. (Via Joe Dawson at Coudal Partners, a place that knows their martinis.)

The Birdfeed Easter Egg That Never Was 

Buzz Andersen on his and Neven Mrgan’s plans to add a “Mr Macintosh” Easter egg to Birdfeed — Mr Macintosh being a planned but abandoned Easter egg Steve Jobs devised for the original 1984 Mac.

Samsung Galaxy S Femme, the ‘Ultimate Android Phone for All Women’ 

One thing Samsung can do that Apple apparently can’t: produce their phones in multiple colors.

Doc Searls: ‘Let’s Kill Interruptive Ads’ 

Doc Searls:

Here’s what I believe: It doesn’t matter how much money interruptive ads make for publications on the Web. They sap the readers’ tolerance and good will, and any unnecessary amount of that is too high a price to pay.

Amen.

Not So Fast on That Demo Purporting to Show That Flash Player Is Faster Than HTML5 Canvas on Mobile Devices 

Ends up the “HTML5” test was really, really poorly coded. Here’s a version that gets 45 FPS on my iPhone 4. Pays to be skeptical of any claim that Flash Player works well on mobile devices.

Update: Here’s another tweaked version of the canvas demo, this one from Charles Ying, that updates the FPS counter less frequently (to match the Flash version), which performs even better.

Pocketbooth 

Really fun, nicely designed 99-cent iPhone app that simulates an old-school photobooth.

VLC Media Player for iPad 

Free video playback app for the iPad, with support for a bunch of formats iOS doesn’t natively support.

Sean Kovacs’s GV Mobile Back in App Store 

His $2.99 Google Voice client app for the iPhone was removed back in July 2009, during Apple’s purge of all Google Voice-related apps. As of this weekend, it’s back in the store. More proof that Apple is, for now at least, loosening up on App Store restrictions.

No word yet on whether Google’s own official Google Voice app will make it into the store, though.

Adam Lisagor’s Trailer for Michael Lopp’s ‘Being Geek: The Software Developer’s Career Handbook’ 

A fun video for a great book.

Chris Black: ‘Flash Outperforms HTML5 on Mobile Devices’ 

John Nack’s headline for the same benchmark: “Flash Runs Faster, More Efficiently Than HTML5 on Mobile”.

It’s a good demonstration, but I’d have a warmer feeling in my heart if they were more specific about what’s being benchmarked. It’s the HTML5 canvas element that they’re showing Flash Player outperforming, not the entirety of HTML5. How about video playback, for example?