Linked List: October 8, 2010

Friday, 8 October 2010

Carcassonne 

My thanks to The Coding Monkeys for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote Carcassonne, their award-winning board game for the iPhone and iPod Touch. It’s a tile-based game where you build a medieval landscape, with multi-player support over both the Internet and local network. Great fun for both board game fans and social gamers.

Watch their demo video and check out the game’s exquisite graphics. Available now on the App Store for the special introductory price of $4.99. Plus, buy now and you’ll receive the iPad/Universal update (scheduled for later this year) at no additional cost.

Andy Rubin Talks Android 

PC Magazine interview:

PC Mag: People have been saying that the freedom of Android has basically meant that the carriers are free to screw the consumers.

Rubin: If I were to release an operating system that I claimed was open and that forced everybody to make [phones] all look the same and all support very narrow features and functionality, the platform wouldn’t win. It wouldn’t win because the OEMs have a lot of value to bring and the carriers have a lot of value to bring, and they need a vehicle by which to put their interesting differentiating features on these things.

What value have the carriers brought? Seriously. What software on Android phones have the carriers added that’s any good at all?

Things you don’t hear iPhone users say: “Man, this iPhone would be even better if my carrier could ‘add value’ to it.”

Pogue on Flash on Android 

He likes it, with caveats, but admits he didn’t test the effect on battery life. Come on.

Jim Dalrymple on the Rumors of a 7-Inch iPad 

He says Apple has been working on seven-inch models ever since the project began. That doesn’t mean they ever plan to release them, but if they do, it’s not the case that Apple just started working on them, as some analysts have speculated. (Dalrymple’s Apple sources are top-notch.)

‘An Atom-Based Product, Developed in Bits’ 

Glenn Fleishman, writing for The Economist, on the Glif project’s remarkable success at Kickstarter.

Dear Gap, Mike Monteiro Has Your New Logo 

Mike Monteiro:

You sell good stuff. But never in my experience has any of your employees offered me a free pair of pants because the ones I was wearing looked bad. I wouldn’t expect them to. Their job is to sell me clothes.

My job is to sell design.

New $5,000 Multimedia Computer System Downloads Real-Time TV Programs, Displays Them on Monitor 

Google TV reminds me of this 1998 Onion classic. The underlying question has switched from “why not just watch TV?” to “why not just use a computer?”

Sell Your Gap Stock 

Gap President Marka Hansen explains their new logo. What a pile of say-nothing corporate horseshit. No wonder the new logo is so insipid.