Linked List: October 21, 2010

Thursday, 21 October 2010

The Talk Show Sponsorship Openings ★

DF RSS feed sponsorships are a whisker away from being sold out for the remainder of 2010 — the only remaining spot is the week of December 27. But The Talk Show — the podcast I co-host with Dan Benjamin — has openings in the weeks ahead. If you’ve got a product or service that you’d like to promote to an audience of about 200,000 smart, good-looking tech enthusiasts, get in touch with Dan.

Next week’s show is going to be about the upcoming Mac App Store, with special guests Marco Arment and Craig “Fleshy Palm” Hockenberry.

Update: The Talk Show just hit #1 in iTunes’s list of top tech podcasts.

HP Slate 500 Appears; Costs $799 ★

Ballmer’s pride and joy from CES. What a turd. This photo says it all — the device has a permanent slide-out tab that serves no functional purpose. It’s just a place to put a bunch of regulatory and licensing small-print crap.

Update: Matthew Yohe improves the design.

Apple Deprecates Java ★

Apple:

As of the release of Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 3, the version of Java that is ported by Apple, and that ships with Mac OS X, is deprecated.

This means that the Apple-produced runtime will not be maintained at the same level, and may be removed from future versions of Mac OS X. The Java runtime shipping in Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, will continue to be supported and maintained through the standard support cycles of those products.

This Hacker News thread has a good discussion on the news. Remember when Java was a first-class supported language for Cocoa?

Ian Betteridge: ‘Why Google TV Will Fail, in One Sentence’ ★

Ian Betteridge pulls a choice sentence from Danny Sullivan’s extensive review.

Not Getting It ★

Mike Beltzner, director of Firefox for Mozilla, after yesterday’s “Back to the Mac” event:

I wonder when Apple will stop shipping Safari. It’s obvious already from today’s keynote that they’re looking to bypass the web.

I’m not sure he could be more wrong. Apple’s strategy isn’t about bypassing the web or replacing it or anything like that. In fact, Apple, judged by its actions with WebKit, is clearly committed to offering the best web browsing experience — both on the desktop and mobile devices — of any platform in the world. Apple’s strategy is about offering a great web experience and more.

No wonder Firefox is falling in popularity.

Update: Craig Hockenberry points out that Beltzner posted the above tweet using Tweetie for Mac — a native app.

Helvetica: The Face All Print Men Are Talking About ★

Trade advertisement from 1966. (Via Khoi Vinh.)

Restore the Traditional Editing Timeline in iMovie ’11 ★

Jeff Carlson:

When Apple radically changed iMovie between the ‘06 and ‘08 releases, one of the biggest criticisms was the abandonment of the traditional editing timeline. Instead of one horizontal succession of clips at the bottom of the screen, iMovie ’08 introduced an editing area at the top-left of the screen where the movie wrapped like a paragraph.

Well, if you’ve been pining for a “real” timeline, it’s time to re-evaluate iMovie ’11. With a couple of clicks, you can have it back.

Back to the PC ★

Good point from Horace Dediu regarding Apple’s “Back to the Mac” theme, where the design of Mac OS X Lion is taking inspiration from iOS — it can’t be copied by competitors.

Samsung Galaxy Player, Perhaps the First Android iPod Touch Competitor ★

No pricing yet, no word of availability in the U.S. And the compositing in the video is dreadful.

Looks a little thick compared to an iPod Touch, no?

FaceTime for Mac Leaves Your Apple ID Account Information Unprotected Once Logged In ★

MacNotes:

We started having a closer look at the settings when Gernot pointed us at some issues: Once you’ve logged into FaceTime you can have a look at all the account settings of the used Apple ID. Username, ID, place and birth date are shown as well as the security question and the answer to it — in plain text, without another password request.

Yikes.

Paul Miller Defends the $599 Price of the Samsung Galaxy Tab ★

Not much of a defense. Consider this: Steve Jobs stated earlier this week that Apple has no interest in making a 7-inch iPad, but what if they did? How much do you think it would cost alongside the current 10-inch iPads? I don’t know, but it’d be less than $599. (My guess: an Apple 7-inch iPad would start at $299, more or less commensurate with the smaller display.)

‘Better Than Wang’ ★

This week’s episode of The Talk Show, recorded by yours truly and Dan Benjamin a few minutes after the end of today’s “Back to the Mac” Apple event.

Sponsored by the .tv top-level domain name, and Alarm Clock Connect (a beautiful alarm clock app for iOS).