Linked List: October 22, 2010

Friday, 22 October 2010

My thanks to AppShopper for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. AppShopper is a native app for the iPhone and iPad that acts as a filtered list for the App Store — with views for new and updated apps, along with the ability to track price drops. Create a wishlist and get notified — by email or push notifications — of price drops and updates to the apps on your list.

AppShopper’s list of popular apps is based on the preferences of other AppShopper users, not the App Store as a whole, and strikes me as being more refined. I’ve found apps using AppShopper that I haven’t heard of before. AppShopper is a free download from the App Store.

Engadget’s Windows Phone 7 Review ★

Judging from various initial reviews of Windows Phone 7, including Engadget’s, the biggest initial problem seems to be launch times for third-party apps:

In day to day use, the lack of multitasking proved to be an even bigger annoyance than we expected. Not only is there no third-party support for the function, but if you lock your screen while you’re in a third-party app (say, Twitter), the software must reload when you unlock! This can be especially annoying when you’re playing a game which has a substantial load time (more on that below). It doesn’t freeze your state, so you have to reload the app and your saved game all over again. It’s not just bad — it’s nearly unforgivable.

The iPhone got away without any sort of third-party multitasking for a few years, but iOS apps didn’t quit when you locked the screen. And it seems like apps take longer to launch on Windows Phone 7 than they did on pre-multitasking versions of iOS. Actual multitasking — apps that continue to run in the background — isn’t nearly as important as fast relaunch/resume.

Redefining ‘Flash’ ★

Good point from Jeff Rock: Apple’s promotional material for the new MacBook Airs contains numerous mentions of “flash” — it’s just a different sort of flash.

Using JavaScript to Display Real Names on Your Group Tumblr ★

Nice howto write-up from Rod Knowlton. See it in action on my favorite group Tumblr site, American Drink.

Rooting Google TV ★

I don’t understand why these guys are working on “rooting” Google TV. Why not just download the source code from Andy Rubin?

A Closer Look at iPhone Transition Animations ★

Details, details, details.

Gadgets and Games, Live Today ★

Speaking of fun things happening live on the web this afternoon, I’ll be a guest on Clayton Morris’s Gadgets and Games in about an hour, at 2p ET. Other guests this week: Michael Gartenberg, Joanna Stern, and Michael Rose.

Update: Permalink for today’s episode.

AT&T Continues to Beat Verizon in Subscriber Growth ★

Dan Frommer:

If the conventional wisdom is that AT&T wireless blows, why is it beating Verizon Wireless — supposedly the best carrier of them all — in subscriber growth every quarter?

This chart may well summarize what has compelled Verizon to work out a deal with Apple for the iPhone. We know what Apple wants: additional market share without conceding any control over the platform. I suspect Verizon is finally willing to concede that control to Apple for a Verizon iPhone because their main goal is beating AT&T.

Titillating Layer Tennis ★

My pal Mike Monteiro takes on Jennifer Daniel today in Layer Tennis, with Jeffrey Zeldman doing match commentary. Even better: they’ll be raising money throughout the match for breast cancer research.

James Gosling on Apple’s Java Discontinuation ★

James Gosling, on the news that Apple is deprecating its support for Java on Mac OS X:

This made upgrading to subsequent releases very hard, and for quite a while Apple’s JVM lagged behind all other platforms. But they eventually got their act together and their JVM upgrade pipeline got streamlined and they kept up very well in recent years.

None the less, there were recurring discussions about having Sun or the community shoulder the burden. There were lots of obstacles. One was that a lot of Apple’s web sites (MobileMe, iTunes, the App Store) were Java apps and they were nervous about not doing the QA themselves.

There’s a difference between Java on the server and Java on the desktop. Mac OS X is overwhelmingly a desktop OS. My understanding is that the iTunes Store, Apple Store, and MobileMe are all still written using WebObjects, and thus, Java. It’s just that they don’t run on Mac OS X. You don’t think Apple is filling that North Carolina data center with Xserves, do you?

Here’s my question, though: If Mac OS X 10.7 ships without a working Java JVM, will you be able to write Android apps using a Mac? And it’s not just Android, of course. There are an awful lot of professional Java developers who use Macs as their preferred development machines.

Andy Zaky: ‘The Amazing Amazon Stock Bubble’ ★

Andy Zaky, writing for Fortune:

While Amazon continues to execute at a very high level — yesterday it reported better than expected sales growth of 39% and earnings growth of 16% — the stock still trades at a very lofty 67 P/E ratio. That’s more than triple Apple’s 20.1 P/E ratio, or Google’s 24.6 P/E ratio. Even more striking is that the company trades at 2.31 times its expected 5-year growth rate, which indicates that the stock has gotten way ahead of itself. Ideally, a company should trade at no more than a 1:1 PEG ratio unless the company has a consistently proven track record (like Apple) of far exceeding analyst expectations.