Linked List: November 12, 2010

Friday, 12 November 2010

TouchUp for iPad 

RogueSheep is one of my favorite indie developers, and I thank them for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote TouchUp, their new photo editing app for the iPad. It’s a recurring theme for me here at DF that pointer UIs (mouse or trackpad) are fundamentally different than touchscreen UIs. TouchUp gets it right. It doesn’t work like Photoshop or any other traditional pointer-based photo editing UI. It’s touch-based, from the ground up.

It’s a simple premise: each effect is a layer atop the original photo. Each effect can be “painted” by touch onto the photo. It doesn’t feel like any app I’ve used before, and it’s a lot of fun — and very easy to get started with. One example of TouchUp’s clever design: “brushes” are always roughly the size of your finger — you pinch-zoom the photo to adjust how big an area your brush affects, rather than changing the size of the brush. Check out the screenshots and demo videos at RogueSheep’s website to get a sense for how it works. Get it on the App Store for just $2.99.

Why Wesabe Lost to Mint 

An honest — and, to my eyes, very astute — analysis from Wesabe co-founder Marc Hedlund. Sometimes being good isn’t enough — you have to be the best to survive.

Rachel Maddow Interviews Jon Stewart 

Thoughtful, smart, reasonable debate on the role cable news plays in U.S. political discourse. (Want to watch it in Safari, without Flash? Turn on Safari’s Develop menu, then choose Develop → User Agent → Mobile Safari 3.2.2 — iPad.)

Comparing Democratic and Republican Tax Plans 

Striking infographic from the Washington Post.

iTunes 10.1 

You need it for some of the new stuff in iOS 4.2.

Get Your Arial Out of My ‘Simpsons’ 

I, too, was annoyed by this. And, yes, I also suspect there’s a pea under my mattress.

Christie’s Auctioning an Apple I 

Estimated value: £100,000 – £150,000. That’s a little bit more than it sold for new in 1976.

Talking Points Memo Turns 10 

I’ve been reading TPM almost since the beginning. To this day, it’s my favorite site for politics, but it’s also a great success story for independent web-based publishing. Great reporting, great analysis, and a business model and organizational structure that works.

Here’s the Wayback Machine’s archive of what TPM looked like at the beginning.

Oracle and Apple Announce OpenJDK Project for Mac OS X 

Apple PR:

Oracle and Apple today announced the OpenJDK project for Mac OS X. Apple will contribute most of the key components, tools and technology required for a Java SE 7 implementation on Mac OS X, including a 32-bit and 64-bit HotSpot-based Java virtual machine, class libraries, a networking stack and the foundation for a new graphical client. […]

Apple also confirmed that Java SE 6 will continue to be available from Apple for Mac OS X Snow Leopard and the upcoming release of Mac OS X Lion. Java SE 7 and future versions of Java for Mac OS X will be available from Oracle.

Sounds like great news for Mac-using Java developers.

Note, too, this statement from Oracle VP Hasan Rizvi:

“The Java developer community can rest assured that the leading edge Java environment will continue to be available on Mac OS X in the future. Combined with last month’s announcement of IBM joining the OpenJDK, the project now has the backing of three of the biggest names in software.”

A very big name not on that list: Google.