Linked List: January 26, 2011

Wednesday, 26 January 2011

Benchmarking HTML5 Games 

Cory Ondrejka, Facebook:

With wide adoption and industry support, HTML5 will transform desktop and mobile gaming, creating amazing user experiences that are only a link away. Already, over 125 million people visit Facebook using HTML5 capable browsers just from their mobile phone, and that number skyrockets when we add in desktop browsers. The future is clear.

How Well Are Windows Phone 7 Devices Selling? 

Ina Fried, quoting Microsoft Senior Product Manager Greg Sullivan:

Sales are an important measure of success over the long term, but perhaps not even the best indicator of the platform’s long-term success, Sullivan said.

“One of the key ways that we’ll measure success of Windows Phone is did we ship a phone people love,” he said, pointing to its customer satisfaction data that said that 93 percent of early customers are “satisfied” or “very satisfied,” adding, “That’s a really great number.”

Translation: Not selling well at all.

Cathode 

This is fun: a vintage terminal emulator for Mac OS X. Run it in full screen mode for the best effect. Clever licensing model, too: it’s free to use but the image quality slowly degrades over the course of a session until you pay for a license. $20.

I’m having fun imagining going back in time and showing this to my, say, 1991 self, and trying to explain why we in 2011, with our magnificent LCD displays, would find comfort in an app that takes great effort to mimic decrepit CRT text terminals.

Android In-App Payments Coming Soon 

MG Siegler:

When asked about the status of an in-app payment system for Android, Chu noted that it was set to launch last quarter, but it was forced to be delayed. Why was it delayed? “Developers were busy with their Christmas applications,” Chu said. “So we couldn’t get enough feedback,” he continued.

OK, yeah, that makes sense.

Amazon Launches Kindle Singles 

Amazon:

Three months ago, Amazon made a call to serious writers, thinkers, scientists, business leaders, historians, politicians and publishers to join Kindle in making a new kind of content available to readers—Kindle Singles. Typically between 5,000 and 30,000 words, each Kindle Single is intended to allow a single killer idea — well researched, well argued and well illustrated — to be expressed at its natural length. Today, Amazon is introducing the first set of Kindle Singles to the Kindle Store.

It’s like an app store for articles. I bought “Lifted”, a report about a Swedish bank robbery by Evan Ratliff, and started reading it over breakfast. Great story.