Linked List: February 4, 2011

Friday, 4 February 2011

My thanks to Pixelmator for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Pixelmator is a beautiful, easy-to-use image editor for the Mac that’s based on built-in Mac OS X graphics technologies. They’ve gone all-in with the Mac App Store, and for a limited time, it’s available at the special “transitional” price of just $29 — which includes a free update to version 2.0 when it ships.

‘Gimme Shelter’ Deconstructed ★

So great. Thanks, Craig.

Does Spotify Make Bands Money? ★

Metronome asked around. Here’s one response:

Exec 1: “Our income from iTunes, Beatport, emusic, Amazon etc is pretty good. The income from Spotify is MICROSCOPIC - LAUGHABLE - PATHETIC. The fact that haven’t been sufficiently called out on this is a SCANDAL. Spotify are old school monopoly capitalists masquerading as painfully hip young “edgy” entrepreneurs. Their game plan is to devalue music 10 - 20 fold and then swallow it up like Pacman.”

Update: Here’s a graphical illustration from Information Is Beautiful back in April 2010.

The ‘Protect Life Act’ ★

Jodi Jacobson:

They want to “protect life” so much that they have written into the bill a new amendment that would override the requirement that emergency room doctors save every patient, regardless of status or ability to pay. The law would carve out an exception for pregnant women; doctors and hospitals will be allowed to let pregnant women die if interventions to save them will kill the fetus.

Your Republican Party.

Nokia Bubbles ★

Clever lock-screen UI from Nokia. (There’s a sentence I didn’t expect to write today.)

Update: Fireballed, apparently. Cached version.

A Fix for My Thing on Writing AppleScripts That Dynamically Target Either Safari or WebKit ★

Thanks to Caio Chassot for this fix, and a nice little explication on AppleScript.

The Two Paths to Success ★

Paul Buchheit:

My strategy can be reduced to two rules: 1) Find a way to make it fun and 2) If that fails, find a way to do something else.

Chitwood & Hobbs ★

Do you like sports? Do you like good writing and a keen eye for the cool? Then you’re going to love Chitwood & Hobbs, by Ryan Sims and Nick Hall.

Inkling: Interactive Textbooks for iPad ★

I’ve linked to Inkling before, but I was reminded of it by this tweet from my friend Jonathan Wight, pointing out that Inkling — an interactive textbook reader/platform for the iPad — is fully accessible. (Wight is an engineer on the Inkling team.) Inkling is a free app, and it’s worth checking out just to see how much better an iPad app can be than The Daily when it embraces core iOS technologies. You can even select and copy text in Inkling. Imagine that.

Verizon Commercial for iPhone 4 ★

Like I said, they’re going to bash AT&T over the head with this. Notice that they don’t even say the word “iPhone”. All they have to do is show it, and brag about their network.

Jason Kincaid’s First Impressions Using Android Honeycomb on the Motorola Xoom ★

Best preview I’ve seen. The UI looks pretty responsive. What’s the over/under on how much the Xoom is going to cost?

The Talk Show, Episode 28 ★

This week’s episode of America’s favorite knitting and craftwork podcast. Topics include market share, The Daily, in-app purchasing, and, of course, the Verizon iPhone 4. Brought to you by two excellent sponsors: Edovia’s Screens, and Campaign Monitor.

By the way: 5by5 has some swell t-shirts for sale, for a limited time. Shame on you if you don’t order a The Talk Show shirt.

Handoff ★

Here’s the problem: you’re reading something on your browser on your computer, but you’re leaving, so you’d like to continue reading it on your iPhone or iPad. How do you get the page from here to there? Handoff is a clever solution. On your Mac (or PC), it’s a free browser extension for Safari and Chrome (and a bookmarklet for Firefox and other browsers). On your iPhone and iPad, it’s a $1.99 app. The browser extension lets you send the current page to your device with one click. A second or two later, boom, there it is, thanks to push notifications. One click.

Motorola’s Android ‘Laptop Dock’ Will Cost $500 ★

Dan Frommer:

Today, AT&T announced that the Motorola Atrix “laptop dock” will cost $499.99 by itself. Five hundred dollars! For a laptop that stops working when you unplug your phone from it.

You can also buy it right away when you’re buying the phone and get a discount: You can buy the phone (normally $200) and the laptop dock for $500 total, after a $100 rebate, with a two-year service contract to a “Data Pro smartphone data plan” AND a tethering add-on.

Good luck with that.

Speaking of Rupert Murdoch ★

The Dead Homer Society, on what Fox omitted from Banksy’s Simpsons-opening storyboards:

Of all the bleak images in Banksy’s original, the suffering children, the dead cats, the emaciated unicorn, only the giant poster of Kim Il-Murdoch was deemed too hot for teevee.

(Thanks to Joe Clark.)

Judgment Days ★

David Remnick on Egypt, for The New Yorker. Best piece I’ve read about this crisis.

The Daily and Accessibility ★

Lioncourt:

Unfortunately, though the Daily’s web site appears to be largely accessible, no effort to make use of Apple’s accessibility API’s is particularly discernible within the application. Outside of a few unlabeled buttons and the major section categories, nothing else in the app is available to VoiceOver users.

A true shame. They started with a blank slate on a platform that has decent accessibility features, and they don’t support any of them.