Linked List: February 25, 2011

Friday, 25 February 2011

Pixelmator 

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.

Paintings Inspired by Films 

Gorgeous, evocative work. (Via John Nack.)

How Sun Almost Bought Apple in 1996 

Chris Preimesberg for eWeek:

Would there be iPhones, iPads and iPods on the market today if Sun Microsystems had been able to close a deal to buy out Apple in the mid-1990s? 

No, says former Sun CEO Scott McNealy. “If we had bought Apple, there wouldn’t have been iPods or iPads … I’d have screwed that up,” McNealy conceded in a talk Feb. 24 with another former Sun CEO, Ed Zander, at a Churchill Club dinner at the Santa Clara Convention Center. 

Refreshingly honest.

‘Consumer Reports’ Claims Verizon iPhone Still Has Antenna Issues 

Yet miraculously, in the real world, no one has this problem. Seriously, where are the actual Verizon iPhone users complaining about this?

Claim Chowder on Yours Truly 

Me, back in March 2006:

One nice side effect of the continuing growth and success of Apple’s iPod / iTunes / iTMS platform is that we’re no longer subjected to moronic business and tech pundits proclaiming that Apple, despite its initial success, is “making the same mistake with the iPod that they made with the Macintosh in the 1980s.”

Maybe the most wrong I’ve ever been. (Thanks to DF reader Tim Ricchuiti.)

You Win, RIM 

Jamie Murai:

You win. I concede defeat. I no longer want to attempt developing an app for the Playbook. Are you happy now? Surely you must be. Considering how terribly designed the entire process is, from the registration right through to loading an app into the simulator, I can only assume that you are trying to drive developers away by inconveniencing them as much as humanly possible. Just in case you’ve forgotten, let me give you a little recap of the process you’ve put together.

Mac OS X Lion Building in Support for Super High Resolution ‘Retina’ Monitors 

This is why the iPad won’t increase in resolution until they can double it — increments less than 2× just don’t work out neatly.

Official Details of the 4G LTE Upgrade Process for the Motorola Xoom 

Droid Life:

As expected, the upgrade will be free to everyone and will be available approximately 90 days after launch, so we’re looking at May before this thing will be cooking up those 4G speeds. And as we were told by Motorola at CES, you will have to send in your device and will be without it for 6 days while they upgrade the hardware and software.

Come on. They’re just making this up, right?