Linked List: March 29, 2011

Tuesday, 29 March 2011

Evan Williams on Stepping Away From a Daily Role at Twitter ★

Seems like he forgot to thank or even mention CEO Dick Costolo. A simple oversight, I’m sure.

Apple Design Awards Now App Store-Only ★

Apple:

This year’s Apple Design Awards will be awarded to developers whose iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps are currently on the App Store […]

Raise your hand if you’re surprised by this.

Jim Dalrymple Plays ‘What if That Was Apple?’ ★

Jim Dalrymple on Google’s refusal to release the source code to Honeycomb:

Can you imagine if it were Apple delaying a software release. What would the press say if Apple admitted it took shortcuts with its OS to keep up with Google and now they couldn’t release it? The press would have a field day with that story.

Total shitstorm.

The Sun Will Come Out, Tomorrow ★

Erick Schonfeld, for AOL/TechCrunch:

One thing Firefox mobile doesn’t have is support for Flash, even though Android has a big partnership with Adobe to make Flash work on mobile. I spoke with some folks from Mozilla yesterday about this topic. Eventually, Firefox mobile will support Flash, but it is just not there yet in terms of responsiveness.

Soon though!

‘Six Million People Who Get Killed’ ★

Regarding Stanley Kubrick’s unmade The Aryan Papers:

Frederic Raphael, who co-authored the screenplay for “Eyes Wide Shut,” recalls Kubrick questioning whether a film could truly represent the Holocaust in its entirety. After Raphael mentioned “Schindler’s List,” Kubrick replied: “Think that’s about the Holocaust? That was about success, wasn’t it? The Holocaust is about six million people who get killed. `Schindler’s List’ is about 600 who don’t. Anything else?”

Mobile Web Sites Aren’t in Opposition to Native Apps ★

Josh Clark:

But let’s not shoot ourselves in the foot by getting tangled up in this “web vs native” thing. Our future is going to be one of many, many thin clients talking to smart web services. Some of those clients will be accessed via HTML, others via native code. I love the “one web” ideal but I also believe in the very real value (despite its high cost of entry) in crafting carefully tailored and high-performance interfaces for specific devices and operating systems.

Justin Williams: ‘An Updated List of Android Apps for Honeycomb’ ★

Take off your shoes: you’re going to need more than just your fingers to count them all.

Hipmunk, Flight Search iPhone App ★

Saw this app mentioned on Mashable and gave it a try. I’m very impressed. It’s not just a good experience for flight search for a phone, it’s a good experience for flight search period. I used it to book my flights for WWDC, and I’d rather use this app on my 3.5-inch iPhone than most flight search websites on my full-size Mac display.

Hipmunk’s “agony” filter produces a seemingly ideal sort order. And their custom date picker is simply brilliant. Hipmunk has a good web interface too, but it has nothing on the iPhone interface. This is why native apps matter.

Fugly Android ★

Via the “AndroidPR” Twitter account.

On WWDC Now Being ‘Broken’ ★

Jeff LaMarche, on criticism that Apple should somehow expand WWDC to something like Oracle OpenWorld:

Making WWDC more like these giant, soulless, “enterprise” conferences is not the answer. Scaling WWDC to 10k, 20k or 40k is fixing the problem by shooting the golden goose. Trying to scale up WWDC like that would utterly destroy everything that is wonderful about it.

It sucks that demand now outstrips supply for WWDC tickets, but I’m with LaMarche: I don’t see any way for Apple to change this other than by ruining what it is that makes WWDC great.

It’s the “just keep selling more and more conference passes each year because demand keeps increasing” strategy that has watered down SXSW.

Update: It occurs to me that Apple did make a major change to help those who don’t or can’t attend WWDC: they release the session videos remarkably soon after the conference ends. Watching the videos is not the same thing as being there (no labs, for one thing), but it’s a big improvement over years past, when the videos were released many months after WWDC was over.

Great Example ★

Embarrassingly bad piece by Steve Lohr for the NYT, on the rise of HTML5 web apps:

“Right now, we’re in a native apps world,” says John Lilly, a venture partner at Greylock Partners, a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. “But people are underestimating the power of the Web. I think we’re going to see an explosion of Web-based apps over the next couple of years.”

Indeed, start-up companies like Zite and Flipboard present media content in magazine-style pages on the iPad, using HTML5. The free software from Flipboard, for example, taps a user’s online social networks for reading recommendations. Flipboard is also working with publishers, offering them tools for automating the display of pages on the iPad.

First, no disclaimer that Lilly was CEO of the Mozilla Corporation until May of last year. Second, how is Flipboard an example of a web app? It’s a native iOS app in the App Store. It uses HTML5 and web content views, sure, but it’s still a native iPad app. (Via Kontra.)