Linked List: April 1, 2011

Friday, 1 April 2011

The Talk Show, Episode 36 

Dan Benjamin:

Netflix has announced that the Bond films will soon be available streaming so John Gruber and Dan Benjamin aren’t doing #5byBond this week. Instead they talk over boats and ducks about the future of Amazon platforms, music licensing at Amazon and Apple, WWDCs past and future, and what to expect out of iPhone 5, iOS 5, and Lion.

Brought to you by two fine sponsors: Sound Studio 4 and Campaign Monitor.

Departing CEO Eric Schmidt Tried to Get Search Team to Hide His Political Donation From Search Results 

Why not just change his name?

The Macalope: Fools of the Year 

Good list of jackasses.

Chasing Profits Instead of Market Share 

Bloomberg:

Gianfranco Lanci tried to make Acer Inc. the world’s largest laptop maker by outselling Hewlett- Packard Co. The board says he should have set his sights on Apple Inc. and HTC Corp. instead.

The rift led to Lanci quitting yesterday as chief executive officer of the Taiwanese computer maker, Chief Financial Officer Tu Che-min said in an interview today. The company plans to name a new president this month who has experience in mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets, he said.

Committed to Android 

Thomas Claburn, reporting last week for InformationWeek:

Motorola Mobility has hired a number of experienced mobile and Web engineers from Apple and Adobe and is developing a Web-based mobile operating system as a possible alternative to Google’s Android software, according to a source familiar with the matter.

Why would they do such a thing when Android is open and Google is such a great partner?

Regarding Those Multitouch Multitasking Gestures on iOS 4.3 

Speaking of Guy English, he’s got a good piece on the multitouch gestures for iPad app-switching in iOS 4.3:

This all sounds wonderful but I still think they’re a bad idea and shouldn’t ship enabled by default. The problem isn’t that they’re not handy (zing), rather that they break what I feel is one of the key wonders of iPad — it becomes the application that is running.

I’m with Guy here. There is a need for a faster way to switch between running apps, but this isn’t the right solution. If those become a system default, then apps are limited to three touches.

(And please, stop with the predictions that these gestures suggest future home-button-less iPads or iPhones. Try explaining to a normal person that they need to use five fingers to get back to the home screen. People love the home button.)