Linked List: April 6, 2011

Wednesday, 6 April 2011

Atari’s Greatest Hits 

Not sure how many of these will translate well to touchscreen control, but of course I’m buying them all.

Lukas Mathis’s Skype 5 Ideas 

Lukas Mathis:

After complaining bitterly about Skype 5, I should probably offer some suggestions on how to improve it. Redesigning somebody else’s product is always a tricky business. You don’t know why they made the decisions they made. You don’t have the data they have. You don’t know what constraints they had. So this is not meant as a «here’s how Skype should look like» article. Instead, these are five ideas that might make Skype better.

Very thoughtful ideas, and some great links at the end to discussion by others.

OS Footprint Is Not a Proxy for Application Footprint 

Greg Cox:

This analysis by Henry Blodget on Business Insider makes the classic (repeated ad-nauseam) mistake of putting Apple in a race they’re not in. Apple does not make a third party OS platform for phones. It makes phones and it makes an application platform for developers. What he is implicitly doing is using OS footprint as a proxy for app platform footprint, and at this point in the mobile market’s evolution, that is just wrong headed.

An older piece by Cox that’s also worth a read: “The Only App Phone” — a really good multivariate argument about why iOS has such a strong software market. Includes this observation:

Turn on the iPhone and the first, and only, thing you see is apps.

When the iPhone came out it was striking that everything, everything, was an app. Even the voice call functionality was encapsulated in an app. This was a massive departure from phones at the time, which all had send and end buttons. The mobile phone had been a physical thing and the iPhone made it a software app.

‘The Libations of James Bond, Drinker, Sailor, Connoisseur, Spy’ 

This is why they invented the Internet:

From Casino Royale (1953) to Quantum of Solace (2008), find every alcoholic beverage consumed by the world’s most famous secret agent.

Detailed catalog of every drink from the Bond movies and novels, dutifully researched. The original site is, alas, no longer online, but the Internet Archive has it.