Linked List: April 14, 2011

Thursday, 14 April 2011

Adobe Systems Employees: It Gets Better ★

Beautiful, open, honest.

David Pogue on the Curious Death of The Flip ★

Weird. Pogue reports that Flip sales remain strong, and they had a great new product ready to unveil yesterday:

That new Flip that the product manager showed me was astonishing. It was called FlipLive, and it added one powerful new feature to the standard Flip: live broadcasting to the Internet. That is, when you’re in a Wi-Fi hot spot, the entire world can see what you’re filming. You can post a link to Twitter or Facebook, or send an e-mail link to friends. Anyone who clicks the link can see what you’re seeing, in real time — thousands of people at once. [...]

And the FlipLive was supposed to ship yesterday. April 13. The day after Cisco killed the Flip.

Apple Employees: It Gets Better ★

“Life changes so much.” So good.

Apple Releases iOS 4.3.2, Verizon iPhones Get 4.2.7 ★

Curious that the Verizon iPhone is still on its own branch.

Spare Us the Email Yada-Yada ★

Those annoying “legal” disclaimers/directives some corporate-types have in their email signatures? Useless bullshit, says The Economist.

RIM Co-CEO Calls a Halt to BBC Interview ★

Anyone else get the feeling that both of RIM’s CEOs are on the verge of a total breakdown?

The Talk Show, Episode 38 ★

Me and Dan:

— There’s a German word that I’m looking for.

— Where you laugh at somebody else’s misfortune?

— No. But it’s along the lines of that. It’s a German word for when you’re running the vacuum, and you see a little, like, Star Wars figure gun or a Lego piece, something of that size, and the head of the vacuum is just inches away, and you go to stop, so as not to suck it up, no matter how many times you as a parent have warned the child whom the little piece belongs to to be careful about such things so that they don’t get vacuumed up, but you try to stop, because you have memories of being a child yourself and having been warned by your parents along similar lines and yet suspecting that your own parents were unsympathetic and purposefully vacuumed up such pieces, and that the emotional scarring and memory of such lost guns causes you, no matter how many times this has happened, to stop the vacuum cleaner and but even in your best efforts to stop, the suction of the vacuum and proximity to the head are such that the piece still gets sucked up and is lost forever. What is the German word for that?

— Yeah. I don’t know.

— It’s on the tip of my tongue.

Brought to you by two fine sponsors: Shopify and Rackspace.

Flash on Android Tablets ★

Neil McAllister on using Flash on the Motorola Xoom. Video was choppy, it made scrolling web pages difficult, form-based apps barely worked, and he “had no luck” with games. But he did get to see animated Flash web ads.

Remember, iOS doesn’t have Flash because Steve Jobs is a dick.

Just the Simple Truth ★

Kevin Drum:

Have I mentioned my favorite part of Obama’s speech yesterday?

Tapbots on Tweetbot ★

Nice overview of the gesture-based shortcuts in the Tweetbot UI.

International Game Developers Association Board Has Issues With Amazon’s Appstore ★

They don’t like the terms:

In brief: Amazon reserves the right to control the price of your games, as well as the right to pay you “the greater of 70% of the purchase price or 20% of the List Price.” While many other retailers, both physical and digital, also exert control over the price of products in their markets, we are not aware of any other retailer having a formal policy of paying a supplier just 20% of the supplier’s minimum list price without the supplier’s permission.

And they draw this conclusion:

The IGDA’s bottom line is simple: under Amazon’s current terms, Amazon has little incentive not to use a developer’s content as a weapon with which to capture marketshare from competing app stores.

Prompt ★

Speaking of exquisitely designed pixel-perfect new apps for iOS, Panic has just released Prompt:

Prompt is a clean, crisp, and cheerful SSH client.

This is another one that I’ve been lucky enough to beta test for a few months, and I can recommend it wholeheartedly. Most of the existing SSH clients for iOS look like leftovers from Linux. $4.99 on the App Store and you can get one that was designed and engineered by Panic. If Apple made an iOS SSH client, it’d look like Prompt.