Linked List: April 22, 2011

Friday, 22 April 2011

DaisyDisk 

My thanks to DaisyDisk for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. DaisyDisk is a new Mac utility that presents an interactive visual map showing where the storage is being used on your hard drives — and it does it with style and panache. It’s a visual solution to the problem of figuring out where your storage is being used, and helping you find big files you no longer need to create more free space.

It’s a geeky tool, yes but DaisyDisk sports a stylish, attractive UI design. Screenshots don’t do it justice — DaisyDisk makes great use of iOS-esque animation for transitions. A fun disk utility? Actually, yes.

Check out DaisyDisk in the Mac App Store, on sale this week for 25 percent off.

Galen Gruman Reviews the BlackBerry PlayBook: ‘Unfinished, Unusable’ 

Here’s a PlayBook review that doesn’t pull punches:

But I doubt that RIM actually listened to customers or outsiders — the train wreck is just too complete for there to have been anything other than heads deeply buried in sand. Still, it’s one thing to see an impending train wreck and fret. It’s another to view the aftermath — it’s a lot worse than I could have imagined, and it feels awful to look at it.

Why RIM chose to ship the PlayBook in such a state is unfathomable. The iPad 2 and Xoom have been out for weeks, so there’s no heading them off at the pass. Instead, the PlayBook debuted with all eyes on it — but instead of a world-class performer, we got the homeless guy who plays air guitar in front of the mall.

One quibble: Gruman’s paragraph on the PlayBook’s support for Flash:

On the bright side, the PlayBook supports Flash, with no need to download a player as on Android. But Flash objects are often slow to load, and some would not function. That’s an issue Flash also has on Android, as my colleague Neil McAllister discovered in his extensive Flash tests. It’s becoming increasingly clear to me that Flash and mobile don’t mix.

That’s some “bright side”.

Malick and Magic 

David Thomson, in The Guardian:

How do I know how pleasant he is? I had dinner with him once. He could not have been nicer or more interesting. I forgot he was a film director and came to appreciate him as an intelligent man of the world — and a man who with intricate care has compiled his own legend as an impossible, unreachable recluse.

(Via Coudal, of course.)

Consider the Retina Display 

Smart piece by Tim Ricchuiti on some of the implications of “retina displays” for Macs.