Linked List: July 15, 2011

Friday, 15 July 2011

PDFpen 

My thanks to Smile for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote PDFpen, their Mac app for editing PDFs. Here’s a short list of just some of PDFpen’s features:

  • Add signatures to PDF forms and email them back
  • Make corrections and changes to documents, including editing images
  • OCR for scanned documents

For me, it’s worth it for the signature/email feature alone. I haven’t sent a “fax” since I started using PDFpen. The Pro version of PDFpen even lets you turn websites into multipage PDFs that you can mark up for revisions.

Download a fully-functional demo of PDFpen or PDFpenPro and see for yourself. At $59.95 (or $99.95 for Pro), it’s the affordable and better-designed alternative to Acrobat.

iPod Sales Expected to Decline 7.2 Percent Year Over Year 

Philip Elmer-DeWitt:

iPod sales hit 22.7 million in the Christmas quarter of 2008 and have been going downhill, with seasonal spikes, ever since.

The quarter that ended nearly three weeks ago is likely to continue that trend, according to the 43 analysts — professional and amateur — we polled in advance of our quarterly earnings smackdown.

You know who called it? Bill Gates, back in 2005:

“As good as Apple may be, I don’t believe the success of the iPod is sustainable in the long run. If you were to ask me which mobile device will take top place for listening to music, I’d bet on the mobile phone for sure,” Gates said.

I somehow doubt that Gates would have correctly predicted the leading brand of mobile phone for music listening, though.

iOS 4.3.4 Software Update 

Fix for that recent PDF vulnerability.

New Patent Troll Surfaces: Kootol 

Lex Friedman, reporting for Macworld:

On Friday, Kootol Software announced that it sent notices of the alleged patent infringement to a variety of companies you may have heard of; in addition to Apple, Kootol sent letters to Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, AOL, Facebook, Twitter, Nokia, Foursquare, IBM, LinkedIn, MySpace, RIM, Quora, Salesforce, Twitpic, Ubermedia, and iOS and Mac software developer The Iconfactory. Those last three companies all make software that integrates directly with Twitter.

Make a Twitter client, get sued. Sheds new light on Hockenberry’s piece the other day.

Tim Foremski on Google’s Quarterly Results 

Tom Foremski:

Google’s own sites, such as search, gmail, etc showed 39% growth in the most recent quarter compared with the year ago quarter, to $6.23 billion.

Google partner sites grew at nearly half the rate: just 20% compared with a year ago, to $2.48 billion. This huge disparity between the growth rates of Google sites and partner sites is without precedent for most of its history.