Linked List: July 18, 2011

Monday, 18 July 2011

The Obamas Watch the Women’s World Cup ★

Even the President of the United States needs two remote controls. Looks like an iPad next to his chair, a MacBook Pro under the First Lady’s feet, and a Flip camera next to the remotes.

AppleInsider: Lion, New MacBook Airs to Be Released Wednesday ★

Neil Hughes, AppleInsider:

According to people with proven track records who would be in a position to know, the new product launches are set to occur later this week. Specifically, one person said the products would be released on Wednesday at 8:30 a.m. Eastern.

Borders Goes Under ★

Mike Spector and Jeffrey A Trachtenberg, reporting for the WSJ:

Borders, which employs about 10,700 people, scrapped a bankruptcy-court auction scheduled for Tuesday amid the dearth of bids. It said it would ask a judge Thursday to approve a sale to liquidators led by Hilco Merchant Resources and Gordon Brothers Group.

The company said liquidation of its remaining 399 stores could start as soon as Friday, and it is expected to go out of business for good by the end of September.

My home has shelves and shelves of books purchased from Borders.

Reading on the iPad ★

Shawn Blanc:

And so — perhaps intentionally, or perhaps unintentionally — digital magazines that replicate their printed versions are, in some ways, feeding on the mindset that printed content has a higher value and novelty than digital content does.

I think it’s simply a reflection of what the magazines’ editorial staffs actually believe: that the print edition is the “real” version of the magazine.

To Blanc’s list of things he seeks in iPad magazines, I’ll add two:

Reasonable download sizes. A copy of The New Yorker should not weigh 150 MB. That takes way too long over a slow Wi-Fi connection, let alone 3G (and 3G is metered on the iPad — some iPad 3G users only have 250 MB total data per month). Books from the Kindle and iBooks stores generally weigh in at 10 MB or so. You should be able to download a copy of magazine quickly over 3G. Condé Nast would never ship the paper magazine in a box that weighs 50 pounds. But that’s exactly what their digital editions feel like.
Resolution independence. These magazines and newspapers that render each “page” as a static 1024 × 768 image are going to look like utter ass on the iPad 3’s 2048 × 1536 retina display. Plus, it’s the fact that these pages are rendered as static images that makes the issues such gargantuan downloads.

Ian Betteridge on Google’s ‘Openness’ ★

Ian Betteridge:

Some of their efforts are extremely valuable: for example, while I think WebM is crapola, it’s valuable to have a freely-licensable codec that will (hopefully) be widely supported. I doubt that MPEG-LA would have been as generous with the terms for H.264 as they are currently had Google not waved the big stick. And that’s an area where there’s little direct revenue implication for Google.

Agreed, up to the last sentence. Google, as the owner of YouTube, must serve more H.264 video than any other entity on the planet. More generous licensing terms from MPEG-LA surely must have a “direct revenue implication” for Google.

And that’s the issue: Having invoked the magic “open” word, you’re a hostage to fortune. Any time that the rational decision is “don’t be open” (as it is, arguably, with Honeycomb’s source) sneering naysayers like me will be on your case, whacking you over the head.

Don’t forget the hypocrisy though. It was exactly the issue of the openness of Android’s source code that Andy Rubin called the “definition of open”.

Samsung Galaxy Tab Smart Case ★

Looks familiar. Can’t quite place where I’ve seen something like this before, though.

(Great digging by Christian Zibreg at 9to5 Mac on this story.)