Linked List: August 9, 2011

Tuesday, 9 August 2011

AOL Stock Slumps 25 Percent as Earnings Disappoint 

Rex Crum, MarketWatch:

AOL said it lost $11.8 million, or 11 cents a share, on revenue of $542.2 million, compared with a loss of $1.06 billion, or $9.89 a share, on $592 million in sales a year ago. Last year’s second quarter was affected by $1.41 billion worth of write-downs and the sale of its Bebo social-networking site.

Really thought the TechCrunch deal would turn AOL around.

Quark Sold to Merger and Acquisition Company 

Remember Quark? There was a time when I made my living using QuarkXPress.

Speaking of Tools 

Nick Peers, “Finally, Apple Provides OS X Lion Recovery Tool”:

Apple has released Lion Recovery Disk Assistant for beleaguered OS X Lion users, allowing them to start the Lion recovery process directly from a USB drive.

Finally. Beleaguered.

Lion Recovery Disk Assistant 

Apple:

The Lion Recovery Disk Assistant lets you create Lion Recovery on an external drive that has all of the same capabilities as the built-in Lion Recovery: reinstall Lion, repair the disk using Disk Utility, restore from a Time Machine backup, or browse the web with Safari.

This Is the New Apple 

Reuters, regarding a Forrester report on the European tablet market:

Apple’s relatively small retail presence in Europe — with 52 stores compared with 238 in the United States — offers a chance to the likes of Samsung, Acer and Research in Motion, Forrester said.

But their prices cannot yet compete with Apple, which has far larger scale in the tablet market and an efficient supply chain.

Think about that last sentence. “But their prices cannot yet compete with Apple”. That’s the new Apple. Superior products and mainstream prices.

Apple Briefly Passes Exxon Mobil in Market Cap 

Mark Gongloff, reporting for the WSJ:

Signaling either Peak Oil or Peak Apple, Apple earlier today topped Exxon Mobil as the largest US company by market cap.

Crazy.

More Bad News for Samsung 

Florian Mueller:

The leading German news agency, dpa, just reported that Apple has been granted a preliminary injunction against Samsung’s Android-based Galaxy Tab 10.1, barring distribution of the product in the entire European Union except for the Netherlands. I can confirm that Apple has a separate lawsuit underway in the Netherlands as well.

Update: More coverage from The Telegraph:

An Apple spokesman said: “It’s no coincidence that Samsung’s latest products look a lot like the iPhone and iPad, from the shape of the hardware to the user interface and even the packaging. This kind of blatant copying is wrong, and we need to protect Apple’s intellectual property when companies steal our ideas.”

Samsung was unable to provide comment at the time of publication.

Matt Neuburg on Lion’s Automatic Termination 

Matt Neuburg:

In my view, therefore, the attempt to copy the iOS experience to the Mac is inappropriate. Apple’s entire agenda here is misguided. On iOS, you can use only one application at a time, so it makes sense that the system can quit an application you’re not using; to help you, a recently used application is listed in the Fast App Switcher even if it is no longer running. But on the Mac, you can effectively use multiple applications at once — that’s what I was doing in this instance — and neither the Command-Tab switcher nor the Dock shows an application that has been automatically terminated.

Astute criticism. This is one of those places where Lion’s adoption of an iOS design just doesn’t fit with an existing and much-used Mac feature like Command-Tab switching.