Linked List: September 9, 2011

Friday, 9 September 2011

The BundleHunt Creativity Mac App Bundle ★

My thanks to the new BundleHunt Creativity Mac App Bundle for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. The deal is simple: you pay $49.99 and you get over $450 worth of Mac apps and design resources.

Included apps: LaunchBar, ColorSchemer Studio2, WriteRoom, Divvy, Seamless Studio, Xslimmer and Tumult Hype. You also get the four latest e-books from SmashingMagazine, three WordPress themes of your choice from ThemeTrust, the Geomicon icon set, and a license for the TN3 Gallery Pro imagine gallery and slideshow.

All that for just one-ninth of the regular combined retail price. Act now: the offer ends September 22.

Bloomberg: Sprint Said to Plan Unlimited Data With iPhone 5 ★

Olga Kharif, reporting for Bloomberg:

Sprint Nextel Corp. will offer Apple Inc.’s iPhone next month with unlimited data service plans to distinguish itself from rivals AT&T Inc. and Verizon Wireless, according to people familiar with the matter.

Might be a tough decision for AT&T refugees planning to switch.

Flash Media Server 4.5 ★

Worst headline of the day has to be this one at BGR: “Adobe Finally Brings Flash to iPhone and iPad”. That’s completely backwards. What Adobe announced:

With Adobe Flash Media Server 4.5, media publishers now have a single, simple workflow for delivering content using the same stream to Flash-enabled devices or to the Apple iPhone and iPad,” Adobe said in a statement. Flash Media Server 4.5 allows publishers to stream Flash content to iOS devices, which means support within the iOS Safari browser is not required. Instead of relying on a device’s processor to render the stream, which often degrades battery life and slows a device down, Adobe’s Flash Media Server 4.5 does all the legwork.

Translation: FMS 4.5 will send HTML5 video to iOS devices, and send Flash Player-wrapped video to other devices. This is Adobe blinking, acknowledging that iOS will never support Flash Player, and is too big a market for video publishers to ignore.

This is the wrong approach for video publishers to take, though. They should be sending HTML5/H.264 video to any user agent that supports it, and only falling back to Flash Player for user agents that don’t support HTML5 and H.264. Flash Player should be the fallback exception, not the other way around. E.g., a factory-fresh Mac running Safari could be supported the same way iOS devices are, but instead, FMS will insist on using Flash Player, and instead of being shown video, the user will be told to go install Flash Player.

‘Other Designs Are Possible’ ★

Tom Reestman on Apple’s win over Samsung in German court:

It gets old seeing companies copy Apple so fully, and then claim they had no choice because there’s no other way to make whatever it is they’re making.

jQuery More Popular Than Flash ★

AppendTo:

AppendTo, the company dedicated to jQuery, the world’s most popular JavaScript Library, released data today showing that the percentage of websites that have jQuery deployed has officially surpassed the percentage of websites that have Adobe Flash deployed. Statistics compiled by HTTP Archive (http://httparchive.org/), which analyze the world’s top 17,000 websites, show that 48 percent of the sites use jQuery, while 47 percent use Flash.

Kind of an apples-to-oranges comparison, but it’s an interesting snapshot. One technology waxing, one waning.

‘Olé’ ★

Kick-ass new single from Pearl Jam, free from their website. Here they are killing it on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon last night.

Heck of a Job, RIM ★

BlackBerry App World:

This web page uses ActiveX controls that work only in Microsoft Internet Explorer. To ensure that BlackBerry App World is correctly downloaded to your BlackBerry, this site is not designed to work with any other Internet browsers. If you cannot use Internet Explorer, you may be able to download the software directly to your BlackBerry smartphone.

Air Force Pilot Heather Penney, 9/11 Hero ★

Steve Hendrix, reporting for the Washington Post:

Late in the morning of the Tuesday that changed everything, Lt. Heather “Lucky” Penney was on a runway at Andrews Air Force Base and ready to fly. She had her hand on the throttle of an F-16 and she had her orders: Bring down United Airlines Flight 93. The day’s fourth hijacked airliner seemed to be hurtling toward Washington. Penney, one of the first two combat pilots in the air that morning, was told to stop it.

The one thing she didn’t have as she roared into the crystalline sky was live ammunition. Or missiles. Or anything at all to throw at a hostile aircraft.

Except her own plane. So that was the plan.

Social Security: A Monstrous Truth ★

The Economist on Texas governor Rick Perry’s crackpot claim that Social Security “is a Ponzi scheme”:

No Ponzi scheme in the history of the world has ever lasted 75 years.

Display Orientation Empowerment ★

Interesting piece from Ben Brooks, discussing how with laptops, our displays are dogmatically (a) widescreen and (b) landscape. The iPad brought back the 4:3 aspect ratio, but more interestingly, it put orientation in the user’s hands. You choose. Put another way, in most senses, the iPad is far less configurable or customizable than a Mac; but regarding display orientation, it’s the other way around.

(Back in the early 1990s, I coveted but could not afford a Radius Pivot display for the Mac — you could rotate between portrait and landscape on-the-fly.)

Bloomberg: AOL Said to Discuss Deal With Yahoo ★

Bloomberg:

AOL Inc. Chief Executive Officer Tim Armstrong is talking with advisers to Yahoo! Inc. to gauge its interest in combining the companies after the ouster of CEO Carol Bartz, according to two people familiar with the matter.

That’d solve all the problems at both companies. Sort of like how piling all the dirty plates in the sink solves your dishwashing problems.

Photo of Mike Arrington Being Escorted Out of AOL’s Offices by Security Guards ★

The sash is a bit much. (Via Mike Monteiro, whose Twitter account page background is a painting of a topless Bea Arthur.)

JD Power 2011 Mobile Phone Satisfaction Study ★

Zero surprises.