Linked List: September 12, 2011

Monday, 12 September 2011

Fascinating new website for The Boston Globe — resize your browser window and you’ll see what I mean. There is no need for an “iPhone” or “mobile” version — the layout simply reflows naturally on small screens. The design is uncluttered and reader-friendly. How many newspaper website designs can you say that about?

The business model is radical as well. It’s free for September, but after that, you’ll have to pay:

For the rest of September, BostonGlobe.com will be free, but after that readers will have to pay $3.99 a week for a digital-only subscription. Home delivery subscribers will not have to pay extra for the site but will need to register online to gain access.

The newspaper’s existing site, Boston.com, will remain free and will offer breaking news, blogs, photo galleries, sports coverage, and a limited selection of stories from the paper.

Machinarium, iPad Game Built With Adobe Air ★

Speaking of Flash and tablets, Adobe evangelist Lee Brimelow is proud that the current top-selling paid app for the iPad is Machinarium, a game developed using Adobe Air’s iOS cross-compiler. It’s easy to see why it’s popular — the game looks beautiful.

But at a technical level, is this really something Adobe should be crowing about? The game requires an iPad 2 for performance reasons, even though the animation is 2D, not 3D. The game was originally written in Air for play on the PC, so I have little doubt it was less work to port it to the iPad within Air rather than rewriting it natively in Cocoa Touch. But it doesn’t seem right to me that this game doesn’t run on first-gen iPads. Commenters on Brimelow’s post seem to agree.

Update: The game’s description on the App Store includes this: “NOTE: If the game crashes, RESET your iPad, the problem does not have to be on our side!” Such instructions are not unique to games built using Adobe Air, but still, it doesn’t speak well regarding the game’s resource consumption.

Delayed by Flash ★

Speaking of the CrunchPad, Fusion Garage, the company formerly known as “JooJoo” that hoodwinked Arrington out of the project, has pushed back the release of their Grid 10 tablet:

The company also added that the Grid 10 will experience a slight shipping delay, being pushed back to October 1st due to a “new criteria in [the] Adobe Flash Player (FP) 10.3 approval process.”

Remember when people used to argue that Apple should add Flash Player to iOS?

AOL Shitcans Arrington ★

AOL:

Michael Arrington, the founder of TechCrunch has decided to move on from TechCrunch and AOL to his newly formed venture fund.

I wonder who gets to keep the rights to the CrunchPad.

WordPress and High Traffic ★

Ben Brooks defends WordPress:

I have been linked to from Gruber and other high traffic sites before and never once has this site crumbled under the pressure — even when I was on the cheaper Grid-Service from Media Temple. The fact is that if you properly cache and administer your site, well, you can handle a ton of traffic.

True, but no one is arguing otherwise. The problem is that I think that’s a big “if”.

It’s worth noting up front that WordPress.com hosted sites perform admirably under high traffic. The problem is with self-hosted WordPress installations that are not cached — which is the default. People choose WordPress for their self-hosted weblog software because it’s easy to install, and easy to configure with “just put it into a folder” installation of additional themes and plugins. But such an installation can’t handle large amounts of traffic. If I link to an uncached WordPress site, it will go down.

I’ve never used WordPress, so obviously I’m no expert on administering it, but if a smart guy like Dr. Drang has enough trouble getting it to run smoothly with caching that he goes back to running it uncached, I’m going to go out on a limb and say it’s not easy.