Linked List: September 16, 2011

Friday, 16 September 2011

Virtuoso Piano 

My thanks to Virtuoso Piano for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Virtuoso Piano is a very cool, very well done piano app for the iPhone. It looks, feels, and sounds real. I gave it to my son to try and he spent 30 minutes playing with it before I could get my iPhone back.

Virtuoso Piano is a free download from the App Store, and has in-app purchases to unlock extra instrument sounds (it ships with two for free — grand piano and a busted Irish Pub piano). Lots of fun, and worth checking out.

Some Other Tablets You May Have Seen 

Marco Arment, after watching several Build sessions on touchscreen Metro stuff:

Instead, they painfully dance around to avoid it, equivocating and genericizing even the most iPad-specific references with “other tablets”, “some competitors”, “you may have seen”, “out there”.

They know they’re talking about the iPad. Everyone in the auditorium knows they’re talking about the iPad. All of us on the internet know they’re talking about the iPad.

I noticed that too, and agree at times it was awkward. Pride explains some of it, but I noticed they even used “other tablets” when talking about things they clearly believe are inferior compared to Metro, like the iPad’s modality for things like rearranging and deleting items in a list.

Archie Out of Context 

I almost feel bad laughing at some of these.

Supreme Court Halts Texas Execution 

David Savage, reporting for the LA Times:

The U.S. Supreme Court stopped Texas officials Thursday evening from executing a Houston murderer who was sentenced to die after jurors were told he posed a greater danger to public safety because he is black.

The justices acted on an emergency appeal after Texas Gov. Rick Perry and state judges refused to intervene. […]

The reprieve came nearly two hours into a six-hour window when Buck could have been executed, but state officials did not act while his emergency appeal was pending.

That these reprieves come at the last hour, just like in the movies, always strikes me as crazy and cruel.

Alderaan Shoots First 

Clip from the new Blu-ray edition of Star Wars.

Similar Use of ‘And’ 

“I’ll always remember this as the night that Michael Jordan and I combined for 70 points.”
—Chicago Bulls forward Stacey King, after a game in which Michael Jordan scored 69 points

Interesting Use of ‘And’ 

Gina Smith and Larry Press, writing for Byte:

Microsoft risks irrelevance in the rapid-fire tablet market dominated by rivals Apple and Google.

Michael Mace: ‘The Two Most Dangerous Words in Technology Marketing’ 

“Just wait.”

Windows 8 Desktop Apps for ARM: Maybe 

Great reporting by Joanna Stern, in an interview with Mike Anguilo, Microsoft’s VP of Windows planning1:

When asked about Microsoft’s plans to explain the legacy program situation, Angiulo said that “there is a significant amount of marketing that we are capable of doing that can get through — we can afford to tell a story and tell it long enough and clearly enough. We will make sure it is absolutely clear where your legacy apps will run.” However, he followed that up with a kicker: “porting things and whether we open native desktop development are either decisions that are either not made or not announced yet.”

So Microsoft hasn’t yet decided whether legacy (a.k.a. traditional desktop) apps will be able to be recompiled/ported to ARM. No question it’s technically possible — the question is whether they want to allow it. My guess is it’s a political fight inside the company.

  1. “VP of Windows planning”? Microsoft needs to reimagine their job titles. ↩︎︎

Movie Poster of the Week: ‘Burning Man’ 

As Jim Coudal says, “Sweet poster and backstory.”

Windows 8, Traditional Windows Apps, and ARM 

Paul McDougall, InformationWeek:

In a clarification, a Microsoft executive said x86 applications built to run on the desktop version of Windows 8 won’t be compatible with the tablet version of the operating system. The executive also said that the tablet version won’t be able run any applications built for previous versions of Windows.

“We’ve been very clear since the very first CES demos and forward that the ARM product won’t run any x86 applications,” said Stephen Sinofsky, president of Microsoft Windows unit, during a meeting with financial analysts Wednesday.

No one should be surprised that existing x86 binaries won’t run on Windows on ARM. That would require something like Rosetta, the on-the-fly emulation layer that allowed Intel-based Macs to run compiled-for-PowerPC apps.

The question is, though, will Windows developers be able to recompile existing apps for ARM? I’ve been looking for a definitive answer and I don’t think Microsoft has given one. This bit from Sinofsky suggests, though, that they will not:

“The challenge is very interesting. If we allow the world of x86 application support like that, or based on what we call desktop apps in our start yesterday, then there are real challenges in some of the value proposition for [ARM] System on a Chip,” Sinofsky said. “Will battery life be as good, for example? Those applications aren’t written to be really great in the face of limited battery constraints, which is a value proposition of the Metro-style apps.”

I’m feeling good about my prediction the other day that ARM-based Windows machines will be Metro-only. (I say “machines” rather than tablets because I think we’ll see Windows ARM notebooks too.)