Linked List: October 24, 2011

Monday, 24 October 2011

Apple Tweaks Colors of iPad Smart Covers 

They dropped orange (my wife’s favorite) and “tweaked” my favorite, the leather navy one, to be “more navy”. Best news is that they’ve added a nice dark gray polyurethane one — I thought it was somewhat crummy how in the original lineup, the only dark ones were the more expensive leather ones.

Updated MacBook Pros 

Faster CPUs and bigger hard drives.

‘I Finally Cracked It’ 

Marco Arment on the passage in Isaacson’s biography where Jobs tells him he’s “cracked” the problem of creating an Apple-quality TV.

The way to revolutionize the TV market is to cut out all of the legacy. No cable companies. No broadcast tuners. No channels. No DVRs. All internet delivery. All on-demand. No commercials.

But that’s an incredibly tall order. Apple can do a lot, but I’m not sure that they can do that, given how much of it is out of their control.

It’s all about content. I don’t even think it’s that hard to imagine a truly game-changing TV from Apple — but such a thing would require massive participation from content providers. I’m not going to hold my breath.

The other thing that’s always struck me is that even if Apple could get a ton of content providers on board with the idea, they’d still have to worry about cable providers because so many of us get our Internet service from a cable company. What’s to stop Comcast from throttling your bandwidth after you drop TV service and pay them for nothing other than Internet service? Ideally the feds would prevent that, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on that either.

Good Point on Amazon’s New KF8 E-Book Format 

Guido Henkel on KF8:

The big problem with the introduction of the KF8 format is that Amazon is doing a pretty hack job with this, I am very sorry to say, because, according to Amazon’s announcement and FAQ, none of the older Kindles will be able to support this format.

Why is this a problem? Well, as a professional eBook formatter, the question for me is, how am I supposed to deal with this? Instead of creating the foundation for one rock solid Kindle platform that has powerful capabilities, Amazon is now going down the road of platform fragmentation.

Amazon promises that their tools will convert KF8 files to alternate formats compatible with older Kindles, but as Henkel notes:

Just because KindleGen 2 promises to convert your books, doesn’t mean you should, because the output quality will be dubious at best. Of course, if you are part of the I-don’t-care-just-make-it-easy, Smashwords-adoring crowd, yes, that might work for you, but if you take pride in your ebook’s layout and formatting, this is not going to fly.

Market Share Claim Chowder 

From a December 2002 CNet piece by Joe Wilcox:

“Certainly by… 2005, possibly by the end of 2003, Linux will pass Mac OS as the No. 2 operating environment,” said IDC analyst Dan Kusnetzky.

Reads better if you pronounce certainly like Curly from The Three Stooges.

(Thanks to DF reader Steven Klein.)

Dick Cavett on Steve Jobs 

Dick Cavett:

“How does it feel to be Dick Cavett?”

That’s what he said.

What a dumb question, I thought. This guy can’t be very bright.

The “guy” was named Steve Jobs. Turned out he was reasonably bright.

Flash Player Access to Your Camera and Microphone Is Controlled By Adobe 

Yet another reason to keep Flash uninstalled in your primary web browser.

Siri and the Phonetic Name Fields 

Simon Evans on the phonetic name fields in Address Book/Contacts:

What they didn’t mention is that adding information to these fields will almost certainly mess up the sorting of your contact list.

To understand why, you need to understand their intended function.

They are there to aid with the sorting of Japanese and Chinese names. That’s why they don’t show up by default when using English as the system language. (Oddly, they can’t even be added if you’re using British English.)

Yeah, seems like a nice idea to use these fields to aid Siri, but it’s not what they’re there for.