Linked List: October 28, 2011

Friday, 28 October 2011

DollarApp: Big Words 

Those of you who follow the DF RSS feed know how the weekly sponsorship works. There’s one sponsor per week, and two posts: on Monday, an entry that appears only in the RSS feed, written by the sponsor; then on Friday, a thank-you post that appears on both the DF website and in the RSS feed, written by me. (You’re reading one of the latter now.) The rule for the sponsor-written Monday entries is that they’re limited to 100 words. Some sponsors try to use every word they can, and that’s fine. But some of my favorite sponsorship posts are the shortest ones. This week’s was the shortest ever, and is my new all-time favorite DF sponsorship post. I’ll repeat it here, in its entirety:

Tired of Twitter? Message in real life using Big Words.

That’s the entire text of the ad. I don’t know about you, but me, if I read that, my curiosity would be piqued. I would have to click. So: my thanks to DollarApp and Dom Sagolla both for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed, and for writing my all-time favorite sponsorship ad. Check out the app — Big Words does one simple thing, really well. Do me a favor and cough up a buck — one buck! — if only to reward him for a great ad.

The Siri Dictation Key Doubles as a Space Bar When Tapped Quickly 

Nice find by Gary Ng. Details, details, details.

The Subtle Changes in iOS 5 

Never stop sweating the pixels.

Jim Dalrymple Calls Bullshit on Today’s Samsung Smartphone Numbers 

Remember back in July, when Samsung announced it would no longer reveal phone and tablet sales data? They’re still not revealing them, but that hasn’t stopped Strategy Analytics from declaring them the unit sales leader in smartphones. (And it’s another case of shipments-vs.-sales-to-customers.)

I’m not doubting, by the way, that Samsung sold more “smartphones” than Apple for the quarter. They’ve always sold more phones, period, and the industry is rapidly transitioning to one where nearly all new phones are going to be “smartphones”. The point is that an analyst’s estimate for Samsung’s sales numbers should not be reported as fact, nor should shipments be conflated with actual sales.

ARM Welcomes Windows With 64-Bit Chips for Desktops and Servers 

I’ll bet Apple has both an ARM-based version of Mac OS X and an Intel-based version of iOS up and running in the labs. Apple loves having options.