Linked List: February 1, 2012

Wednesday, 1 February 2012

Macworld 2012 ★

Astute summary of last week’s show by Shawn Blanc.

Similar take from Chris Foresman at Ars Technica, who summed the changes thus:

As a tech journalist, Macworld has gradually become less interesting. As a user of Apple’s products and a geek in general, however, the show has become perhaps more interesting.

70 Percent of All Smartphones Sold by AT&T and Verizon Last Quarter Were iPhones ★

Android’s market share victory is imminent.

This Is Sad All Right ★

Violet Blue, writing about last week’s Macworld/iWorld Expo:

I was, in fact, looking at The Saddest Booth Babe In The World. […]

She sat on a stool in between two large monitors across the aisle from us. The pretty brunette was in one of those big corner booths that paid a few bucks for that sorta-prime real estate you know is a gamble for whoever forked over the money to sell wignuts or widgets or iPhone cases or other sundry USB landfill.

Her shoulders were hunched and her hands sat limply in her lap beneath breasts that were packaged air-tight in a tight, branded t-shirt.

She stared at the floor. Unlike her counterparts, she never smiled. Sad booth babe was sad.

But as Shawn King points out in the comments under the photo, the woman in question doesn’t look anything at all like a “booth babe” — she simply looks like a developer who happens to be a woman manning her booth. And according to subsequent comments by Tim Breen, that’s exactly what she is:

The woman in the white top appears to be Piroska Szurmai-Palotai, the (sole?) developer for NeoPlay Entertainment. She has three apps currently in the App Store and was a first-time exhibitor at the Mobile Apps Showcase this year.

Update: The woman in the photograph is Zsófia Rutkai, who works in PR for NeoPlay Entertainment.

AT&T and Samsung Finally Upgrade the Infuse 4G to Android 4.0 ★

Wait, did I say 4.0? I meant Android 2.3.

iPhone 4S Camera Made by Sony ★

That’s one way for camera companies to thrive in the face of declining point-and-shoot sales: to become component suppliers for smartphones and other devices.

No Longer Loving Google ★

Nelson Minar:

I imagine half of my readers are smugly thinking “See, I told you Google was evil all along”. I don’t think that’s right. In particular I refuse to give in to a cynical view of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto; that ethos was very real, a sincere and important guiding principle. And if a big company like Google can’t avoid being evil, then what world-changing enterprise can? But I think Google as an organization has moved on; they’re focussed now on market position, not making the world better. Which makes me sad.

Apple Updates Final Cut Pro X With Multicam, Broadcast Monitoring ★

Finally.

In Praise of Apple’s .ibook Format ★

Joseph Pearson, of the e-book startup Bookish:

So we were surprised and delighted by some aspects of the .ibook file that iBooks Author spits out. Their extensions to EPUB are done precisely the right way. They’re not done with dollops of embedded JavaScript — a fact that Baldur Bjarnason laments. (You can be sure EPUB’s governing body, the IDPF, is lamenting that too.)

Instead they’ve done it with microformats. […] They’ve said: this stuff is up to reading software developers to implement. Like Apple. Or Amazon. Or Kobo. Or Booki.sh. What we need to do is give the ebook authors enough opportunities to customise the functionality, not recreate it for every single book.

This is exactly the right stance. We’re thrilled to see this, although it means a whole lot of work for us.

Apple’s approach suggests that they think “write once, run everywhere” is no better a strategy for e-books than it has been for any other sort of software.

Making Mistakes ★

To top off those panel appearances, while in San Francisco I stopped by the palatial Mule Design studio to make an appearance on Let’s Make Mistakes, hosted by my friend and American McCarver co-contributor Mike Monteiro and Katie Gillum. We talked about everything from conferences to NFL team uniform design.

Less Than Perfect Apps ★

My second appearance was on this panel moderated by Lex Friedman, featuring Glenn Fleishman, David Wiskus, Paul Kafasis, Guy English, and yours truly, talking about the flaws that bother us in apps that we love.

The State of Apple ★

I made two speaking appearances last week at Macworld/iWorld. The first was this one, with Jason Snell and Andy Ihnatko, on the state of Apple (and, really, the state of the industry).