Linked List: February 10, 2012

Friday, 10 February 2012

My thanks to Rogue Amoeba for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote Audio Hijack Pro, their indispensable audio recording app for the Mac. As they say, if you can hear it on your Mac, Audio Hijack Pro can record it. Skype conversations, streaming radio, or recording a note via your microphone — you name it. Audio Hijack Pro even works to capture audio from sandboxed App Store apps.

Download their free trial, then purchase from Rogue Amoeba’s store. This week only, Daring Fireball readers can save 25 percent using coupon code “DF201202”. Great app at a great discount.

A Conversation With Amy Jane Gruber ★

For your weekend enjoyment, even more podcast fun: my wife Amy is the guest on this week’s Let’s Make Mistakes.

Wow, Is That a Pen? ★

This week’s episode of The Talk Show, with topics including iPad 3 rumors, Windows 8 on ARM, LTE hardware, Google’s purportedly imminent Dropbox competitor, Super Bowl ads, and Path doing the wrong thing the wrong way.

Brought to you by Smile and Sourcebits.

Bookle ★

New app from Stairways Software — a $10 Mac e-book reader for DRM-free ePub books. Included with the app is, self-referentially, Take Control of Bookle, by Adam Engst.

No Third-Party Code on the Windows on ARM Desktop ★

Peter Bright, Ars Technica:

The built-in Windows apps — including Explorer and Internet Explorer 10 — and four Office apps — Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote — would run on the desktop, but nothing else would. Third-party applications would be prohibited, and there would be no provision to port existing desktop applications to run on the ARM desktop.

This led to an immediate, if somewhat surprising, reaction across the Internet. “But what about browser plugins? Will they also be forbidden?”

The answer to that is “Yes.” Or perhaps even “Yes, of course they are, since it was stated in unequivocal terms that there would be no provision to run third-party code on the desktop. That means you, Flash.”

So maybe I was right that Windows on ARM would go Metro-only — it’s just that they’ve made an exception for a few built-in apps from Microsoft itself. Why include desktop versions of Explorer and IE, though? Why include two different versions of IE if even the desktop version doesn’t allow plugins?

Also: this seems to suggest that the Office suite is included free-of-charge with Windows on ARM. That’s a pretty bold move considering how much money Microsoft makes from Office licensing.

Leaked Download Counts for USA Today Tablet Apps ★

Todd Bishop:

The undated slide shows 260,000 downloads of the USA Today app for Kindle Fire, the Android-based tablet released by Amazon last fall. That is double the 130,000 cumulative downloads of the USA Today app for other Android tablets.

It still pales in comparison to the more than 2.9 million total downloads of the USA Today iPad app, but the iPad has also been around for a lot longer than the Amazon tablet.

Even the HP TouchPad has double the downloads of all Android tablets combined.

Joanna Stern Reviews the MacBook Air as a Windows 7 Laptop ★

Joanna Stern:

I could go on and on about how much better the touchpad experience is on the Air, but the big question I’ve always had is: why? Why is it that other laptop makers haven’t mastered the touch experience and Apple has been able to make it work so fluidly, even with another operating system?

Because no one other than Apple gives a shit about doing the hard work to get things like this right.

Interesting note on battery life: the Air got over 6 hours of battery life running Mac OS X, but only 4 running Windows 7.

‘Can You Hear Me, Dave?’ ★

Apple’s 1999 Super Bowl ad. It’s like they made this one just for me.

Paul Thurrott Giveth Common Sense, Paul Thurrott Taketh Away ★

Not so good a piece by Paul Thurrott:

But the big takeaway here is simple. Windows on ARM, or “WOA,” as Microsoft calls it, looks like more than a credible answer to the iPad. In fact, it looks like something that will relegate the iPad to the backwater of the tablet market, much as Windows did to the Mac.

That’s simply not going to happen. Comparisons to the Mac are impossible — the iPad is now far more popular than the Mac ever was. They sold over 15 million iPads last quarter; in the old days, when the Mac-vs.-DOS/Windows war was running hot, Apple sold around 1 million Macs per quarter. I say Windows 8 should be deemed a success if it simply joins iOS as a successful tablet computing platform. It’s not too late for others to join the tablet party, but it is too late to keep the iPad out.

And they will ship with full, but touch-enabled, versions of the coming Office 15 apps, which should be a neat final nail in the coffin of those overpriced luxury items from Cupertino.

There’s a kernel of wisdom here, which is that the Office 15 apps should be the best selling point in favor of Windows 8 tablets versus the iPad, for those buying tablets for use as a secondary or even tertiary computing device in a job that’s already dependent upon Microsoft Office. When I travel, I see gobs of corporate businesspeople using iPads; with a real version of Office, many of those people may well be using Windows 8 tablets a year from now. It’s a genuinely compelling hook.

But “overpriced”? Really? If anything, the opposite remains the case: no one can match Apple on pricing for comparatively-spec’d tablets. Remember when everyone thought the iPad was going to start at $999? (Including Thurrott himself?)

Why Microsoft Shouldn’t Focus Only on Windows ★

Good piece by Paul Thurrott, arguing that “Office everywhere” might be a better strategy for Microsoft than “Windows everywhere”:

So what would an unfettered Office look like? […]

You’d also target other popular computing platforms — primarily iOS/iPad but also iOS/iPhone and Android for both smartphones and tablets. You’d make sure that Office ran as well as possible on all of these platforms, and not just a single app but as many Office apps as possible. You’d speak openly about how the computing world was changing and that for a large percentage of customers, just having an A-1 product on Windows PCs wasn’t enough.

Motorola Exec on Android Upgrade Delays: It’s the Hardware ★

Sascha Segan, PCMag:

It’s the hardware, said Christy Wyatt, senior vice president and general manager of Motorola’s Enterprise Business Unit. The issue at hand, according to Wyatt, is that writing code to support hardware other than Google’s Nexus model has proven to be a tall order for smartphone makers.

“When Google does a release of the software … they do a version of the software for whatever phone they just shipped,” she said. “The rest of the ecosystem doesn’t see it until you see it. Hardware is by far the long pole in the tent, with multiple chipsets and multiple radio bands for multiple countries. It’s a big machine to churn.”

Presumably this will change for Motorola once they’re a Google subsidiary. In the meantime though, the simple truth is that if you want Android 4.0, you’ve got to buy a new phone.