By John Gruber
WorkOS — Agents need context. Ship the integrations that give it to them.
Linked List: February 21, 2012
Tuesday, 21 February 2012
- MLB Simplifies Pricing for iPhone and iPad Apps ★
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Christopher Meinck, EverythingiCafe:
In previous years, baseball fans who subscribed to MLB At Bat were charged an additional fee to use MLB At Bat for iPad and yet another charge for the iPhone app. This year, we’ve just confirmed that MLB At Bat 12 will be free with your subscription, which remains at $119.99 for existing subscribers. New subscriptions will be priced at $124.99. This enables you to receive 150 Spring Training games and all 2430 regular season games (some games are subject to blackout), with no added cost for either the iPhone or iPad apps.
I like this change. Previously they had separate free and paid apps, plus the subscription fee for watching live ballgames. This is much simpler: apps are free, subscriptions cost $125. Easy. (If you like baseball, trust me, it’s money well spent.)
(Via 9to5 Mac.)
- Dell’s Predicament ★
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Dustin Curtis:
After basically admitting defeat in the consumer PC market and promising to focus on enterprise IT and “mobile services” last year, Dell has found itself in the midst of a confusing transition. It is caught between two markets that are dramatically changing. Consumer PCs are dying. Enterprise IT problems are being solved increasingly by “cloud-based” solutions using generic or custom-built equipment. The future viability of Dell’s hardware products, which already have razor-thin margins, does not look great.
Put another way, Dell has no strengths in any market that’s growing. They’re a relic.
As a side note, I found this quote from Michael Dell interesting. The Journal asked him what had most surprised him since returning as Dell CEO four years ago. He replied:
I’d say [the] rapid rise of the tablet. I didn’t completely see that coming. Tablets aren’t really new, in the sense that the tablet PC idea’s been around for a while. Obviously, more recent products have been much more successful.
“More recent products”. I’ve started to notice a trend where Apple competitors can’t bring themselves to mention the iPad by name. There are no other successful tablets. It’s just one: the iPad.
- Helpful Tip for Messages for Mac Beta Users With Mac.com AIM IDs ★
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Dan Frakes:
With Messages beta, my colleagues don’t see me as being online. Fewer work interruptions, I suppose.
I had the same problem. I could see my AIM buddies, but none of my AIM buddies could see me. (Listeners of The Talk Show live broadcast last week could hear me discover this problem.) I think the problem only affects AIM users with a @mac.com AIM ID. When you upgrade from iChat to Messages, Messages assumes you want to use @me.com as your AIM ID. Apple itself treats [email protected] and [email protected] as synonymous, but AIM does not. So what Messages is doing is logging you in as [email protected], but you need to be logged in as [email protected] for your buddies to see you.
Solution: Delete your AIM account in Messages’s preferences, then recreate it. In addition to restoring your visibility to your buddies, it also restores your ability to transfer files.
- iPhone Mail Tip: Re-Open Most Recent Draft Message With One Tap ★
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I seldom use draft messages on the iPhone because it’s so cumbersome to get back to them. This tip might change that. (Via Dan Frakes.)
- Ubuntu for Android ★
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Newly announced project from Canonical to create Android phones which you can dock and get a full Ubuntu desktop. Perhaps the first realization of Philip Greenspun’s “Mobile Phone as Home Computer” idea from 2005? This is sort of the opposite of cloud computing. Cloud computing is “access your stuff from any device”; this is “take your stuff with you”. I don’t think this is the way to go, but it’s an interesting idea.
Jamie Keene at The Verge has a hands-on with a prototype.
- The Curious Case of the (Cr)apps That Make Money ★
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More on App Store scam apps, from Trevor Gilbert at PandoDaily. Apple needs a zero tolerance policy on this crap. (Via Shawn King.)
- Clear ★
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Speaking of Phill Ryu and Impending, they collaborated with Realmac Software on a new to-do list app for the iPhone. I don’t like everything about it (I don’t think apps other than games and video players should hide the status bar, for one thing), but my complaints are niggles. In the large, it’s a damn clever app, with a very thoughtful interaction design focused on letting you do a few simple things very easily.
My cardinal rule of to-do list apps is that priority should be implicit by task order. Drag more important/urgent items up, drag less import/urgent items down. Clear gets this right. Apple’s Reminders app gets this completely wrong.
- Phill Ryu on the Rise of Scam Apps in the App Store ★
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At one point this week, two of the top ten paid iPhone apps were outright scams. Phill Ryu has a good set of suggestions for how Apple should address this. Being able to get a refund within a short window after first installing the app, for example.
- Oscar Voters: Old White Men ★
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John Horn, Nicole Sperling, and Doug Smith, reporting for the LA Times:
A Los Angeles Times study found that academy voters are markedly less diverse than the moviegoing public, and even more monolithic than many in the film industry may suspect. Oscar voters are nearly 94% Caucasian and 77% male, The Times found. Blacks are about 2% of the academy, and Latinos are less than 2%.
Oscar voters have a median age of 62, the study showed. People younger than 50 constitute just 14% of the membership.
Pretty obvious that Academy membership skews old, white, and male — and always has — just by looking at the movies that have won Oscars. Or by looking at the great movies that didn’t win.
- Sandboxing Deadline Extended to June 1 ★
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News from Apple:
We have extended the deadline for sandboxing your apps on the Mac App Store from March 1st to June 1st to provide you with enough time to take advantage of new sandboxing entitlements available in OS X 10.7.3 and new APIs in Xcode 4.3.
If you’re interested in a deep, thoughtful take on the problems Mac developers are running into with sandboxing, Daniel Jalkut wrote a good piece last week. For some concrete problems encountered in a sandbox-enabled app as things stand today, see Craig Hockenberry’s brief piece on xScope 3.0, and Manton Reece on his decision to pull Clipstart from the Mac App Store.
If they had asked my advice, I’d have suggested postponing mandatory sandboxing until Mountain Lion is released. The problem here isn’t really about app developers needing more time to update their apps; it’s about Apple needing more time to improve the sandboxing rules and APIs.
- Mountain Lion Details ★
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Nice list of new stuff in Mountain Lion from Serenity Caldwell at Macworld.
- Microsoft Office for iPad Coming Soon? ★
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Nice scoop by Matt Hickey at The Daily.
Update: Nice scoop, if true. Mary Jo Foley:
A Microsoft spokesperson said the screen shot accompanying The Daily’s story is not a real picture of a Microsoft software product. But the spokesperson also said Microsoft is declining to comment as to whether or not the company has developed a version of Office for the iPad and/or when such a product may come to market. I’ve asked Daily Editor Peter Ha for a response (via Twitter). No word back so far from Ha.
So they’re saying the screenshot is phony, but that’s a non-denial denial that Office for iPad is in the works.
- Pitcher and Catcher ★
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Yours truly, saying nice things about a Red Sox pitcher.
- The Apple/Google Cold War ★
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During last week’s The Talk Show, I mentioned that Pocket-Lint got a statement from Apple PR regarding YouTube’s omission from Mountain Lion’s new system-wide sharing feature:
Most interesting of the three is the inclusion of Vimeo over YouTube, a choice that is bound to give the professional video-sharing site a boost in awareness and audience numbers, but also leave users wondering why no Google support from day one?
When asked why there was no YouTube support at the moment in the developer preview, Apple told Pocket-lint: “We have Vimeo, and we don’t have YouTube.”
Allow me to translate: “Fuck Google.”
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After linking to this Danny Sullivan piece yesterday, I’ve gotten a bunch of emails from readers who report that on their iPhones, Mobile Safari’s “Accept cookies” preference is set to “Never”, even though they never changed it manually. Here’s an Apple support discussion thread about the issue. Sounds like a real pain in the ass, since without cookies, you won’t stay signed-in to any website. It turns Mobile Safari into the guy from Memento.