Linked List: November 17, 2012

Saturday, 17 November 2012

Tech Conferences: What’s the Big Idea? ★

Speaking of Glenn Fleishman, I bet this piece he wrote for The Economist is the only thing you’ll read today that contains the phrases “geegaws and jimcrack” and “the improbably named Quebecois Guy English”.

Tower ★

My thanks to Tower for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Tower is a terrific Mac client for the Git version control system. Git is powerful and popular, but the command-line interface can be difficult, to say the least. Tower makes Git easy.

Download the free trial and see for yourself. Even better, use coupon code “DF10” and save 10 percent through the end of November.

Windows 8 as a Long Bet ★

Harry McCracken:

Windows 8 was never (primarily) about driving PC sales for the 2012 holiday season. It’s a long bet on a future in which most PCs have touch capability and many of them are tablets. As such, any current conclusions about how it’s doing are hopelessly premature.

But why put the touch/tablet UI on all PCs? A touch-optimized UI makes no more sense for a non-touch desktop than a desktop UI makes for a tablet. Apple has it right: a touch UI for touch devices, a pointer UI for pointer (trackpad, mouse) devices. Windows 8 strikes me as driven by dogma — “one Windows, everywhere”.

Twitter to Client Developers: Drop Dead ★

Matthew Panzarino:

What it did say, however, which caused the Tweetro folks to hold out hope that they could get the limit lifted, was that “you will need our permission if your application will require more than 100,000 individual user tokens.”

This implies that Twitter would be flexible about the limits, but in all of my discussions with developers, and I’ve had a lot of them over the past few months, I’ve never seen evidence of them doing so. And they were not flexible with the Tweetro folks, even though there is NO official Windows 8 client from Twitter (it has said it is working on one).

You’ll use Twitter’s shitty website and you’ll like it.