Linked List: November 30, 2012

Friday, 30 November 2012

My thanks to Doxie for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed to promote their simple, wireless mobile scanner. Doxie is easy, simple, and works with your Mac or iPad. They now have two great models to choose from:

Doxie One: Scan all your paper with no computer required. ($149)
Doxie Go: Scan anywhere with a rechargeable battery, built-in memory, and optional Wi-Fi. ($199)

Both models come with Doxie’s elegant Mac app for organizing documents — use it to create searchable PDFs, send documents to other apps, upload to the cloud. It’s a great gift for the holidays for anyone who wants to go paperless.

The Inside Story of Pong ★

Epic feature by Chris Stokel-Walker for Buzzfeed:

“Anyone could play,” Alcorn says. “You didn’t have to know physics or space flight or anything. Pong was designed so you could participate in athletics while maintaining a firm grip on a can of beer. You could literally pick up a girl, drink a beer, and play a video game at the same time. It was wonderful.”

Microsoft: 40 Million Windows 8 Licenses Sold in First Month ★

Brandon LeBlanc, Microsoft:

As we pass the one month anniversary of the general availability of Windows 8, we are pleased to announce that to-date Microsoft has sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses. Tami Reller shared this news with industry and financial analysts, investors and media today at the Credit Suisse 2012 Annual Technology Conference. Windows 8 is outpacing Windows 7 in terms of upgrades.

That’s a huge number, so it’s not all bad news for Microsoft. But as Paul Thurrott points out, Windows is so successful that it usually sells around 20 million licenses per month:

First, I’m surprised no one else has questioned why launch-month license sales of Windows 8 weren’t higher than 40 million units. That figure is double the normal sales rate for Windows — remember, Windows 7 sold about 20 million licenses a month for three years straight — but, looked at another way, it’s only double the normal sales rate of Windows. How is it not more than double?

Use the MiniPlayer With iTunes 11 in Full-Screen Mode ★

The trick is to set iTunes to appear on “All Desktops” (i.e. in all Spaces) using the Dock. The downside though, is that when iTunes’s main window is not in full screen mode, it shows up in all Spaces.

Mac OS X Hints has another good iTunes 11 tip regarding keyboard shortcuts for switching between library sections.

Forstall vs. Fadell ★

Worth keeping in mind regarding Tony Fadell’s “got what he deserved” comments regarding Scott Forstall’s ouster from Apple is that these two guys were directly vying with each other to define the iPhone. From a 2008 piece here at DF:

The story I’ve heard is that at the outset of Apple’s iPhone initiative, there was a heated debate within Apple as to what OS should be used [for the iPhone]. Forstall and Serlet pushed for using OS X. Fadell (and, according to one source, former Apple executive Steve Sakoman) pushed for using something else. Obviously, Forstall and Serlet won this debate, and, hyperbolic though it may sound, it may prove to be the single best early design decision in the entire history of the company. It seems hard to imagine the iPhone any other way now, but at the outset it was not a foregone conclusion that a stripped down and revamped version of OS X would work for a mobile phone. […]

The word on the street in Cupertino is not that Fadell was pushed out the door, but that he was never offered a role like Papermaster’s, encompassing all of Apple’s handheld hardware engineering. The iPhone has eclipsed the iPod as the A Team at Apple, and Tony Fadell does not sound like a B Team sort of guy.

So it’s not like Fadell is an unbiased observer here. And as for his comment that Forstall’s ouster resulted in cheering from employees in Cupertino, I’m sure that’s true, but it’s important to keep in mind that the cheering was not universal. At least within Forstall’s iOS division, many engineers and designers liked working under Forstall, and felt that he had their backs. He was divisive — polarizing — not universally disliked.

Fantastical for iPhone ★

Very well done. My new go-to calendaring app for the iPhone. See Lex Friedman’s review at Macworld for more.

‘Scott Got What He Deserved’ ★

Leo Kelion of the BBC, interviewing Tony Fadell:

So what does he make of the news that Mr Forstall lost his post in October after reports of rifts with other executives and a refusal to apologise for the release of a flawed Maps app.

“Scott got what he deserved,” Mr Fadell told the BBC.

When pressed, he adds: “I think what happened just a few weeks back was deserved and justified and it happened.”

Worth watching to see in context. Pretty clear Fadell and Forstall weren’t buds.

Recreating the Sounds of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop Using the Web Audio API ★

Audio is the final nail in Flash’s coffin. Great work here from the BBC. (Via Jory Prum.)

Apple Says ‘Jump’; Carriers Reply ‘How High?’ ★

Mike Hibberd, Telecoms.com:

Apple is not allowing mobile operators to offer the iPhone 5 as an LTE device unless they pass the Californian vendor’s own, independent tests for LTE network performance, Swisscom has confirmed.

Telecoms.com was told of Apple’s policy in October but, at the time, no operator had conceded publicly that it was true.