Linked List: May 31, 2013

Friday, 31 May 2013

RIP, Camino 

Lex Friedman:

Pour one out for Camino. The Mac-only browser, born a decade ago, is no longer under active development.

Camino was a free, open-source browser for the Mac, built on Mozilla’s Gecko engine. Unlike other Mozilla-based browsers of its era, Camino featured a totally native OS X interface from day one. By contrast, Firefox has long used a cross-platform interface markup language, which to this day makes some Mac users feel that the app isn’t quite “Mac-like.”

A precursor to Safari — not in code, but in spirit. Camino (née Chimera) was like a glass of ice water on a hot day for Mac users who wanted a modern but Mac-like browser in the early years of Mac OS X.

GetResponse 

My thanks to GetResponse for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. GetResponse makes email marketing easy. They have great template designs that are easily customized with a simple drag-and-drop interface. They have automation tools to eliminate repetitive tasks and drudgery, including auto-responders to handle responses.

Landing pages are customizable too, and include tracking and analytic tools so you can measure the response. Check out their website to see some of the great brands they have as clients, and try GetResponse free.

Counting Tablets as PCs 

Frank Shaw, writing from the D11 conference:

On one hand, looking around the conference, there were iPads and other tablets as far as the eye could see. On the other hand, (as I noted in a tweet), most of the people around me were using their iPads exactly as they would a laptop — physical keyboard attached, typing away, connected to a network of some kind, creating a document or tweet or blog or article. In that context, it’s hard to distinguish between a tablet and a notebook or laptop. The form factors are different, but let’s be clear, each is a PC.

You could have won a lot of money making bar bets a decade ago that in 2013, Microsoft’s communications chief would make an argument that positions Apple as the number one maker of PCs by volume in the world.

It’s a good piece, and I agree with his conclusion:

When you strip away all the post-PC rhetoric, maybe we’re all saying the same thing — the future is about killer devices connected to amazing cloud services. That’s the future Microsoft is embracing, and that’s the future that everyone here at the D Conference is excited about.

CNet: ‘Acer $400 “PC” Will Run Android’ 

Interesting device. Also interesting that CNet put “PC” in quotes in the headline.

Update: They’ve rewritten the article and headline.

The Feature Set Trap 

Rene Ritchie, on Microsoft’s new iPad vs. Windows 8 campaign:

Instead of competing with that, trying to out do Apple at that, Microsoft, like almost everyone else before them, has fallen into the feature set trap. Here’s the problem with that — it doesn’t matter what something can do, it only matters what you can do with that something.

These ads will help Microsoft convince some people to buy a Windows 8 tablet rather than an Android tablet or another kind of Windows PC. It won’t convince the hundreds of millions of iPad customers and iPad-inclined customers to do anything other than to continue buying iPads.

I’m curious what their goal is with this campaign. Do they think PowerPoint is the sort of thing that will take the air out of the iPad? Or are they going after a different market, shoring up the parts of their existing user base that really does need PowerPoint? If it’s the latter, I think this is an effective campaign.

It is a little rich, though, that they repeatedly use the absence of Microsoft apps on the iPad as knocks against the iPad. It’s Microsoft’s choice, not Apple’s, that there is no PowerPoint for iPad. Makes me wonder whether the Office team is being blocked from doing apps for iOS in order to protect Windows.