Linked List: December 29, 2013

Sunday, 29 December 2013

Daring Fireball RSS Feed Sponsorship Openings for Q1 ★

A last-minute scheduling change has opened up this week’s DF RSS feed sponsorship, and the rest of the quarter is mostly open. If you have a product or service that you’d like to promote to Daring Fireball’s audience of smart, good-looking readers, please do get in touch.

Update: This week’s spot has been sold, but next week’s remains open.

Why MacPaint’s Original Canvas Was 416 Pixels Wide ★

Great bit of historical analysis by Bill Scott. Hardware limits driving software design.

Chrome OS Web Traffic Share According to StatCounter ★

I was wrong yesterday — StatCounter does break out Chrome OS separately. The trick is, you have to download CSV files to see it — its share is so low that it gets filed under “Other” in the results they show on the website.

Chrome OS’s web traffic numbers remain really, really low, but — according to StatCounter — they did seem to see a spike in December, going from around 0.04 to 0.1 percent worldwide, and from 0.14 to 0.34 in the United States. Here are a few tweets I collected from others examining these numbers.

I don’t think we can draw any conclusions from this data other than that Chromebooks are not yet in widespread use. It’s possible that Chrome OS is now on pace to eventually be a major platform, but that it will take a few more quarters of strong sales for it to make a dent. It’s also possible that Chrome OS will remain in no-man’s land, measured in mere tenths of a single percent.