Linked List: January 27, 2014

Monday, 27 January 2014

AppleScript Returns in Latest Update to Numbers ★

Ben Waldie, writing for Macworld:

The latest update of Numbers reintroduces AppleScript support in a big way. While Apple could have taken an iterative approach, reintroducing a few commands here and there, it chose instead to go whole-hog: The entire suite of scripting terminology originally supported by Numbers in the 2009 edition of iWork has returned.

And right on cue, here’s an excellent guide to Numbers’s AppleScript support at Mac OS X Automation.

On First Thought ★

Linus Edwards:

I recently stumbled upon a 1984 New York Times review of the original Mac, and it was fascinating to see a person’s first reactions to a computer that has become so incredibly influential over the years. This made me search out first reviews of a few other Apple products, including the iMac, iPod, iPhone, and iPad. I’ve always found these first reviews to be incredibly interesting, and a way to go back and see what people at the time thought of products that would become so historically significant. What I found was that most reviewers couldn’t see the revolution that was happening right before their eyes and instead were stuck in the past and mostly focused on relatively insignificant concerns.

The reviews he quotes all read like classic attempts at “balance” — the idea that any “fair” review should be at least somewhat balanced between pros and cons.

Small Update to My JavaScript Bookmarklet Builder ★

Small update (and new Gist mirror) of a little helper script I wrote for creating bookmarklets a few years ago.

Apple Q1 2014 Results ★

Apple:

The Company sold 51 million iPhones, an all-time quarterly record, compared to 47.8 million in the year-ago quarter. Apple also sold 26 million iPads during the quarter, also an all-time quarterly record, compared to 22.9 million in the year-ago quarter. The Company sold 4.8 million Macs, compared to 4.1 million in the year-ago quarter.

Average selling price for iPhones is up from the previous quarter, and just a hair down year-over-year (from $642 to $637), which means the 5S had a very good quarter, and that the 5C didn’t really change things much from Apple’s prior practice of selling year-old iPhones at the mid-tier price point.

Shawn Blanc’s Grandpa’s iPad ★

Shawn Blanc:

The iPad was a gift from my aunt. It’s a 3rd generation and she doesn’t use it that often so she gave it to him hoping he could use it. (Perhaps as a giant remote control for the TV?)

But my Grandpa discovered a use for it that none of us had considered. It is the best camera he’s ever owned.

With so many people using their iPads as their primary cameras, I really hope Apple can figure out a way to get the same camera used in the top-of-the-line iPhone into the same model year’s new iPads. And I worry about how someone like Blanc’s grandfather is backing up those photos.

Socioeconomic Acrophobia ★

I really enjoyed this piece by Josh Marshall, going deep on Kleiner-Perkins founder Tom Perkins’s comparing the rising critique of income inequality to the Nazis’ Final Solution:

And then there’s the other really important variable in the equation. We know now that Wall Street came out of the financial crisis pretty nicely. But that was far from clear in the fall of 2008. The titans, under-titans and sub-titans saw the entire financial system spin on the edge of un-self-regulating collapse, something the reigning ideology of recent decades said shouldn’t have been possible along with the real prospect of whole personal fortunes evaporating in an instant. That kind of scare is not easy to forget. Mix it with the need to run to the political class hat in hand and that ocean of animus from the public at large and you get the makings of a political and psychological toxicity that breeds Perkinsonian nonsense at the extreme end and more pervasively the sense of embattlement and threat verging on persecution complex that I described above.