May 2011
29 posts
The Hit List 1.0 →
iphoneyou:
The application is finally out of beta. I think many people thought it had been abandoned. It also has over-the-air sync as a paid service.
I loved THL for a while; while it only did a subset of what OmniFocus does, it did the things it did very elegantly. But I was one of the many people who figured it was abandoned, and stuck it out with the Zen-like TaskPaper until finally...
So it's not just me writing "Dear Leo" letters
David Chartier quoted a quip from Merlin Mann on the “Back to Work” podcast (“What about self-righteousness? Does that have gluten in it?”), and made this observation:
Related: I have essentially replaced the TWiT network with Dan Benjamin’s 5by5. I barely get to listen to half the shows I want, but Dan’s put together a great lineup with some killer...
PBS gets commercial breaks →
Elizabeth Jensen (NYT):
PBS officials told member stations at its recent annual meeting in Orlando that beginning this fall, the Wednesday science series “Nature” and “Nova” would contain corporate and foundation sponsor spots, promotional messages and branding within four breaks inside the shows, instead of at the very beginning and end.
While there’s incredibly fertile ground for...
PHP Sadness →
“These are things in PHP which make me sad.”
(I just want to know what language he implemented the site in.)
Android Counter-Culture
Fortune’s Philip Elmer-DeWitt writes an article that asks why it’s harder to make money with Android apps than iOS apps, providing a few “answers” along the lines of:
There are three times as many paid apps on the iOS App Store as there are on the Android Market
Android downloads for paid apps are significantly lower than for free apps
Paid applications on iOS tend to...
Ruby Red Paloma
With Memorial Day weekend coming up, it’s time to think about summer cocktails. What makes a cocktail “summer?” I don’t know, but I think it means the drink is so light and refreshing that you think it has less alcohol in it than it does.
When you think of tequila, the chances are you think either of the margarita or some night back in college that made you swear off...
The mobile landscape in Japan →
This is an article about the Samsung Galaxy S outselling the iPhone in Japan in the last quarter, which is interesting—but that’s not what actually interests me about it. For years, we Westerners have been told that the Japanese cell phone market is so different from—and in some ways so far ahead of—our cell phones that there’s no way “outsiders” can make...
HTC's "Puccini" tablet →
10.1″ display, Honeycomb, and a Qualcomm MSM8660—a dual-core “Snapdragon”—1.5GHz CPU. This seems standard issue for “non-iPad tablet” currently; two questions:
The touch panel supports both resistive and capacitive sensing, so it can work with a stylus more precisely. What’s the use case they’re going for?
Is that use case going to be enough to...
Google Wallet: the evolution of payments? →
At least, so claims a slide shown on Joshua Topolsky’s report:
Today the company announced two new services, Google Wallet and Google Offers, both aimed to serve retail shoppers everywhere. MasterCard and other high-level partners will be involved with Google Wallet, including 20,000 retail merchants at launch. It looks as though Google will snap up those businesses quickly because of...
Facebook, your One Stop Everything
From Forbes:
Facebook has partnered with Spotify on a music-streaming service that could be launched in as little as two weeks, sources close to the deal have told Forbes.
There are two interesting things about this.
First, Spotify still isn’t in the United States due to legal restrictions, which means this service won’t be in the US, either. Which might mean that Facebook is...
The Myth of the Flat Fee →
Roy Tomeij:
You made a deal with someone to build you a website. Best of all: you agreed on a flat fee! That’s great, because you know you have a fixed budget. And you’re getting everything you want, because that’s what your vendor promised you. Guess what? It’s not going to happen.
I’ve been on the other side of this, and while I built a pretty respectable web...
Twitter and TweetDeck →
You’ve likely already seen that news if you care, and if you don’t care, well, you don’t care. Ben Brooks muses:
I saw this last night and didn’t post about it because I couldn’t figure it out — I am still scratching my head here. Either Twitter knows something I don’t about TweetDeck, or their management is far worse than I think. Typically I would go with the former, but...
Windows Phone 'Mango' →
Of the “also ran” mobile operating systems, I’m increasingly thinking Windows Phone is the one to watch. For all of the heat Microsoft takes (mostly deservedly), Windows Phone doesn’t come across like it’s trying to be “iPhone++” — it doesn’t look like anything else on the market, and they’re clearly putting a lot of effort into user...
“Chrome’s version number has been changing so rapidly lately that every...”
– Jeff Atwood
For certain values of "soon" →
Christopher Mims:
The real threat [to OS-specific app stores] are web apps. The kind that will download to your device the moment you open them, allowing you offline access, whether they’re news, games, email or some other utility. If you don’t believe they’ll work — and eliminate dependencies on plugins outside of open web standards, like flash — go download a...
"Touchpad will be better than number one" →
HP’s Eric Cador:
Only one company plays in both the consumer and business world. We tend to talk about technologies. But the way the user is going to look at tablets means it’s about experience.
While I suspect Cador is going to be in for a lot of ribbing—particularly among Apple fans—he’s right on that point: it is all about experience. And while the first claim is...
Henry Blodget: The Truth About What He's Worth
On his site “Business Insider,” analyst Henry Blodget wrote “LinkedIn: The Truth About What It’s Worth,” to explain, effectively, that LinkedIn might be worth more than $100 a share, but it might be worth less, too.
As a former roommate of mine used to say when confronted with this kind of say-nothing thinking (let’s called it “Blodgic”):...
Did developers pressure Apple into having an iOS...
(Spoiler: this post follows Betteridge’s Law.)
In an Ars Technica article, iOS developer Mike Lee makes an argument for developers flooding Apple with “bug reports” about Lodsys’ patent trolling by saying that it was developer pressure that got Apple to release an iOS SDK rather than keep claiming web-based apps were enough. John C. Welsh calls bullshit on this:
I...
Patent "confirms" iTunes cloud service! →
Have we not learned yet that patents don’t “confirm” anything? Sigh. It’s an interesting approach, though, and not quite what anybody else is doing. (Whether it should be a patentable approach is another matter, of course.)
Feels like old times →
NY Times Dealbook:
Shares of LinkedIn, a professional social network, soared on their market debut on Thursday, feeding a growing investor mania for the latest generation of Internet companies. The shares opened at $83 and rose as high as $122.70 in late morning trading — well more than double its offering price — on the New York Stock Exchange. At more than $80 a share, the company’s...
iOS vs. Android From the Trenches →
A developer’s perspective on some of the differences between the two mobile OSes. I admit I’ve never looked at Android programming (Java gives me hives), but the description of “intents”—sort of a pre-baked event notification system that any application can hook listeners into—is really intriguing.
Also, Android has a declarative UI system: basically,...
250K PlayBooks sold to date →
Boy Genius Report:
RBC Capital Markets Managing Director Mike Abramsky believes RIM has sold approximately 250,000 BlackBerry PlayBook tablets to date. If these estimates are accurate, RIM’s PlayBook is handily outselling the XOOM, Motorola’s flagship Honeycomb tablet, which sold 250,000 units in its first two months of availability. Abramsky believes RIM could move 500,000 units during RIM’s...
The Magic of Coffee Pods
I was traveling last week, and stayed in a small hotel in the LA area. The room had an in-room coffee maker, one of those ones that uses “pods” for the coffee: little paper filter packs filled with pre-measured ground coffee, in this case branded by Wolfgang Puck.
“Magic?” you may be saying. “But those things don’t make good coffee!” No. No, they...
Guardian: Apple "studies" Lodsys patent claims →
Florian Mueller, quoted in the article:
It’s actually questionable whether Lodsys’s patents would survive a well-funded effort to have them declared invalid. Even if they could be upheld under the system as it stands, there’s no way that those patents represent a fair deal between society and [Lodsys].”
The idea that patents are supposed to be a “fair...
“There are some things Google Docs is great at. But as a replacement for Office,...”
– Michael Mace
Nokia and Microsoft, the story that keeps on...
Ben Brooks pointed to rumors that Microsoft wants to buy Nokia’s mobile phone division, observing that he doubted it was true (“with Ballmer though I will probably be wrong, as logic goes out the door with him”). My Nokia Blog described this uncharitably as “Comedy Rumor Hour” and later pointed to a tweet from Nokia’s Mark Squires that seems to debunk the...
A few questions spurred by iFlow
So I have to wonder, how many people have actually heard of iFlow before they started screaming “Apple put us out of business” this week?
I mean, I’m sure they had users—they refer to being the “highest rated ebook reader” on the iOS App Store. (Which is distinct from the most popular, of course.) They apparently had some big business deals in place—they...
Text editors: a quick follow-up
Fortunately I seem to have avoided inviting too many flames, which is always entertainingly perilous when you talk about text editors—they’re very personal choices. Naturally, a lot of people popped up with their favorite editor if I didn’t mention it.
As I added in an update, though, there’s an advantage that BBEdit, Emacs and Vim have that most other editors don’t...
Text Editor Intervention
“Don’t write a text editor; you’re reinventing fire.” — Ben Straub
As I’ve mentioned here before, I’ve been a TextMate user for the last few years, albeit increasingly reluctantly. TM has always been a mix of sheer brilliance and stone cold stupid, and while the former outweighs the latter, when the latter pops up it really gets in your face. (Undo...
