Obviously inspired by Panic’s dream setup that’s been making the rounds for two days. I can’t afford a 46-inch industrial screen (slurp), but I have a Mac mini with a web-based screensaver and I know JSON. (Actually, I didn’t, but that way I got to learn.)

It looks all gray on the photo because everything’s working right. (Except for the chart of online users on No Pic No Chat, I need to fix the script.) And the photo’s not as cool as Panic’s because, hey, 46-inchers are photogenic, but it’s pretty nice in person.

gamevideos.1up.com:80

You know how every reviewer said the actors sounded like they spoke English as a second language? Turns out they were not French actors speaking English, but actually British actors faking an American accent with no American coach within earshot. It’s still pretty stupid, but I can see how that would happen.

(Warning: Some parts of the video seem very spoilery.)

Greg Egan, Diaspora ★★★★★

Hard science-fiction at its best, a revelation even: Egan considers every single aspect of post-physical humanity, when we’ll be raised in silicon silos and infinitely copyable.

The last third of the book branches into that one classical sci-fi topic I kinda hate, but it’s okay because the beginning was well worth it.

Greg Egan, Quarantine ★★★★

A little less fascinating, and with so much more of that aforementioned topic I don’t like (in case that wasn’t clear, I’m trying not to spoil the story), but it’s a good read anyway, and I just like the premise: one day, humanity woke up and there were no stars in the sky, our solar system was sealed inside a hermetic bubble.

Dan Simmons, Summer of Night ★★★

Not my usual kind of book, but I was curious to see what Dan Simmons wrote when he channeled Stephen King. It’s well written, but a very unoriginal story, and I’m so not interested in the adventures of a bunch of clichē kids in the clichē American sixties (even if they’re all gonna end up dismembered).

Terry Goodkind, Wizard’s First Rule ★★

All in all, it’s a good adventure novel, and I’m not surprised it found success and an upcoming TV adaptation (it has good ideas, most of which aren’t particularly original but well integrated and developed), but I just can’t condone a book where the villain’s second happens to be a sadistic homosexual pedophile.

It would be one thing if the book had been written in 1950, but it was published in 1994.

Joe Haldeman, The Forever War ★★★★

Haldeman was a geek who got sent to Vietnam (for the younger listeners: there was a war there, and it wasn’t pretty), and that shows: the book is more about war than it is about sci-fi, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t good SF either (because, like I said, he’s also a geek).

Good story progression (the beginning makes you fear that you’re gonna spend the whole book bogged down in the ugly details of low-tech combat in a vacuum, but the author knows to make his story grow and stay fresh), an interesting read with well written characters and some gripping scenes.

Joe Haldeman, Forever Peace ★★★

Twenty years later, the writer’s style has nicely evolved (taking on the more cynical humor of the times) and he takes on different aspects of futuristic war — clearly, he’s still convinced the world is going to hell in a handbasket, a misanthrope after my own heart (except for the obsession with gender issues).

Less memorable than The Forever War, but still interesting.

Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky ★★★★★

Another revelation, this: while it may be a classic sci-fi device, the author masterfully describes the life of spider-like aliens in a way that makes you forget they’re not human, yet never contradicts their nature and remains faithful to the few details that couldn’t be translated simply to humankind (like babies peeking through the fur on their father’s back, or expressing emotions with the movement of your “eating hands”) — plus, it’s nicely justified in the novel itself by the people who are “actually” translating those adventures.

And the story-telling is excellent, too, with two parallel stories unfolding, one with the spiders evolving into their space-faring age, the other with different factions of observing humans bogged down in machinations and rebellion on their orbital base, all of which is very nicely paced (you spend the first few chapters dreading that the balance of forces being set up will belaboredly drag itself over 800 pages, and it all ends up turned on its head ten pages later).

A masterpiece of science-fiction, on every level.

I decided today that it was time to flush all the unfinished book reviews that I never posted, and I should just write one big post listing all the books I hadn’t mentioned because tweets are too short to review 600-page novels and I can’t be bothered to write full posts anymore.

Then I went through my blog drafts and realized that there were review drafts dating back as far as 2008, so I’m going to split them in two posts; one for the books I read in 2008, and one for those I read in 2009. (In the future I’ll try to post for each quarter or something. One can hope that I might find the courage to write real posts once in every three months. While we’re at it, one can also hope that I might find the cure to world hunger.)

Anne Rice, The Witching Hour ★★★

While it’s certainly well written, I can’t say I’m a fan of the story; in fact, there are several points of that story that I don’t like at all, because they’re gross, and the whole thing isn’t all that original or imaginative.

There’s definitely a Stephenie Meyer in there; Anne Rice just has enough talent to be slightly more subtle about the whole Mary Sue aspect.

The part that’s interesting, though, is how masterfully she leads you through a detailed account of 300 years in the history of a sprawling family of witches, keeping it captivating and inspiring throughout.

But not to the point of buying the other books in the series.

Christopher Moore, A Dirty Job ★★★★

Written like a (good) TV show, and even extremely reminiscent of Dead Like Me. The story itself isn’t the strongest point, but it’s a really enjoyable read, and Moore is a very, very funny writer.

The humor goes beyond politically incorrect to reach borderline racist at times, but it works — and I hear that San Francisco is a really special place, and maybe a Muslim will really dance around you, chanting “Death to the infidel!” because you named your dog Mohammed. And maybe Chinatown residents really cook every single animal they can get their hands on. Then again, maybe not.

George Orwell, 1984 ★★★★

When I heard about 1984, the story’s description always conflicted with my long-standing idea that having every fact of our life be public should mechanically breed democracy and tolerance rather than despotism. (A theory we’ll soon be able to test unless our governments manage to censor Google and Twitter off of the internet.)

Well, it turns out that Orwell has a trick to make his own idea stick, and that trick on which the whole Big Brother thing hinges is a magical self-hypnosis device called doublethink that, unlike every other political device in the book, he never actually justifies — he describes it, but never explains how it might be possible. Because, really, it’s not, and that proves my point.

1984 is a book but, no, it doesn’t expose a valid political theory and you might as well stop quoting its vision of the future.

Orson Scott Card, Children of the Mind ★★★

Funny: reading the plot summary on Wikipedia, I don’t remember that one at all, even though, according to my notes, I seem to have enjoyed it.

But, clearly, I didn’t enjoy it to the point of buying further books in the Ender series. They’re rather interesting, but ultimately a bit too naive for my taste, and of course (like most cycles) they’re rehashing the same themes a bit too much over and over.

Neal Sephenson, Anathem ★★★★

Well, that was a voluminous read, with a rich, memorable environment. Rather comparable to the Golden Compass trilogy, actually, only a little more arid. But still worth a read.

I have a bone to pick with the science in this fiction, though, on two points. One, minor: if your body can’t process foreign food, how can it process foreign oxygen? And one major: how is it that all the clever people go to cloysters, and regular people are all hooked on Prozac, yet the secular world looks exactly like ours? Shouldn’t the seclusion of intelligent people have more consequences on the state of the world?

Dan Simmons, Endymion / The Rise of Endymion ★★

Hyperion was a little too literary, obsessed with poetry, but the universe and story were fascinating; The Fall of Hyperion was too long, wasting the first half (of 500 pages) to re-establish the universe and story for no good reason, but the ending was strong, and didn’t make me regret the time it had taken to read both of the books.

The Endymion part of the cycle, however, involves some bits of insulting retcon and nonsensical sci-fi (how does the Thetys still flow? and how does it include an ocean?), and eventually boils down to a rehash of Terminator 2.

And much of it is not very interesting. Stephenson can be just as boring at times, but a) even when it was boring and too detailed, it was relevant to the story and b) the writing was better by several orders of magnitude.

Les modes de consommation des RSS changent avec le temps ; mes habitudes d’ēcriture aussi. D’une part, je ne poste plus autant de courts liens qu’ā une ēpoque, et je doute que ça revienne prochainement (en partie grāce ā Twitter, en partie parce que ma façon de bloguer a changē). D’autre part, tout le monde lit ses blogs dans Google Reader, de nos jours, dans une interface qui change des agrēgateurs ā l’ancienne — les articles sont affichēs d’une traite au lieu de vous faire choisir dans une liste (je sais qu’il y a une option pour afficher les articles sous forme de liste, mais qui l’utilise ,), et le rēsultat est plus appropriē aux articles courts. En outre, Twitter a aussi changē les attentes des utilisateurs quant ā la façon de recevoir le contenu.

J’ai donc changē aujourd’hui la façon dont mes feeds gērent les posts courts et liens : le feed principal (index.xml, celui que tout le monde suit) recevra chaque article court dēs qu’il est publiē, au lieu d’attendre un rēsumē quotidien compilē ā minuit. Et, pour ceux qui trouvent que ça fait trop d’articles dans leur lecteur RSS, il y a un feed de rēsumēs (remplacez index.xml par digests.xml) qui reprend le fonctionnement prēcēdent.

Ces modifications ne s’appliquent pas ā mes posts sur Twitter, qui seront toujours repris une fois par jour, parce qu’il est assez clair que, si vous voulez recevoir mes tweets dēs que je les poste, vous devriez me suivre lā oū je les poste.

Tant que j’y suis, le compte Twitter qui prēvient de chaque nouveau post sur mon blog est renommē en @garooRSS (ceux qui le suivaient dējā n’ont rien ā modifier, c’est automatique).

incident57.com

This. Is. Magical.

If you don’t know what Less is (I didn’t — or I must have heard about it once and promptly forgotten), it’s a Ruby application descended from Heaven to let you write parametric CSS files.

You can set up variables (e.g., color values) in the beginning of your file, reference them everywhere and only have to change the value once when you want to update the look of your entire site. You can do some math on those values (e.g., dimmer or brighter variations of those colors for some elements). You can create helper classes to include into the definition of other classes (e.g., cross-browser shadows or rounded corners), and they can even behave like functions (e.g., take the corner radius as a parameter). More info on lesscss.org.

It becomes annoying, though, in that every time you edit your CSS you have to run the file through a compiler — you can’t just upload the parametric CSS as is, you have to turn it into a regular .css file (at least as far as I know; maybe there is, or will be someday, an Apache plugin or whatever). Nobody wants to have to bother with that, and that’s where this excellent new app comes in: just give it a list of folders containing your .less files, and it will watch them and compile them into .css files every time they’re updated. There you go, .css files ready to be uploaded. (For now, the Less app doesn’t automatically send the compiled files to your FTP program, but the developer assures me that’s coming.)

If you’ve ever maintained somewhat complex CSS files, you know you want this.

A hint: if you want to install the Less compiler on Leopard (the application doesn’t install it by itself, for some reason), you’re going to need one more command-line instruction than documented on lesscss.org.

Also, the compiler can be a little picky about the CSS it wants to compile. For instance, having a comma-separated list of CSS selectors, with some of them commented out, will throw a syntax error. Just work around it.

via daringfireball.net

Well, that was… something. I just about went through all phases of grief during that one-hour keynote, starting when Steve Jobs announced that name and when, a minute later, the first official screenshot of the iPad’s home screen appeared on the web. Omigod, it’s just a giant iPod touch.

Or is it?

The thing is, Steve Jobs pulled the wool over our eyes from the start, when he said again that netbooks are crap, and it only became evident at the very end, when he announced the list price: the iPad is Apple’s netbook.

That’s what it is and nothing else.

And it’s offered at an okay price for a product you’d define as “Apple’s netbook” — the upper limit of what could be an okay price, but that in itself was to be expected.

It’s not at all what I hoped for, but it’s not just a giant iPod, either — and it’s also noticeably cheaper than I expected. The special version of iWork (I so didn’t see that coming) and the starting price point are what define it as a netbook; as such, it’s not something anyone absolutely needs, but it’s something many people will want, and I’m thinking that a large enough number of those people will buy it. (Of course, unlike netbook makers, Apple will actually make a profit on those sales.)

And if you take the optional 3G plan, that makes it that much more of a bargain. Unlocked device (heh, fool Steve Jobs once…), no contract, very competitive prices? Here’s hoping Apple manages to negotiate equivalent offers in the rest of the world — but if they managed to get AT&T on board, how hard can it be? (It’s kind of a bargain for a carrier to support both iPhone and iPad anyway, as there’s bound to be customer overlap and customers will end up paying twice for the same unlimited data.)

Now, the ball is in Microsoft’s camp, to release the Courier or not. But I’m very afraid Redmond doesn’t have the guts. (Just as afraid as hopeful, really. I need to sell apps on the iPad, so I need to buy an iPad, so that makes the cheap part of me not so eager for Microsoft to offer a decent competitor.)

A few additional thoughts, as usual:

{lire la suite sur le blog}

— Cela dit, j’ai adorē ta carte de voeux, je l’ai montrēe partout autour de moi.

— En fait, je m’aperçois que ce n’est pas forcēment que les gens n’ont pas lu le mail en entier, mais surtout que plus personne ne rēpond ā ses mails s’ils n’y sont pas impērativement obligēs ; au dēbut, c’ētait juste moi, mais on dirait que tout le monde m’a rattrapē.
Et c’est pour ça qu’on a besoin du bouton “like” sur tous les moyens de communication qui existent.

Comme je le disais il y a une heure, en croyant que ça serait trop compliquē pour ētre viable, j’aime la suggestion de remplacer tous ces accents compliquēs de la langue française par des macrons (et je n’ai rien de mieux ā faire) ; aprēs une heure de recherche, j’ai fini par trouver une façon simple de les saisir sous OS X, en ēditant le keyboard layout ā l’aide de Ukelele (dont l’interface est plus confuse que nēcessaire, mais une fois qu’on sait ce qu’on fait c’est assez simple).

Rēsultat, un “French - Macron.keylayout” ā placer dans ~/Library/Keyboard Layouts (tout ça doit bien sūr avoir un nom diffērent sur un systēme en français), puis log-out et log-in, et ça marche, il suffit de l’activer dans le panneau International. En prime, comme je n’ai pas mis d’icōne avec, on peut garder le choix de clavier dans la barre de menus sans se taper le gros drapeau vulgaire en permanence. (Si jamais vous essayez — ce dont je doute, ā la base — et que le clavier ne marche plus du tout aprēs, c’est parce que vous avez cru pouvoir sauter l’option log-out / log-in.)

Avec ce layout, les lettres accentuēes sont remplacēes par des macrons, et l’accent circonflexe est un macron qu’on peut associer aux autres voyelles et aux majuscules, donc il n’y a aucune habitude ā changer. Et, tant que j’y ētais, j’ai mis un ♫ ā la place de l’accent grave qui est prēs de la touche Return, parce que ça me frustre toujours de ne pas l’avoir facilement accessible dans mon client Twitter.

Si je tombe sur des incompatibilitēs, que j’ai besoin d’envoyer un mail pour le boulot, ou que je reçois trop de plaintes de mes correspondants ou lecteurs, c’est tout simple, il suffit de changer de clavier dans la barre de menus.

Donc, presque personne ne prend la peine de lire le post sur lequel j’ai passé deux jours, et presque personne ne prend la peine de regarder à ma carte de voeux assez longtemps pour s’apercevoir qu’il n’y a pas juste des chatons dessus — allez savoir pourquoi je ne suis plus jamais motivé à faire quoi que ce soit. Il faut que ça cesse, et j’ai deux options : fermer le blog, ou fermer les commentaires.

Here comes that time of the year when Apple pundits, big and small and wannabe, have to man up and put their credibility on the line, writing up their definitive specialist’s opinion on the matter of what Steve is and isn’t going to announce in his upcoming keynote. (Thankfully, nobody expects any credibility from those types anyway, so there’s nothing to lose.)

What’s going to be announced? is the question we ask about four times a year, but this time may well be the keynote of all keynotes: it’s not about a refresh of the Mac lineup, or new functionality in iTunes, but it is (or isn’t?) about the infamous Apple tablet. Even the days before the original iPhone announcement weren’t as frantic: we already knew smartphones then, we knew why they ought to be important, and we thought we knew what we were gonna get (which, to a certain extent, we did). With the tablet, though, Apple doesn’t just present a “breakthrough device” (to quote the horrible expression Jobs used that time): they get to invent a brand new market altogether, and sell us a concept that nobody has managed to make work yet.

But is there gonna be a tablet?

Yes. It’s that simple. As far as I’m concerned, once an Apple rumor has been written up in the Wall Street Journal, you can consider that it’s been officially confirmed. Besides, given how convinced everyone is and has been for a month, if Apple wasn’t actually going to launch a tablet, you can be sure they would leak that to the WSJ; that thing has been hoped for and awaited and expected before but, at this point, no matter what else Steve Jobs could announce on next Wednesday, stock prices would tank unacceptably if he didn’t show the unicorn.

{lire la suite sur le blog}

On oublie, je savais bien que je n’étais pas content de ce que j’avais mis en ligne hier. Là, c’est vaguement mieux.

Comme d’habitude, la motivation de départ est de trouver le parfait layout qui me permettra de poster plus de liens (cette fois-ci, en mettant les liens courts au même niveau que les tweets, en retrait par rapport aux articles plus importants). Comme d’habitude, ça ne prendra qu’une semaine ou deux pour que j’arrête à nouveau de poster.

Avant :

Après :

Oui, je sais, j’ai fait mieux. Mais entre ça et fermer le site…

transmission.blogs.topgear.com

A weird blog post from the producer of Top Gear, who addresses the growing criticism (I was just googling around because this week’s episode very nearly jumped the shark) by saying that he understands why people feel that way, and he’s kinda sorry about it, but the team doesn’t really care because they’re gonna be doing what they think is fun to do, and people can just stop watching if they don’t like it — yet the same article includes this bit:

I miss the three mates who mooch along – there were flashes of it in the Lancia film, and it’s there in the South American Special, and yes, it’s nice to have it back. I know James definitely feels that way, and Jeremy and I were saying the other morning how the Lancia film was a bit of a wake up reminder that we can actually make good films just enthusing about cars.

An odd contradiction, but overall I wouldn’t say I’m optimistic about the show’s evolution. There’s only so many ways to talk about cars, and clearly they’d rather do something new and stupid and over-the-top than have to repeat themselves. That’s the risk with any long-running series, and maybe there’s just no good way to handle this; it’s always a choice between repetition or caricature.

But it’s so sad to see good television go bad.

P.S. If there’s a show that should end its final episode with a literal re-enactment of “jumping the shark,” it’s Top Gear. Write this down.

tuaw.com

After carefully considering the issue, Apple is now allowing applications to use the function UIGetScreenImage() to programmatically capture the current screen contents. […]

A future release of iPhone OS may provide a public API equivalent of this functionality. At such time, all applications using UIGetScreenImage() will be required to adopt the public API.

This annoys me. A lot. Not because I don’t like the idea of issuing derogations for using this or that function from the private API (which I don’t), but because the reason why everyone wants to use UIGetScreenImage is that it’s currently the only way for an application to capture video and process it on the fly (or to capture video at all on anything but an iPhone 3GS). And I don’t really mind stopgap measures per se, but it scares me to see Apple forum moderators addressing the future issue of having to use the upcoming official screen-capture API, rather than the real problem of not being able to access live video capture from the camera sensor… when the UIGetScreenImage produces awful three-frame-per-second 160-pixel video, and apps for a jailbroken iPhone 3G can instead make somewhat fluid, usable video — because they don’t have to use that terribly inefficient workaround of displaying video, capturing the screen, and encoding it themselves, all on a pretty limited CPU.

Sure, just because Apple doesn’t mention an upcoming video streaming API doesn’t mean it isn’t coming, but I can easily see them being content with the access they just opened for capturing screenshots. And, if or when they finally do give developers a direct access to video capture, I can even more easily imagine that they’d still restrict it to the iPhone 3GS.

And it pisses me off because there’s no good reason for that, and because I’m not going to be able to upgrade until next summer at best. (Well, I might be able to, but even if I got a huge contract next week it would be stupid to upgrade my iPhone this late in the product cycle.) I have kitten videos to make!

smokingapples.com

This is what I was waiting for: a review written after a longer period of time, by someone who knows about tablets, and evidently understood as well as I do how cool this multitouch tablet can and should be.

Moreover, the ‘tap’ to select or click, is slightly delayed, presumably as the device tries to figure out what it is you’re doing. Bugs me no end. To make matters worse, it’s not even good at detecting a tap from a move, randomly selecting windows as you try to move the cursor. I’ve had trouble keeping icons in the dock, as they keep going “poof!”.

These two problems sound perfectly understandable (they’re probably the hardest thing to get right), and I’m pretty sure they would both drive me crazy if I bought one.

Wacom has tried to implement the same scroll-with-momentum we’ve seen on the iPhone and lately with the Magic Mouse. It feels unnatural, is slow, and gets quite unweildy.

Once again, I’m not really surprised, and it’s kinda hard to blame Wacom for trying and almost succeeding. But I’m reverting to my original idea: the only way the external trackpad thing can be done right is for Apple to do it. (And why the hell don’t they?)

I’m removing the Bamboo Touch from my wishlist, at least until I get to test drive one extensively, and/or they manage to update the software significantly. (Because, yes, all those issues are in the drivers and can be fixed, but, no, I don’t think they’ll be fixed satisfactorily in a near enough future. The Wacom guys are good, but this is hard, and I’d never have said software was their strongest suit anyway.)

youtube.com

(Yeah, I’m late, I had stuff, okay?)

So Chrome OS offers only one full-screen window, and it replaces the task bar with a tab bar at the top. And then, you have popup windows, and there’s a task bar so you can manage them. Oh, and then you have multiple full-screen windows, and there’s Exposé for those. It’s all so damn revolutionary. Or something.

To be clear, the only reason I watched the video was that I was curious as to how they managed popups, and they could hardly do it any other way — but the thing is, pretty much all the articles I read presented it as “having a tab bar rather than a task bar.” It would be stupid if that were the case, and it’s stupid to describe it that way.

gametrailers.com

gametrailers.com

Les vidéos publiées il y a quelques semaines m’avaient déjà surpris (je ne sais pas trop pourquoi je n’attendais rien de ce jeu — peut-être parce que la Seconde guerre mondiale ne m’a jamais trop intéressé), mais cette démo de l’exploration libre de la ville me donne décidément envie d’y jouer.

J’aime la façon dont le héros peut grimper partout (de façon plus réaliste que dans les autres jeux qui permettent d’escalader les immeubles) et je ne peux pas m’empêcher d’avoir envie de jouer dans ce Paris d’un univers parallèle où tous les points touristiques se doivent d’être subtilement mal positionnés. Et, contrairement à The Crossing, qui est aussi censé se dérouler à Paris, Saboteur a l’avantage de sortir effectivement en magasin.

P.S. Never mind; in fact, all I needed was the live.gdgt.com page. This time again, the best of all live reports, by far.

Who does that? Deliberately design your bulk mailing so that will it reveal the secret redeem code for your special offer to anybody who looks at it? Seriously?

techflash.com

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is confirming Amazon.com’s controversial 1-Click patent following a re-examination that lasted more than four years.

That’s just depressing.

engadget.com

PlayStation Move is definitely a better name than when it was dubbed “Arc.” I still think it’s the best technology of all three, but at $100 for a single controller and not including the optional nunchuk, it isn’t gonna be an easy sell. (Not that the PS3 ever was.)

Ah, and the comments about how the glowing sphere on the top looks ridiculous or whatever make me want to die. (But why am I reading blog comments?)

engadget.com

The game streaming service will run users $14.95 a month, though buying or renting games is an additional cost (it’s unclear exactly what that cost might be).

It’s very, very sad that they supposedly managed to put together the technology needed to play games remotely, and it’s going to be a complete failure because they couldn’t negotiate a Netflix-like agreement with game publishers.

edge-online.com

The series adaptation will be making its way to browsers “this fall” and has been built on Unity’s engine, which was also used to make Cartoon Network’s free MMO FusionFall.

That’s right, it will make its way to web browsers. Oh, this thing is gonna be bad.

macgeneration.com

Time Machine aurait pu s’appeler Time Tunnel, ainsi que le relève le site Patently Apple. Cette marque, déposée par Apple à la fin de l’année 2006, est désormais abandonnée (Time Machine est arrivé avec Mac OS X Leopard en octobre 2007).

On comprend mieux, d’un coup, l’interface de Time Machine. Je me demande s’ils ont abandonné à cause de droits sur le nom, ou parce que la spirale donnait des vertiges aux utilisateurs.

1up.com

Following a span of a number of hours yesterday when owners of the PC version of Assassin’s Creed 2 and Silent Hunter 5 couldn’t play due to problems with Ubisoft’s DRM authentication servers, the company now says the server problems were the result of hacker attacks — attacks that are evidently still ongoing. As of this writing, Ubisoft’s official Twitter account reports the DRM authentication servers are once again under attack, locking some gamers out of their perfectly legally owned games.

How conveniently unverifiable.

(Not that it would make it okay for the games to be unplayable because of a DDoS rather than normal server load. It still annoys me that people actually bought that game on PC despite the DRM.)

techcrunch.com

Between the developers I spoke to, the consensus was this: Apple doesn’t appear to be opposed to ‘app generators’ and templates per se, but in the last month or so it has started cracking down on basic applications that are little more than RSS feeds or glorified business cards. In short, Apple doesn’t want people using native applications for things that a basic web app could accomplish.

Nevermind the part about pulling the rug from yet another bunch of iPhone-based businesses, as it’s par for the course by now, but this particular rule is bullshit. Some sites have dedicated readers who want to have a shortcut or two on their Springboard — and most users don’t know, or want to know, about manually adding a shortcut from within Safari. They just want to click a link and download an app, because Apple has spent the last year emphasizing that “there’s an app for that.”

I understand, and support, the desire to remove those apps from App Store listings — but not banning them altogether.

If Apple wants to approve everything that can be installed on an iPhone (for security’s sake, let’s say) and doesn’t want to pollute the App Store, here’s a novel idea: just approve the apps in such a way that they don’t appear in listings and search but are only accessible by using the direct URL. Or are they also trying to cut down the in-house testers’ workload?

beautifulpixels.com

I can’t believe this works.

Of course, it doubles or triples the amount of CPU power it takes for my Mac mini to play a video (haven’t even tried on the old iMac), and it’s not very pleasant to watch (do real Ambilight TVs lag so much?), but it’s a nice tech demo for HTML 5.

engadget.com

That looks much smaller than it did in my head — pretty much an iPad folded in two. It better have a super-high-resolution screen if it’s gonna be of any use.

As we’ve heard, the interface appears to be pen-based and centered around drawing and writing, with built-in handwriting recognition and a corresponding web site that allows access to everything entered into the device in a blog-like format complete with comments.

Cool.

gizmodo.com

After being recommended by Google to speak to HTC’s technical support, Crave was told that "putting a phone in a tight pair of jeans and sitting down would usually cause the kind of damage," and that "people sometimes forget that they don’t go in pockets."

Nice.

Apple’s humidity sensors don’t seem so bad now.

wired.com

You’re not crazy, and neither are we: The touchscreen on the Apple iPhone really is more responsive than the screens on the BlackBerry Storm, the Motorola Droid, the Nexus One and many other phones, even though all of these devices use essentially the same touch-sensing hardware.

Though handset makers buy their touchscreens as components from the same select pool of suppliers, a good touchscreen experience requires more than just hardware. It requires a bit of design alchemy blending software, engineering and calibration for the perfect feel. Few smartphone makers have managed to get that balance right, say experts.

Followed by a long article correctly concluding that Steve Jobs’s perfectionism is to thank for this.

iphonefreak.com

“My expectation is that there’s not going to be a lot of people out there looking for another subscription,” he said during a webcast of an investor conference, adding that the device would be a mainly “Wi-Fi driven product.”

Translation: “We absolutely haven’t planned to provide the network capacity needed for people to use the 3G data plan we’re offering. And if you do start using it, we’ll have to slap a 500MB ‘reasonable use’ limit. Unlimited data for $30? Come on, if you believed we actually meant it, it’s your own damn fault for being so gullible.”

mashable.com

Gesture Search is pretty straightforward: you open it up and then draw letters. Draw a M and you’ll get contacts, bookmarks, and apps that start with M. Draw an o and you’ll get results starting with “Mo,” and so on until you find what you’re looking for. Queries can also be erased by drawing a line left to right, while drawing right to left removes the last letter in the current sequence.

Want!

But for Apple to do that on the Spotlight home screen would mean to acknowledge that the software keyboard isn’t perfect, and I don’t see that happening.

googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com

An interesting point that I don’t remember giving much thought about, even though it should be obvious: nobody cares about the <title> that’s displayed on top of a browser window; it should be 100% optimized for when it’s show in search results.

Also, the report mentions that you can go to Google’s Webmaster Tools and decide which variants of your URLs should be prioritized for which geographical user base; I have to check that out. Nah, it’s useless except for some very exceptional cases.

engadget.com

The upshot of this whole thing — with patents covering very basic aspects of object-oriented operating system development — is that you can’t create a new operating system nowadays (or a phone, or much of anything) unless you have a portfolio of patents of your own so that you can force every other player in the field to sign a non-aggression pact with you, like Microsoft and Apple did back then.

Or you can stay in Europe. (For now.)

arstechnica.com

We think competition is healthy, but competitors should create their own original technology, not steal ours.

Of course, most of those are bullshit patents. Uh, I mean, software patents.

Gotta wonder what’s the ultimate motivation for this. I guess it still smarts Apple, and Jobs personally, that Microsoft was able to copy all it could from MacOS and, now that Apple has pretty much reinvented the smartphone and does own patents, it’s tempting to use them.

But the timing is weird, right after Nokia slapped Apple with the same kind of suit, and just about the same rhetoric. Is Apple bullying forward, going after the smallest possible actor of the field, the one who won’t have patents of its own to fight back with? Or could they think it will make them look more serious in their negotiations (or trials) with Nokia?

arstechnica.com

So there’s a very good chance that the issue here is an honest error. What is remarkable, though, is that it exists. This browser ballot, as simple as it is, has been months in the making. The decision to do the randomization client-side, where it depends on the web browser, rather than server-side, where it would be consistent for all users, is a little surprising. But most remarkable at all is that no one responsible for signing off and saying "that’s an acceptable response to the Competition Commission’s complaint" bothered to do this testing.

Or it would be remarkable if we weren’t talking about Microsoft.

9to5mac.com

Sulcer, who is a 70 year old grandfather to nine, won by purchasing Johnny Cash’s “Guess Things Happen That Way”.  He had no idea Apple was even having a contest.

Oh, come on. You want me to believe that the person who downloaded the 10-billionth iTunes song just happens to be a technology-literate 70-year-old grandfather who knows who Steve Jobs is — and listens to Johnny Cash?

macstories.net

Squeeze is very simple and straightforward: basically, it can keep track of some selected folders and compress them without visible differences to the user, but saving space in the background. It uses the latest HFS-comrpession technology built in Snow Leopard to compress all the files within a folder you choose to be processed. After the compression process, Mac OS will read the file again just fine […]

I’ve downloaded it (hey, it’s free on MacHeist, and they’re not even forcing you to tweet this time), but before I decide whether to install it I’ll wait for the technical reviews that don’t gush about it.

There’s a reason why OS X doesn’t compress the whole drive by default, and until I read more about the trade-offs implied by using Squeeze, I’ll stay on the fence. (The reason could simply be that it makes the drive unreadable from not-10.6 machines, which isn’t much of a problem.)

daringfireball.net

And if a bunch of [former] Apple geniuses can’t kick butt on their own at Palm, how are they going to kick butt without Steve at Apple?

That’s an interesting point, and I disagree with Gruber’s arguments about it. The thing is, though, that Palm failed for three reasons: (1) they were going against Apple, (2) they were two years late on the iPhone market, and (3) they didn’t have enough cash for the first webOS phone to be really good hardware.

None of those reasons will apply to Apple post-Jobs (for a while).