The Daring Fireball Linked List

Thursday, 3 Jul 2008

Khoi Vinh:

In case you didn’t realize it, three years ago, Christopher Nolan brought our long, national nightmare of bad Batman movies to an end. Let’s hope The Dark Knight keeps us in the clear.

TripLog/1040 ★

Check out the UI on this upcoming iPhone app from Palm OS developer Stevens Creek Software. This is not a joke. (Via Macworld.)

How Pixar Created the ‘Wall-E’ Visual Style ★

Fascinating Animation World Magazine story on the steps Pixar took to make Wall-E look and feel like a traditional film by mimicking the limitations and optics of real-world cameras. Director of photography Jeremy Lasky:

We used a spherical lens as a kind of control to look at depth of field and barrel distortion and the optical breathing you get when you rack from things really close to really far away. It gave us a chance to have something tangible. We used an Arriflex camera with Panavision lenses. We looked at lens flares and how to focus lights in the background. There’s that shot in the truck [his home] when EVE’s looking at the lighter for the first time from WALL-E’s POV and you see the bouquet stretched in the background. And this is the kind of thing we discovered doing those tests.

(Via Daily Kos.)

Gus Mueller on Adobe Reader 9 ★

Craptacular.

Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner ★

I don’t see how this will ever catch on with kids — there’s no dialogue.

Judge Orders Google to Turn Over YouTube Records ★

Miguel Helft, reporting for the Times:

A federal judge in New York has ordered Google to turn over to Viacom a database linking users of YouTube, the Web’s largest video site by far, with every clip they have watched there.

The order raised concerns among users and privacy advocates that the online video viewing habits of hundreds of millions of people could be exposed.

Regarding ‘Wall-E’ and Kids ★

Tyler Cowen (via Kottke) on Wall-E:

Better than better than good. It is, however, not recommended for children.

I have no idea why not. My four-and-a-half year-old son loved it. Rapt attention the entire time. That large stretches of the film have no dialog whatsoever does not make it difficult for children to follow. If anything, I’ve found that Jonas is much better at following stories which are told cinematically than those which are told verbally. I’d go so far as to say it’s the best film for small children that Pixar has made since Toy Story 2.

The film is so good overall that it makes me wonder whether the Academy will have the balls to nominate it for Best Picture, rather than relegating it to the ridiculous and artificial “Animated” ghetto. The odds that there will be five better films released this year are slim.

‘Walkman Phone Nails Form, Fails Function’ ★

Danny Dumas reviews the Sony Ericsson W350.

Wednesday, 2 Jul 2008

Microsoft Equipt ★

Ina Fried, reporting for CNet on Microsoft Equipt, a new $69 annual subscription software package from Microsoft for Windows users:

The idea behind the subscription service is to convert more new PC buyers into Office buyers. It plays on the fact that although most people don’t buy Office at the same time as a computer, many do purchase a security software subscription.

Microsoft is trying to tap into the fact that while many people would rather find a copy of Office that they don’t have to pay for (either an older version or a pirated copy) they are willing to pay for security software. “Security is basically the No. 1 thing that gets attached with a PC,” said Microsoft group product manager Bryson Gordon.

Equipt includes Microsoft OneCare anti-virus software. So, when you buy a new Windows machine, even Microsoft encourages you to pay extra for security software.

Current iPhones Keep Cheaper Plan on Reactivation ★

Glenn Fleishman:

You won’t pay a 3G rate for a 2G iPhone with a new service plan, AT&T confirmed for me today. This should be good news to anyone looking to either sell their so-called 2G iPhone when they upgrade to an iPhone 3G, or for those looking to buy (or beg) the older iPhone model without paying a fee for bandwidth they can’t use.

Buy n Large to Brand Direction ‘North’ ★

What’s next, the Year of the Depends Adult Undergarment? Jiminy.

(Via the BnL home page.)

Tuesday, 1 Jul 2008

Tooltips for Disabled Menu Items ★

Lukas Mathis suggests that Mac OS X apps should provide tooltips to explain why menu items are disabled.

Balloon Help ★

System 7’s Balloon Help had an elegant solution to the “Why is this menu item disabled?” problem. Apple encouraged developers to provide separate Balloon Help strings for each state an item could be in; so, you could hover over a disabled menu item and Balloon Help would explain why the item was disabled.

iPhone 3G Is Totally Screwed ★

I don’t think there’s ever before been an iPod (or iPhone) that’s had exposed screws.

Regarding AT&T’s iPhone 3G Upgrade Policy ★

M. Jackson Wilkinson explains what I was missing with regard to AT&T’s upgrade policy for existing AT&T customers. In short, original iPhone owners can buy new iPhone 3Gs for $199/299 because the original iPhone wasn’t subsidized. But if you purchased a subsidized phone from AT&T and are still in your mandatory two-year contract period, you’re still paying off your last subsidy with your monthly fees, and so you’ve either got to wait or pay full price for an iPhone 3G ($499/599).

What this means, though, is that when Apple comes out with next year’s new iPhone(s), iPhone 3G owners are going to have to pay a penalty to upgrade.

Features Are a One-Way Street ★

Ryan Singer:

The lesson: Once your user base has grown beyond a certain point, you cannot take features away from them. They will freak out. Whether the feature is good or bad, once you launch it you’ve married it.

Jacqui Cheng on AT&T’s iPhone 3G Pricing/Plans ★

Sounds like current AT&T customers who are under contract with phones other than the original iPhone are stuck paying significantly higher up-front prices. I don’t get it.

‘What Happened Here’ ★

Perhaps you think of Jeffrey Zeldman as a designer or as a web standards evangelist. He is those things, but first and foremost the man is a writer, and all else he does stems from that. This is the good stuff.

Adobe PR on Searchable Flash Content ★

This is why I think today’s news about Google and Yahoo indexing Flash content is bad news:

Adobe is providing optimized Adobe Flash Player technology to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines.

It’s completely closed and opaque. Adobe is only providing the magic recipe to Google and Yahoo; all other search engines remain locked out.

Rogers’s Exorbitant Early Cancellation Fees ★

This is usury:

An Early Cancellation Fee (EECF) applies if, for any reason, your service is terminated prior to the end of the service agreement. The ECF is the greater of (ii) $1100 or (iii) $220 per month remaining in the service agreement, to a maximum of 400 (plus applicable taxes), and applies on each line in the plan that is terminated.

Outrageous.

Update: Apparently it was a typo that has since been corrected. The page now reads: “The ECF is the greater of (ii) $100 or (iii) $20 per month remaining in the service agreement, to a maximum of $400,” which is reasonable.

Regarding Disabled Menu Items ★

Joel Spolsky recommends not disabling menu items in context where they can’t be used:

Instead, leave the menu item enabled. If there’s some reason you can’t complete the action, the menu item can display a message telling the user why.

This is why Spolsky is a Windows developer, not a Mac developer. Disabling menu items when they can’t be used is a fine practice — it means that the visual state of a menu item reflects the actual state of the command it represents. One can argue that this can be confusing for users who don’t understand why a particular menu item is currently disabled, but it’s a classic trade-off. Spolsky’s suggestion — that you leave all menu items enabled all the time and show an alert when they’re chosen but can’t be used — would be irritating as hell every time you ran into it. (I’m reminded of Mac apps which don’t supply any Help content but which leave the default Help menu in place, with an “AppName Help” menu item that does nothing but show an alert stating that “Help is not available for AppName.”)

Spolsky’s suggestion is also predicated on the assumption that the user is stupid. Better is to assume that the user is clever and curious and will be able to figure out for themself why a certain command is currently disabled.

Google Learns to Crawl Flash ★

Not sure if this is good news or bad news.

iPhone 3G Guided Tour ★

Bob is back for another video tour.

Monday, 30 Jun 2008

Wal-Mart Logo Timeline ★

They should totally go back to the one they used from 1964-1981. Dress everyone in the stores up in cowboy outfits and sheriff badges, the whole nine yards.

Brand New: Less Hyphen, More Burst for Walmart ★

Armin Vit on Wal-Mart’s upcoming new logo:

The change to title case helps humanize Walmart with a name that reads more like John, Albert, Sarah or Wilbur; it really looks very different and sets a different tone. The wordmark is nice and friendly and has enough customization to feel more proprietary than out-of-the-box. The new icon, however, is very questionable. It reflects technology start-up or telecommunications company before it does discount retailing that will make anyone live better. Sure, it might represent a flower or a sun, but the execution is too modern and cold to be seen as a natural element.

Gallery of Sawn-In-Half Cameras ★

Fascinating cross-sections of German cameras and lenses.

EveryBlock Philadelphia ★

Outstanding: EveryBlock has expanded to two new cities, Charlotte and Philadelphia. More from Adrian Holovaty at the EveryBlock weblog.

Working With History in Bash ★

Useful Bash tips from Allan Odgaard. There’s also some great stuff in the comments, including this gem from Pádraig Brady — I’ve always wished the arrow keys worked like that in Bash.

Development Phase Code Signing ★

Daniel Jalkut explains the practical benefits of code signing.

Mac OS X 10.5.4 ★

Includes (among many other things) another useful Spaces improvement:

Addresses an issue in which switching from a space with a Finder window keeps the Finder as the active application instead of the application residing in the destination space.

This one, too, was apparently a very significant (read: “data loss”) bug:

Resolves an issue with saving and reopening Adobe Creative Suite 3 files on a remote server.

EA Veteran Starts iPhone-Focused Mobile Game Studio ★

Neil Young in an interview with Gamasutra regarding his new mobile game publisher Ngmoco:

So if you think about what Apple’s doing with the App Store, they’re really turning mobile on its ear. They allow you to control the pricing yourself. They’re taking a distribution fee for distributing your software, but they’re really allowing users to choose what to put on their phone and how they want to enhance their device. And that is a fundamental shift.

It’s interesting that from the perspective of Mac OS X and the Mac software market, the iPhone seems very restrictive — but from the perspective of those used to dealing with the mobile phone market or Nintendo’s and Sony’s handhelds, it seems free.

Cornerstone 1.0 ★

New $59 Subversion client for Mac OS X, from Zennaware. At a glance, the UI details seem very thoughtful, including an optional widescreen layout. The file comparison tool can compare both text and images. Extra credit for debuting with a proper 1.0 version number, unlike Versions, which debuted as (and remains) a public beta.

It strikes me as an odd coincidence that two serious Subversion clients would debut at a time when many developers are starting to switch away from Subversion to distributed revision control systems such as Git and Mercurial.

George Carlin Would Have Enjoyed This One ★

Steve Benen:

But the American Family Association’s OneNewsNow website takes the phenomenon one step further with its AP articles. The far-right fundamentalist group replaces the word “gay” in the articles with the word “homosexual.” I’m not entirely sure why, but it seems to make the AFA happy. The group is, after all, pretty far out there.

The problem, of course, is that “gay” does not always mean what the AFA wants it to mean. My friend Kyle reported this morning that sprinter Tyson Gay won the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic track and field trials over the weekend. The AFA ran the story, but only after the auto-correct had “fixed” the article.

Conglomerate ★

Sony CEO Howard Stringer:

“Apple is a marvellous company, but it is a boutique. We are a giant conglomerate.”

Update: As for just how giant, Sony’s current market cap is about $44 billion. The boutique’s market cap is about three times larger, at $149 billion. In terms of net income for the most recently reported financial year, Sony’s was $3.7 billion; Apple’s was $3.5 billion.

Sunday, 29 Jun 2008

Avie Tevanian on Windows’s Architecture ★

Randall Stross, for a piece in today’s Times advocating that Microsoft take the time and effort to re-architect Windows from the ground-up, asks Avie Tevanian’s opinion:

I asked Mr. Tevanian if he thought Microsoft could pull off a similar switch.

“Perhaps, but I don’t know if it has the intestinal fortitude,” he said, “At Apple, we had to. It was a matter of survival.”

That’s an astute point. For all the problems with Vista, Microsoft’s profits and revenues are just fine.

Saturday, 28 Jun 2008

Amazon MP3 Special Deals Twitter Feed ★

Some great deals — entire albums for just $1.99. (Thanks to Patrick Berry.)

Fuck You Rogers ★

The name of the site pretty much says it all.

Verizon CEO Waiting for Jobs to ‘Get Old’ ★

Ivan Seidenberg, chairman and CEO of Verizon, when asked about Apple in an interview with The Financial Times:

As handsets become banking tools and games controllers, he argues, mobile operators can up-end other companies’ business models. “It’s very cool. And Steve Jobs eventually will get old… I like our chances.”

What’s particularly odd about this remark is that Seidenberg is nine years older than Jobs.

Update: Here’s another interpretation of the same quote, where by “getting old”, Seidenberg perhaps meant it in the sense of falling out of favor with the public, like that “Who Let the Dogs Out” song or something. Best-of-breed user experience design and affordable high-quality hardware engineering are the next Cabbage Patch Dolls, perhaps.

Friday, 27 Jun 2008

Visual Thinking ★

Douglas Coupland:

Here’s another question I was recently asked: when I see words in my mind, what font are they in? The answer: Helvetica. What font do you think in?

LiveDiscKit ★

Neat open source project from Rogue Amoeba.

Jackass of the Week: Douglas McIntyre ★

Douglas McIntyre:

Apple may eventually end up selling 20 million iPhones worldwide every year. It will be faced with the unpleasant reality that now bedevils firms like Motorola and Nokia. Sales volume is not any good as a substitute for a high yield on each product. Low margins have never been part of the Apple formula for success.

Apple hasn’t switched to low margins for the iPhone 3G. They’ve switched from taking a cut of the monthly service fees to an up-front subsidy from the carriers.

Bleep ★

Stephen Colbert gives George Carlin “The Word”. (Via Laughing Squid.)

The Big Leagues ★

Robert Palmer:

We mentioned yesterday a rumor that Apple won’t cut a check for iPhone application developers until the dev’s share of the sales tops $250. A lot of commenters were upset about this, if it’s true: TomWBrowning said “So if you make an app that costs $1 you won’t see a penny even if 359 people buy it?”

From the (indie) developer’s perspective, this stinks.

If you’re thinking in terms of a couple hundred dollars, your app probably isn’t even going to get listed in the App Store. The App Store isn’t going to be like VersionTracker or MacUpdate, where every piece of junk gets listed as it’s submitted.

An Event Apart ★

My thanks to An Event Apart for again sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. Their slogan pretty much sums it up: “The design conference for people who make web sites.” Upcoming events include San Francisco on August 18-19 and Chicago on October 13-14. I’ve attended twice, and they’re crackerjack shows. If you care about good design and standards-based web development, this is the conference.

Daring Fireball readers save $100 off registration using discount code “AEADARE”. Register during an early bird period period and save a total of $200.

‘Browser’ ★

This seems like a very accurate rule of thumb.

Rogers Announces iPhone Rates in Canada ★

And — surprise, surprise — they suck. Stingy data limits and no unlimited data plan at any price.

Fake Steve on Palm ★

Fake Steve:

Meanwhile Palm is getting inquiries from Chris Anderson of Wired who wants to do a big cover story on how “selling for less than cost” is the new future of business.

No Country for Raising Arizona ★

Some similar shots from two very different Coen brothers movies.

99Rental.com ★

What a great idea:

Every week Apple offers a special 99 cent movie rental on iTunes. 99Rental.com keeps track of the $0.99 iTunes Movie of Week for you. You can check the site or be notified automatically through RSS, Email, Twitter, or Dashboard Widget.

Subscribed.

Dino Dai Zovi on Mac OS X Security ★

Dino Dai Zovi, who a year ago won a MacBook Pro in an exploit contest at CanSecWest, on the security-related improvements he’d like to see in Snow Leopard.