- Why The Symphony Needs A Progress Bar (Elaine Wherry) — an excellent interaction designer tackles the real world.
- Biologic — view your social network as though looking at cells through a microscope. Gorgeous and different.
- The Cost of Cracking — analysis of used phone listings to see what improves and decreases price yields some really interesting results. Phones described as “decent” are typically priced 23% below the median. Who would describe something they’re selling as “decent” and price it below market value unless something fishy was going on? […] On average, cracking your phone destroys 30-50% of its value instantly. Particularly interesting to me since Ms 10 just brought home her phone with *cough* a new starburst screensaver.
- OpenStreetMap Welcomes Apple — this is the classy way to deal with the world’s richest company quietly and badly using your work without acknowledgement.
"apple" entries
Commerce Weekly: PayPal’s Here service takes on Square
PayPal launches a card reader, AmEx teams with Twitter, and the smartphone tipping point is mere months away.
PayPal introduces its own credit card reader, AmEx asks you to tweet it out, and Asymco visualizes the smartphone market. (Commerce Weekly is produced as part of a partnership between O'Reilly and PayPal.)
Four short links: 9 March 2012
Real World User Experience, Biovis your Social Network, Analytics for Phone Sales, and Classy OpenStreetMap
Developer Week in Review: The new iPad and the big meh
It's iPad evolution rather than revolution, increasing patent penalties for Android, and Raspberry Pi is served.
Apple unveils pretty much what it was expected to unveil, and decides to treat Android as a cash cow rather than an enemy. Meanwhile, the Raspberry Pi is finally out, so let the hacking begin.
Commerce Weekly: An app to end tab walkouts
A new app lets you make an elegant exit, Square hails a cab and iWallet gets closer.
Tabbed Out pays the bill even if you leave the bar. Also, Square takes a ride in NYC taxis and an iWallet patent appears. (Commerce Weekly is produced as part of a partnership between O'Reilly and PayPal.)
Developer Week in Review: Flash marginalization continues
Flash ditches Linux, a developer faces death, and we get a peek inside Foxconn.
If you use Linux, either start using Chrome as your browser or get ready to give up Flash. A developer faces execution in Iran because of how someone used software he wrote, and the world gets to see what it's like to build iPads and iPhones.
Four short links: 17 February 2012
Predictive Surprises, Javascript Checking, Web Caching, and Security Through Clinical Kills
- How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did — predictive analytics moves faster than family communications. (via Sara Winge)
- JSHint — a tool to detect errors and potential problems in JavaScript code. (via Hacker News)
- Web Caching Tutorial — explanation of the technical ins and outs of web caching.
- Gatekeeper — Apple’s new app security technology for Mac OS X. Identity, general purpose computing, security, and third-party kill switches all in the one technology. (via John Gruber)
About the Emerging Battles Over Textbooks: Options from Apple to Open Initiatives
Two dramatically opposed announcements from Apple and the state of California put the textbook publishing industry on notice recently that it could be facing rapid disruption. But open textbooks can't be created and altered as easily as open source software.
Developer Week in Review: A pause to consider patents
There was good news and bad news on the intellectual property front this week.
We take a look at two major events that rocked the technology intellectual property wars, centered on a courtroom in Texas and a standards body a continent away.
Four short links: 6 February 2012
E-Commerce Analytics, Text Mining on Hadoop, Bozonics, and It's Safe To Write With a Mac Again
- Jirafe — open source e-commerce analytics for Magento platform.
- iModela — a $1000 3D milling machine. (via BoingBoing)
- It’s Too Late to Save The Common Web (Robert Scoble) — paraphrased: “Four years ago, I told you all that Google and Facebook were evil. You did nothing, which is why I must now use Google and Facebook.” His list of reasons that Facebook beats the Open Web gives new shallows to the phrase “vanity metrics”. Yes, the open web does not go out of its way to give you an inflated sense of popularity and importance. On the other hand, the things you do put there are in your control and will stay as long as you want them to. But that’s obviously not a killer feature compared to a bottle of Astroglide and an autorefreshing page showing your Klout score and the number of Google+ circles you’re in.
- iBooks Author EULA Clarified (MacObserver) — important to note that it doesn’t say you can’t use the content you’ve written, only that you can’t sell .ibook files through anyone but Apple. Less obnoxious than the “we own all your stuff, dude” interpretation, but still a bit crap. I wonder how anticompetitive this will be seen as. Apple’s vertical integration is ripe for Justice Department investigation.
Top stories: January 30-February 3, 2012
Hadoop deconstructed, the value of unstructured data, and a Moneyball approach to software teams.
This week on O'Reilly: Edd Dumbill examined the components and functions of the Hadoop ecosystem, Pete Warden gave a big thumbs-up to unstructured data, and Jonathan Alexander looked at how a Moneyball approach could help software teams.