WebM is now BSD-licensed. Good. (via @timbray)

Hawt. (via @rands)

Belgium’s first baby snow leopard. Sure, but does it run Safari? (Ba-dum-dish. via Denis.)

The new trend: tweaking your PC from your iPhone. Asus shows off BIOS settings; Galaxy overclocking. (German article)

Puntastic. (via @uliwitness)

If you e-mail Steve Jobs, he may give you terse, blunt, yet useful answers, even the second time. If you e-mail AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson twice, you get threatened with a cease and desist. What about Valve’s Gabe Newell? You’re good.

Apple has made a HTML5 marketing page, including a showcase of various technology demos, and I never knew they had sample code like that. Good, right?

Yet for some inexplicable and likely stupid reason, they decided to not just recommend you look at the demos in Safari; they require it. That the “You’ll need to download Safari to view this demo.” error message can be worked around is besides the point. Not only does this still break cases where CSS vendor prefixes are relied upon; Apple makes little effort to support Mozilla’s and Opera’s respective prefixes. It also appears to disagree with the message of their marketing copy, which promotes “web standards” which are “open”.

Requiring one particular browser doesn’t sound very standard or open to me. These are all very cool demos, and counter the idea that Apple wants to lock everyone into Cocoa Touch — but the browser lock-out leaves a bad aftertaste. (also via @timbray)

Having said all that, there’s a sarcastic image going around showing Google Chrome doing significantly better at a HTML5 test site than Safari (142 vs. 70 points). However, I’m getting 120 points with the current Safari release 4.0.5, and 144 with the current nightly build. Since I find it unlikely that Safari on Windows fares that much worse, the screenshot must be of a significantly out-of-date version (yet, curiously, a not-so-out-of-date Chrome). Counting Apple’s unfair play with yet more distorted comparisons doesn’t benefit anyone.

Google Android open source and compatibility program manager Dan Morrill:

Because [fragmentation] means everything, it actually means nothing, so the term is useless. Stories on “fragmentation” are dramatic and they drive traffic to pundits’ blogs, but they have little to do with reality. “Fragmentation” is a bogeyman, a red herring, a story you tell to frighten junior developers. Yawn.

I can think of multiple meanings of “fragmentation” as it applies to Android, including differences in:

• hardware configuration, e.g. GPU capabilities,
• hardware properties, e.g. native screen resolution and hardware buttons, and
• minimum and maximum supported operating system version

— so the point that it means a lot (though far from “everything”) is well-taken, but this only makes matters worse: every possible meaning I can come up with gets the very point of pundits across: it’s bad, and to a point, it’s unnecessarily bad.

I’d be the first to support advances in technology and ditching legacy components¹, and that will inevitably lead to some users getting left behind. But as an Android user, you can’t even be sure that a handset you buy right now will offer the best possible hardware prerequisites, and run the latest version of the OS.

Call it a frightening story all you like. It’s also very real. We’ve seen this before with Windows Mobile, and if Google doesn’t step up to require hardware manufacturers and carriers to make the experience less awful, we’ll see it again. (via proggit)

More on this by a Slashdot user. (also via proggit)

It may be a bug, but double-/triple-pressing the lock button apparently invokes a flashlight in iPhone OS 4.0 beta 4. (via fscklog)

This appears to be the year of Star Trek stuff getting real. First, the PADD gets released by Apple; now, Pantec Biosolutions gives us hyposprays called P.L.E.A.S.E. (via @alahmnat)

This guy must be the Poe’s Law stand-in for libertarians: “Why Not Feel Sorry for BP?” (also via @alahmnat) Ooh! Ooooh! I know a reason. (via DFLL)

Wikipedia has a List of youngest birth mothers (and grandmothers). I for one was not expecting those ages.

A Services Menu for iPhone. Great (and, evidently, Apple-esque) approach, but doesn’t that require a way to compile bundles (that aren’t apps) on the iPhone, and ship them through the App Store, perhaps alongside apps? After all, you wouldn’t want the whole application to launch… (also via DFLL)

Some suggestions for Xcode UI Improvements. Very cool UI design, and looks like a bunch of huge time-savers, but would probably take a ton of effort, or be very inconsistent / cursory (especially, say, Brandon’s in-API-doc example screenshots of enum values). (via @sophiestication)

Adobe Announces iPad-Focused “Digital Publishing Platform”. Generating HTML from Word? Pshaw. Let’s generate entire iPad apps from InDesign.

David Baron on Hidden complexity in specifications.

Kaleidoscope, a new file comparison utility for the Mac. Looks gorgeous, and image comparison is a useful addition — but with “it doesn’t support editing or even applying changes” and “it doesn’t do folder comparisons”, Michael Tsai points out two jarring weaknesses.

Because, really, why would you expect Photoshop CS5 to handle something that 1.0 could?

Onkyo showed off a notebook with two displays; one optionally sliding out from beneath the other. Ten inches and 1366×768 pixels each. The displays aren’t flush next to each other, and the (German) article doesn’t speak highly of the build quality. Puzzling that so few companies (such as Apple) ‘get’ seamless hardware design.

A quote about engineering. I’d argue that, compared to building bridges, software development is much fuller of unknowns, but this may merely present my ignorance in architecture.

Just one question. Also, how many cubic inches is an ounce?

Is this Guid HOT or NOT? (via @codinghorror)

“Will Apple Embrace the Web? No.” No indeed, because they already have, long ago, being a WHATWG founding member and openly leading the development of what is widely regarded as the most impressive layout engine du jour, WebKit.

Camen likening Safari to IE6 might make some sense if Apple had a controlling market position for cellphones (2.7%), or at least the smartphones segment (15.4%). They’re not even in the first or second place, and chances are Android will soon surpass them. Apple may control the mindshare (and has been leading in profits), but they’re far away from leading the market, and don’t seem intent to change that.

Do you remember when Internet Explorer 6 was released? It was hands-down the best, most standards compliant browser at the time.

In some bizarro universe, that may be true, but Internet Explorer 6 was released more than a year after Internet Explorer 5 for Mac (yes, by the same company), based on the Tasman engine, which offered much better support for CSS, PNG and various other aspects.

Can you see where I’m going with this?

No.

Well, actually, thanks to your mention of John Gruber and claim chowder, my money is on ‘linkbait’. I fell for it. Good job. (via proggit, where this kind of drivel does not belong)

I really want to do something nifty with CSS3 media queries, like the example(s) laid out in Responsive Web Design (via Jon Hicks), or the for-IE9 demo by Microsoft.

Between parody Twitter accounts (with some tweets turned into billboards), Despair t-shirts (via reddit), and Spongebob (via @chartier), BP has a bit of a public relations problem. Allegedly restricting photographer access (via DFLL) and shipping in workers (also via @chartier) isn’t exactly helping. I had a hard time figuring out what kind of animal this once was, too (via reddit).

iPad + Velcro. (via fscklog)

John Mayer’s blog reminded me of the Droste Effect, so I created a subreddit dedicated to it.

HelTweetica, a Twitter client in a familiar typeface. I ultimately found the Mac version a bit too limiting. Echofon continues to be my client of choice.

Flojuggler — “Track the periods of girls you know. Seriously.” Glad they added that latter sentence to the tagline. (via reddit)

CSS3 Memory. I won’t spoil what happens when you finish. (via WebKitBits)

The ultimate evidence iPads are selling like hotcakes:

“I can now say ‘we have no f***ing iPads’ in five languages.”