Music Notation with HTML5 Canvas (via WebKitBits)

Q&A: Why was it Entourage:Mac and not Outlook in the first place?

After the release of Entourage, the Exchange team decided to stop development of Outlook for Mac. This left the MacBU with a dilemma: there were two separate code bases, neither of which did everything that was needed.

Uh, I have a question: how messed up is a corporate structure that this happens in the first place? How did communication fail such that Outlook and Entourage were first developed independently (surely somebody said “uh, guys, we’re also developing a mail client for the Mac!”), then one of them abandoned, then the other destined to (insufficiently) replace the former (surely somebody said “we kind of do want to have an Exchange client on the Mac, though!”)?

Two thirds of 2009’s phishing attacks were from a single group. (German article) Phishing strikes me as something where a little education could go a long way. Still haven’t heard of any case among friends and family of mine, non-computer enthusiasts included.

Now this is some nice iPad artwork. More such skins. (via @chartier)

Saving state is a rather common behavior in iPhone OS, and will become default (rather than implemented per-application) in 4.0, but what if you left the app hours or days ago? You may not even remember, much less care, what you had previously been doing in it. (via @danielpunkass)

Palm webOS, on a PC. Uh, sure. (via @chartier)

Wild Fox, a Firefox fork seeking to add H.264 support, may be more attention seeking than substance, but more important than my skepticism is the recognition that pragmatic people still exist. (Even Microsoft, who used to try to compete against MPEG with their Windows Media / VC-1 silliness — submitted as an SMPTE standard and all — now will ship IE 9 with exclusive H.264 support. Why does Mozilla think they can win this?)

More worth reading than the barebones website is the reddit commentary.

Ask a C# question on Stack Overflow, and get detailed information from someone on Microsoft’s C# compiler team. Awesome. (via reddit)

Speaking of pragmatic people, Bruce Schneier wants you to write your passwords down. More of this, please. (also via reddit)

I’m typing this in WriteRoom for iPhone. It’s fast to launch, gets right back to where you left off without any nagging, syncs with a Google App Engine-based site and comes with more editing-suitable typeface and appearance options than Notes. Nothing to help with markup, but still a good start. Did I mention how fast it launches?

Windows Server is coming to ARM. (article in German)

Between that and some other development you may have heard of, Intel has quite some work ahead with Atom. (via DFLL)

Twitter account @SergeGraystone continues to amuse me.

So Steam for Mac launched, and comes with a time-limited offer for a free Portal. I’d check it out if I had a Mac.

That the games are “real” ports — OpenGL instead of Direct3D; no Cider or similar translation layers, that Valve is providing Mac targeting as a free update for their Source engine SDK, that with many games, you get to reuse the same license you already have, and that game state syncs through Steam cross-platform are undeniably terrific.

UI issues include misuse of typefaces as well as of designated file system areas — Microsoft, too, likes to pollute ~/Documents with non-user-supplied data, but it’s wrong; no excuses. It also apparently makes itself launch on login (under certain unclear conditions). Those should be worked on, but don’t make the news any less exciting for me. I’ll have to reserve judgment on whether this makes for a great case against cross-platform applications and thus plays straight into Steve Jobs’s hands; some seem to think so. So far, I’d say I’ve seen far worse.

Speaking of far worse, Adobe is back with its stunning incompetence at writing installers. This time: silently install Growl whether you like it or not, and only use it for one single, user-hostile purpose. Perhaps they should focus less on loving Apple, and more on trying to use their apps without hair loss. (via @boredzo)

Alahmnat provides a good FAQ of sorts on why open sourcing Uru isn’t quite as easy as it sounds. Solid, but I disagree that the Myst community has had it particularly bad with abusive outsiders; I’d argue on the contrary that we’ve been rather lucky. I’d also be less harsh on Cyan had their initial claims not been as bold. (Via @alahmnat)

Has bike marketing completely missed out on the obvious, pragmatic “it gets you from A to B, fast” answer? (Via @chartier)

John Mayer’s Tumblr account. (Also via @chartier)

“Fun With Secret Questions & Answers”. Some of my favorites come from the comments on Schneier’s post:

Q: If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?

A: Sorry, you’re not my type.

Q: I’d like to take a moment to tell you about our long distance plan.

A: [customer hangs up]

(via Uli Kusterer)

A great look at how Apple got the privacy aspect of one major iPhone API right, and of another wrong, including historic context and suggestions for how to improve the latter.

dot-net-transitions: animated transitions for .NET Windows Forms UI element property changes.

The Watir-inspired WatiN, and its offspring WatiN Test Recorder, look very interesting.

WolframAlpha for iPad has the last word on virtual keyboards. (via @tristan)

Whether you find yourself wanting to use your phone’s accelerometer on a fictional space station or merely on Venus, Android has you covered. (via proggit)

The VCR did not kill Hollywood, and file sharing has yet to kill everything. But did you know that the same concern — libraries killing booksellers — was raised (and proven wrong) over two centuries ago? (via reddit)

The above is also interesting for its relevant discussion of the long s (ſ) character (which was likely invented to avoid discrimination of lispers), eventually devolving into abusing math alphanumeric symbols.

And that, in turn, reminded me of how spectacularly well font activation works in Mac OS X: install a font that implements missing characters, and without rebooting, relogging-in, relaunching, reloading, resizing or even bringing to front an already-open Safari window with previously-missing characters will suddenly display them crisply. Stunning technology.