I resisted posting too many of the dumb analyst reports in the wake of the earnings call because I was trying to contextualize it. The Macalope did it for me:
Long story short, the number that Apple “missed” is the average of Wall Street analysts’ made-up numbers. They have no real idea what Apple’s going to announce; they’re making a guess based on second- and third-hand information. In a rational world, no one should have to explain that Apple is under no obligation to meet Wall Street’s estimates. What people should be concerned with is whether Apple improves on its own numbers. Which it did. Handsomely.
Quoting Steve Wozniak:
“I’m kind of shocked. Every screen is much more beautiful than the same apps on Android and iPhone.”
No surprise there. Windows Phone is rightly lauded for being beautiful, while being criticized for its relatively dated functionality. Woz notes that he still prefers the iPhone overall, and probably for that reason.
As some of you may have noticed, I recently rolled out two small changes to the website.
Citations and footnotes have been improved. This has been made possible through Michel Fortin’s quite excellent PHP Markdown Extra plugin, with a slight modification to change his <sup> tags into <cite> ones. I really am quite the pedant. They should also render more correctly in RSS readers, in theory, and they improve my writing experience because Fortin’s plugin automatically creates backlinks.
The second improvement concerns permalinks. For the longest time, any link log item used the permalink from the day with the post ID hashed onto the end, in the form http://pxlnv.com/2012/04/24/#post-3667. This isn’t bad—it’s certainly usable—but it wasn’t up to my satisfaction. This is changing effective immediately when I begin using the Daring Fireball Linked List WordPress plugin, instead of Page Links To. This has allowed me to create proper permalinks to link log items.
Neither of these changes are retroactive, as correcting the thousand-or-so links I’ve posted in the past year would be a tedious task, to say the very least. However, going forward, all permalinks and citations will be much improved.
If you’d like to find out more about the madness of creating a link log or linked list in WordPress, I’ve written a brief “how-to” guide.
The early speculation behind this embarrassing stunt put the blame on Samsung, but they’ve denied any involvement.
James Croft of MacTalk did a little detective work and it looks like RIM (of all companies) is behind the campaign. Indeed, if you put the DoubleClick campaign ID found on the Wake Up site into Google, it spits out a bunch of BlackBerry links, along with articles related to this stunt. What a fiasco.
Alex Knight:
Lion is not a new operating system, so the people at Mozilla have had plenty of time to support some of these innovative features that other third party developers have long embraced. How many more versions of Firefox do we have to go until they build a proper Mac browser?
The biggest problem Mozilla faces is that Firefox is cross-platform, and they’d like to reduce the amount of unique OS-targeted code they have to write. As long as this is the case, Firefox will always lag behind native browsers. It seems Google has done a better job at managing a cross-platform browser. Chrome uses the native scrolling and full-screen APIs.