#FF00AA

@web@

SixApart releases a new blog platform. Can’t say I understand their business strategy. Do they expect to take both Blogger and MySpace down just because of their MovableType aura? I’m sorry, but even if that were at all relevant to their new target (which it isn’t), they’ve lost a lot of this aura to open-source PHP solutions over the past couple of years.

Sure, they’ve got LiveJournal. But they bought it, not made it, so that doesn’t give them any credibility. Besides, LiveJournal is way too endogenous to drive adoption of another platform. And the LJ community would be mightily pissed if they were to be forcefully relocated to a new platform.

There’s no need to test the service to know whether it’ll work, because it’s not functionality that matters, or the amount of Ajax and rounded corners, when it comes to building the community — they’re just going to crash, period. And they might have a hard time falling back on the pro blogger community once Vox bombs.

 

@web@

Slashdot redesign contest winner announced. It’s less ugly than the original, but still not pretty. I didn’t have much hope in this contest anyway — to produce a layout as horrible as Slashdot, the creator must have terrible taste, and not just a lack of design expertise.

 

@web@

Extending the ‘standard’ feed icon. Sure, it kinda defeats the original point of having a tiny icon with no text — but there are cases where you need to have labels (while I agree that differentiating between RSS and Atom isn’t one such case — that’s not an alternative regular users should be exposed to — you may have to display a blog feed, podcast, Flickr feed and so on) and this proposal is pretty cute. Where’s the web-based button creator?

 

@web@

Top 10 Most Common Passwords [via].

 

@music@

Using your iPod to store and dial phone numbers. Nice and simple. Wonder how come Apple — or any other developer — hasn’t thought of making a small utility to synchronize Address Book phone numbers with iPod mp3s.

 

@apple@

Results:

“But how does [the MacBook] handle WoW???”

Not. At. All. With everything turned off I was able to get a whopping framerate of 5. Needless to say, this thing with all the RAM in the world is a far cry from being a game machine. The Intel graphics adapter works well for work but not for entertainment.

 

@apple@

Petition for a matte display option for the MacBook [via]. 550 signatures only so far.

 

@apple@

Really Expensive Cat Toy [via].