EA Backtracking on Claims of Simultaneous Mac
Game Releases

post from Daring Fireball on 16 August 2007 11:58:00 PM. © Daring Fireball

Remember when Electronic Arts announced at WWDC that they were going to release games for the Mac simultaneously with the PC versions? Scratch that:

The Mac OS X versions of two brand-new games, Madden NFL 08 and Tiger Woods 08, have been pushed back from their announced August releases to September or October, an EA representative told AppleInsider. The company, however, launched Madden NFL 08 for virtually every other platform on Tuesday.

(Via TUAW.)

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Read The Full Article:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/07/08/16/ea_backtracking_on_claims_of_simult
aneous_mac_game_releases.html

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iPhone + AT&T = Dead Trees and Giant Fees

post from Daring Fireball on 16 August 2007 11:54:00 PM. © Daring Fireball

How do you rack up a $600 iPhone bill from AT&T during just 48 hours in Canada, even if you’re being careful not to place unnecessary calls or use the Internet? Forget to turn off the MobileMail auto-checking.

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Read The Full Article:
http://sitening.com/blog/2007/08/13/iphone-att-dead-trees-giant-fees/

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Im Doing It Right Here

post from Daring Fireball on 16 August 2007 11:34:00 PM. © Daring Fireball

I’ve been waiting for someone to call me on this. Feel free to chalk it up to ego-centricism if you’d like, but I see it more like a distributed, filtered form of feedback. No, I don’t have comments, but if you write something smart about something I wrote, there’s a good chance I’ll link to it.

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Read The Full Article:
http://jonb.vox.com/library/post/grubers-trick.html

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EyeTV 250 Plus

post from MacNN | The Macintosh News Network on 16 August 2007 08:40:00 PM. © MacNN | The Macintosh News Network

Elgato has introduced the EyeTV 250 Plus, a new solution for the Mac that combines a hybrid televisi...

Read The Full Article:
http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/08/16/eyetv.250.plus/

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Meebo for Mobiles

post from Daring Fireball on 16 August 2007 06:38:00 PM. © Daring Fireball

Meebo, the web-based multi-network IM client, now has a mobile-optimized interface, specifically targetting the iPhone. Works great in my quick testing, given that it’s only a web app. (E.g. you get signed off from AIM if you leave MobileSafari or even switch to a different browser tab.)

(Via Dan Moren.)

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Read The Full Article:
http://blog.meebo.com/?p=346

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Fusion vs. Parallels

post from MacNN | The Macintosh News Network on 16 August 2007 05:45:00 PM. © MacNN | The Macintosh News Network

In a new set of benchmarks comparing SWsoft's Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac, Apple's Boot Camp 1.3 B...

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http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/08/16/fusion.vs.parallels/

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Feedback

post from Daring Fireball on 16 August 2007 05:39:00 PM. © Daring Fireball

A little over two weeks ago I began experimenting with a new format for the default RSS feed¹ here at Daring Fireball — pretty much putting the full content of the site in the feed, freely available to everyone, with week-long sponsorships to foot the bill.

My main concerns at the outset:

Would there be sufficient interest in the sponsorships?
Would the full-content feed severely deflate traffic to the web site?

The answers to both questions look good, so far. Sponsorships are selling briskly. Web page views for August are down slightly from July, but it’s still on pace to be the second-highest-traffic month in DF history. (And, I’ll note, August tends to be the least busy month of the year — a lot of vacations and not much news.)

So, let’s remove the “experimental” label and make it permanent.

I got a ton of terrific feedback from readers regarding the new feed format. Most, as I expected, was effusively positive, especially from those who’d been seeking to subscribe to the full-content feed in Google Reader. All of you who simply wrote to say thanks are very welcome.

There were, however, many well-reasoned suggestions and complaints. The most common was from readers who don’t want the frequent Linked List items in the feed. The idea being that they want to be notified via RSS when I’ve published a new article, but if they want to peruse my links, they’ll simply hit the web site. Put another way, they wanted the old feed back.

My goal is to maintain a balance between simplicity and reader satisfaction. Just one feed is as simple as it gets, but I agree there’s a need for a less-frenetic articles-only feed. So, as of about a week ago, I added a second sponsored feed, containing just the full articles. If you miss the old DF feed, check it out.

Linked List Format for Feeds

If you’re subscribed to the main feed, you may also have noticed last week that I played around with the format for Linked List entries in the feed. Originally, the main <link> element for each Linked List item in the feed pointed to the URL of what the item was pointing to. I.e. the feed was constructed similarly to how Linked List items appear on the web site — the title points away from daringfireball.net, to what I’m linking to.

Many readers complained about this, asking instead for the items to point back to the Linked List item’s permalink here on Daring Fireball. So I implemented this, and within one day I’d received far more complaints about the change than I had gotten about the original format in the course of a week. I personally prefer the original style, with links pointing away from daringfireball.net, and most readers do too, so I switched it back.

I suspect the reason some readers asked for the other style is that it’s what they’re accustomed to from other feeds. I’m convinced this is a better design, however. The point of the Linked List is to send you away from Daring Fireball to read or look at something elsewhere, and the feed format should reflect that.

Technically, the new feeds are in Atom 1.0 format, but it’s far easier and better understood to simply call them “RSS feeds” than something like “syndicated XML feeds”. ↩

Read The Full Article:
http://daringfireball.net/2007/08/feedback

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TechExpo, DEFCON free

In brief: We review the Fujitsu ScanSnap s500m, fmDataguard is available to all at DevCon pricing, t...

Read The Full Article:
http://www.macnn.com/articles/07/08/16/techexpo.defcon.free/