04/02/2012

Leo Laporte calls TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington “asshole”

This one is nice: Leo Laporte, US Radio and TV host, freaks out during a live recording when Michael Arrington, founder of TechCrunch, asks him whether the Palm Pre Laporte reviewed had been given to him as a free trial.

Watch the clip, it’s an awesome example of what can happen if people take themselves too serious. :-)

Michael Arrington posted a lengthy response at his blog:

I’m bummed this has to be an issue on a day that we’re all mourning the loss of such an important member of our community. And I’m sad that my professional relationship with Leo is apparently over. I apologize to you, Leo. I didn’t mean to imply that you were being unethical. I just think that, given the story that’s brewing about favoritism at Palm, it was important to disclose whether you paid for that Pre, and/or got it in advance.

In the meantime Leo responded, too:

Thanks for the post, Mike. Apology accepted. Now that I know what was going on in your mind, I apologize to you.

There seems to be something about the Gillmor Gang that just engenders over the top passion. I’m embarrassed by my overreaction. Peace.

Microsoft Bing API released (no usage limits)

Over at The Next Web I’ve briefly covered the release of Microsoft’s Bing API. I’ll follow up with more technical details and maybe some Objective-C code here at 24100.NET later next week.

I’m glad to see that Techmeme picked up the post as the only Discussion link (so far) and hope that’ll drive some traffic to this topic!

bingpostattechmeme

Today is Palm Pre Launch Day

iphone-palm-tnwOver at The Next Web I’ve published an “extended executive summary” about everything you need to know about Palm’s new smartphone: The Palm Pre. The Palm Pre, which some people tout to become an “iPhone killer”, will not be immediately available in Europe as it does not support the GSM/UMTS standards, yet. But anyway, if you are in the mobile business, you hopefully find the summary helpful.

JSON Framework 2.2 for iPhone (and Cocoa) released

Stig Brautaset has released version 2.2 of the very popular JSON.framework for Cocoa and the iPhone. You can grab the .dmg or visit the project home over at Google Code.

Here is the list of significant changes compared to version 2.1, copied 1:1 for your reading convenience courtesy of Stig’s blog post:

New, fresh API—particularly for errors

Extracted the SBJsonWriter and SBJsonParser classes from the SBJSON class. These present a fresh, simple API. If a method returns nil, you can now simply call a method to get an array of NSError objects containing the error trace.

The SBJSON class is now a facade, implementing its old interface by forwarding messages to instances of the new classes. Additionally, the facade also implements the new simplified interface of the SBJsonWriter and SBJsonParser classes.

[Read more...]

Calling all Twitter tool providers to implement OAuth

OAuth has rightly gained lots of popularity these days and even given the current session fixation issues, I’m a strong fan of the delegated access control it promotes and helps implementing.

One of the prominent service providers offering OAuth based authentication is… Twitter. As more and more people are using Twitter as a personal and professional communication tool, I’m wondering why many of the additional third party services have not yet implemented OAuth based authentication. I don’t know about you but I’m getting slightly annoyed when an independent (often poorly designed) web site asks me to enter my full Twitter credentials. They all promise to not cache or store my username and password but still, it’s does not feel right. Some don’t even use an SSL encrypted HTTP connection for retrieving my secret user information.

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Google Wave Developers at FriendFeed

I’d kindly like to invite all developers to join the Google wave Developers group on FriendFeed. Google wave is the much acclaimed successor of Lotus Domino upcoming collaboration platform introduced during this years Google I/O.

While almost 2/3 of the demo presented at Google I/O showcased what looked like a completely Ajax-ified integration between Google Talk and Google Mail, the most intriguing part to will likely be the set of Google Wave APIs.

[Read more...]

P2P Interview #10

I’ve recently had the pleasure to get interviewed by Laurent Francois (LinkedIn link), Head of 360° Digital Influence Hub at Ogilvy Public Relations Worldwide. The interview has been published in English and French.

Thank you Laurent and keep up the good work!

A new approach to web fonts: typekit

Jeffrey Veen has announced a new approach to simplify the legal use of fonts for web design. I’ve covered his announcement in more depths over at The Next Web.

typekit will leverage the W3C 2002 Working Draft 2 CSS3 module: Web Fonts specification and allow designers to link to free and paid fonts hosted by typekit. Veen envisions a vital font market place which will equally serve designers, developers, brands and visitors.