Textastic is an advanced code editor for iPhone with rich support for syntax highlighting, (S)FTP and Dropbox.

Love the iPad app. Just bought the brand new iPhone version. $4.99 cheap. Go get it.¹

Until Panic releases a version of Diet Coda for the iPhone, this is looking like my go-to mobile blogging app.

Gedeon Maheux for the Iconfactory:

We’re re-doubling our efforts to bring you an all-new version of Twitterrific: one that complies with Twitter’s new guidelines and makes reading and posting to Twitter even easier and more fun.

Glad to see my favorite Mac Twitter client isn’t going anywhere soon.

Phenomenal piece by Kevin Morris over at the Daily Dot:

As the popular consciousness of the nation and much of the world zeroed in on the tragedy in Aurora, Jones was doing something that no one else was: He was organizing the horrific mess of news, rumors, and panicked speculation bit by bit—correcting, fixing, managing as other redditors jumped into the comments, correcting him or chastising him or just helping out with news and first-hand knowledge.

In doing so, Jones instantly became the most-read news voice on a website with 35 million visitors a month, with the best live summary on the Internet. And he was a complete amateur, an 18-year-old getting ready to start his freshman year at Rice University whose journalism experience amounted to writing for his school newspaper and designing its website.

But Jones isn’t the future of journalism.

Great article that delves deep into the how and why of social news-gathering. If you know nothing of Reddit, or if you visit it and think it’s useless, read this.

{% blockquote -Time Bray http://www.tbray.org/ongoing/When/201x/2012/08/18/Blogodammerung Blogodammerung? %} I don’t know of any way to be influential without deploying some combination of rhetoric and polemic and storyline. And I don’t think you can do that without writing a few hundred words, organized into paragraphs, with a permalink. {% endblockquote %}

Thoughtful piece on the latest wave of “blogging is dead” hubbub.

Last week, Matt Fisher took to the web to vent about Progressive Insurance, who stooped to assisting in his sister’s killer’s defense to avoid paying out her policy. The heartbreaking story went viral, forcing Progressive into panic mode and changing the scope of the case. The company responded with a non-starter explanation, but now things are looking up (as up as they can be) for the Fisher family.

I’ve noticed, as this story has grown, that many people are making Progressive out to be the ultimate villain, sometimes cheekily.¹ While there is blood on their hands, so to speak, there is a lot more at play here. Here’s Matt’s original post:

Out of a sense of honor, and out of a sense of the cost of my sister’s outstanding student loans, my folks opted to try to go after the money through legal channels. At which point they learned another delightful thing. In Maryland, you may not sue an insurance company when they refuse to fork over your money. Instead, what they had to do was sue the guy who killed my sister, establish his negligence in court, and then leverage that decision to force Progressive to pay the policy.

The emphasis is Matt’s, but I’d add it here as well. I know nothing of Maryland’s laws, and in fact I can’t point directly to the offending legislation that would take away a citizen’s right to justice.

However, I can tell you a movie to watch that will help: Susan Saladoff’s Hot Coffee. Here’s what I had to say about it in my review last year:

The title comes from one of the most notorious civil lawsuits in recent history, the 1992-1994 case of Stella Liebeck, then a 79-year-old woman who sued McDonald’s after she spilled hot coffee on herself. Liebeck became a punchline after a court awarded her $2.7 million in punitive damages. The case brought so-called “litigious lawsuits” to the national stage and set off two decades of reform which have in many ways crippled our access to the civil courts. Collectively, we all bought into the story that Liebeck took advantage of the system, but did she?

I bet I could go up to most of my progressive, more liberal-minded friends and ask them if they remember the case of the woman who sued McDonald’s because their coffee was too hot and get a response along the lines of, “Yeah, that was ridiculous.”

And now we can’t sue corporations when they wrong us. Ridiculous.

Again, from my review:

You can write to your senators and congresspeople, or to the President for that matter, but it is only within the courts that the average American can take on an insurmountable force like McDonald’s and win. For a brief period, the pendulum swung on the side of the citizens. Was that such a bad thing? Now, we find ourselves in a time when corporations have begun shutting down our access to the courts.

Progressive didn’t treat the Fisher family like shit (just) because they’re villains, they did it because they could. I applaud the Fisher family for taking the difficult route of going after what was owed to them, but I especially appreciate the latest note from Matt on his blog:

As we move forward, we hope to focus on celebrating the joy that Katie brought us and working to change the balance of power between policy holders and the insurance companies they pay to protect them.

This isn’t a problem limited to insurance companies. Go read your cell phone or credit card contract, for example, and see how much wiggle room you have if you get screwed, even if it’s the company’s fault. Better yet, read the contract you signed at your job.

I encourage the Fisher family to look at what laws have been passed that put the courts on the side of corporations and see what can be done to reverse them. And I encourage everyone to go out and see Hot Coffee. It’s streaming on Amazon now. Watch tonight if you can.

The headline of this post promises to tell you the secret to hating a company. Here it is: don’t. Dig deeper and figure out what it is that makes them capable of acting in such a horrific manner. Then work to change that.

{::nomarkdown}

Nick Wingfield, reporting for the New York Times on the forthcoming verdict in the Apple/Samsung patent case:

If Apple prevails, experts believe Samsung and other rivals in the market will have a much stronger incentive to distinguish their smartphone and tablet products with unique features and designs to avoid further legal tangles.

Making great products that customers connect with, apparently, was never incentive enough.

And if the jury finds in favor of Samsung, its decision could have the opposite effect, creating a consensus around Apple-like designs for years to come. “Expect to see an awful lot of Apple knockoffs without fear of retribution,” said Michael Gartenberg, an analyst at Gartner, the technology research firm.

What do you mean “expect,” Michael?

If Apple loses, the industry-wide aping of their products will continue at roughtly the same rate it has for years. If Apple wins, Samsung will be forced to ship an original design. Should be fun to see how this plays out.

In case you’re wondering what seems to be causing all this stir about Web publishing, it’s this post by Anil Dash from last week:

Start moving your content management system towards a future where it outputs content to simple APIs, which are consumed by stream-based apps that are either HTML5 in the browser and/or native clients on mobile devices. Insert your advertising into those streams using the same formats and considerations that you use for your own content.

Anil’s an incredibly smart guy, but no thanks.

Great bit of journalism from Andrew Wallenstein at Variety. In short, Variety got ahold of an internal memo from Hulu, detailing what to do if the company’s CEO, Jason Kilar, decides to cash out to the tune of $100 million.

The memo outlines amendments including:

• No more exclusivity for current-season content once restricted to Hulu and the networks’ respective websites. Now Disney and News Corp. can turn around and license programming to another third-party, i.e. YouTube, which could dilute Hulu’s competitive advantage in the marketplace.

• No more content parity. ABC.com and Fox.com will be able to hold back certain content to differentiate their own sites from Hulu, which was once entitled to everything on the networks’ sites.

• Exclusive “super-distribution” rights Hulu once retained to syndicate content to third-party sites like Yahoo and AOL would revert back to Disney and News Corp.

• Fox wants to increase to four ads per commercial pod on Hulu.com.

Fucking idiots.

I don’t always agree with Kilar, but I’ve also never envied the position he is in. Going by the list of changes the rest of the suits want to implemnent, I truly hope he sticks around. Hulu without him sounds like a lost cause.

Scott Hanselman on the recent spate of publishing startups and where your words should go:

You are not blogging enough. You are pouring your words into increasingly closed and often walled gardens. You are giving control - and sometimes ownership - of your content to social media companies that will SURELY fail.

Bingo.

I’m looking for a job right now, so I’m constantly on Craigslist looking at new postings. This one is perhaps the most ridiculous I’ve come across yet, and that’s saying something.

…I’m looking for a few bright, capable individuals who have access to potential investors but just don’t have the experience or track record to get in the game as a qualified writer and/or film producer.

Uh huh. But what does it pay?

No, this is not a paid position up front where I hope you can do what you say, this is a commission based position where we work together and use my track record as a basis to attract a few qualified investors to get our next project (a family film comedy based on a true story) into development and production.

Commission based, eh? Sounds great.

And if you really can produce…you’d better start taking French lessons because our next stop may be the Cannes Film Festival in the south of France…

Pro-tip: this character is full of shit. Here’s the full ad, for posterity.