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I too noticed that the common ground between Apple’s blockbuster announcements last week was price, size, and headlessness. But John Gruber (as always) puts it much better, and does something I can’t: he gets inside why these products are what they are, when they are.

Even if the iPod Shuffle becomes the best-selling player in the iPod line-up (and, hence, the best-selling player in the world), the word “iPod??? is already firmly established in the public consciousness as a high-quality, high-capacity player. Apple has cashed in a bit of the iPod brand value in exchange for a shot to dominate the entire digital music player spectrum, from top to bottom.

Edward Tufte has made available (for a limited time!) a couple of draft chapters from his forthcoming book, Beautiful Evidence. Advice for the consumer of presentations, the Corrupt Techniques in Evidence Presentations chapter rails against imprecise, equivocating, and deceptive arguments. The chapter on Sparklines (how is this pronounced? “spark lines” or “spar-kleens”?) describes a new kind of inline infographic, no taller than a row of type.

Houston Chronicle: A year later, Metro’s light rail still dividing line. “Some believe the rail will generate something new for Houston: dense ‘urban villages’ where people live, work and play. And some don’t.” (Sadly, people are whining that after a year of ridership, Main Street hasn’t been magically transformed into Westheimer at 610.)

Hey, did anyone else notice that Apple has silently dropped support in Mail.app for the X-Image-Url header? It would fetch a small graphic from the given URL to display in the header of an email, a feature inherited from NeXTSTEP’s Mail.app. Yeah, it’s something of a security hole, but it was a fun feature. I had been intending to exploit it by stuffing some kind of graphical message meta-data in there; of course, when I tried it, Mail.app ignored the URL I supplied.

Maybe inline graphic data is the only safe option—perhaps the Face header proposal, or some kind of specially tagged MIME part.

Mail.app will still show icons in email messages, but only if there’s a picture associated with the email address in your Address Book. (example above: Mail.app uses my iChat icon)

“You must really love 柠檬.???