July 2009
27 posts
Daring Fireball: Microsoft's Long, Slow Decline →
John Gruber has written another insightful article on the nature of the Mac vs. Windows (or perhaps one might say ‘generic PC’) markets.
There is much in this article about playing the ‘cheap’ angle, and a comparison to Wal-Mart as such:
They’re a software company whose primary platform no longer appeals to people who like computers the most. Their executives are...
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“With Windows 7, Ballmer vowed prices would go up”
– Microsoft ultra-thins to ‘out cool’ netbooks, Apple • The Register
Steve Ballmer just makes this too easy.
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But I R Lexmark, U n00b!11!!
Me: This is just some handwritten text, to be emailed. 75dpi is fine.
Lexmark: Okay. Here's a preview.
Me: That's good, now scan it.
Lexmark: … … … done.
Me: 12MB? I thought it was going to be 1.5MB… Hey! Everything but the first page is at 300dpi! I said to use 75dpi!
Lexmark: OH HAI U WUR SEEREEUS ABUT DAT? DURR U SILLEE 300 R BETTR THEN 75! PFFT U N3WB!!1!
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furbo.org · Waving a red flag →
Craig Hockenberry shares some delightfully useful information for developers who need to get out a quick bugfix for their iPhone apps:
An email to appreview@apple.com that explains the critical problem and which product is affected will help speed your update through the system.
Note however that, as he points out, you must not abuse this. Only use it for problems with application review...
“You can argue all day long that your product is better, but if that runs...”
– iPhone Development: Microsoft’s Ads Redux
Amen.
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If you’re having trouble with symbolicatecrash not finding symbols for system frameworks on 3.0 devices, look in /Developer/Platforms/iPhoneOS.platform/DeviceSupport/3.0. There should be a symlink in there called ‘Symbols’, pointing to ../../Developer/SDKs/iPhoneOS3.0.sdk. If there isn’t create it like so:
> sudo ln -s ../../Developer/SDKs/iPhoneOS3.0.sdk Symbols
Now...
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30 iPhone Apps with Sexy Interfaces →
davidkaneda:
Mac AppStorm was kind enough to include Outpost on their top 30 iPhone interfaces list. To celebrate, I’m publicly posting the original spec we created for Outpost that I sent to Jim as we started discussing the UI design.
These are my favourites, the ones which got me hooked:
“…we got a call from the Apple legal department saying … “Hey, you need to...”
– Microsoft: Apple wanted ‘Laptop Hunters’ ad pulled | Apple - CNET News
Really? $100? I seem to recall about $600 coming off the MacBook Pro prices, and nearly $1000 off the MacBook Air.
iTunes 8.2.1 released: Update cripples Palm Pre... →
Hey Palm— sucks to be you.
I would have more sympathy if you hadn’t utilized a blatantly hacky method of syncing with iTunes. Write a fucking Mac app which reads the iTunes DB (or scripts iTunes) like everyone else. Even better, talk to me and I’ll write it for you.
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Typing in Croatian on the iPhone
mrgan:
Now that 3.0 has a Croatian dictionary for auto-correction, I actually find it easier to type Croatian on the iPhone than on my Mac. Emailing my family from the Mac is pretty painful; I hate switching keyboard layouts (I can never remember the shortcut), and how the heck do I keep track of what key which non-English character maps to?
I find the same thing true about typing in...
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Blocks, Episode 2: Life Cycles
Blocks are quite special constructs. The chief reason for this is the way that they are able to capture the lexical scope in which they were defined, keeping the values of variables defined on the stack preserved with them. While this is very powerful, it leads to some questions of memory management, and therefore some new rules to learn. To begin with, we’ll look at a block’s...
:o(
Darn, I could’ve sworn I downloaded Delicious Library for iPhone while I was at WWDC (or rather, while I was at WWDC and intoxicated enough to turn on data roaming), but it’s not on any of my machines or their respective TimeMachine backups.
Well that sucks.
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Amazon Axes Delicious Library for iPhone
So Amazon recently changed the terms of service for their Product Advertising API, which is in use in applications such as Delicious Library. This is (I believe) the API by which DL gets its book information, and through which it provides links to related items, reviews, etc.
The new license includes this marvellous little tidbit in section 4e:
You will not, without our express prior written...
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“Wouldn’t it be nice if you could do this with your paycheck? “Hey,...”
– iPhone Development: Wireless Carriers the Great Train Robbers of this Millenia
Jeff LaMarche on the wonderful ‘extra charges’ the wireless operators (and others) tack onto our bills. Like Rogers Wireless’ wonderful “System Access Fee (non-government charge)” of $6-odd...
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Blocks, Episode 1
I was expecting to have to wait until the release of Snow Leopard to write any of this small series of tutorials on using Blocks and the different paradigms you might want to learn as a result. I will still have to do so to really get involved with the actual capabilities of things like Grand Central Dispatch. However, since Landon Fuller / Plausible Labs released their port of the Blocks runtime...
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Blog | Plausible Labs » Blocks for iPhoneOS 3.0... →
Hot damn! An implementation of Blocks for pre-10.6 operating systems, this time including installers, compiler support, and runtimes for both OS X 10.5 and iPhone OS 3.0.
I say again: Hot Damn!
The only downside I can see so far is that they’re not using github to host the source code :oP
For those with interest in helping out, there’s a forum set up at Google Groups for that...
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AQGlassButton Internals
The AQGlassButton class is implemented using two CoreGraphics objects: a CGMutablePathRef and a CGGradientRef. The gradient defines the actual gloss appearance, while the path defines the shape of the button, and is used for both drawing its outline and for clipping the gradient when that is rendered.
Update: There’s a sample image of the button in its default setup in this followup...
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