For my iPad Dev Camp Hackathon project I’m releasing AQGridView, formerly known as KBGridView, written for the Kobo iPad application(iTunes link). It was designed to fill the role of NSCollectionView, with an API and internals based around UITableView. Full details are found on its GitHub project page.

All in all, the iPad won’t change the game as much as, say, Kobo, which is determined to become the world’s leading seller of e-books and plans to do so by allowing its e-books to be read on any device. It’s coming at this from the right direction. Apple dominates the digital-music world with the iPod and iPhone, but the iPad will not enjoy the same omniscience with digital books.

Joel Johnson: Cory Doctorow, you are a consumer, too

It all just kills me. It literally makes me sick to my stomach. I am sitting here looking at my computer screen and looking over at your post and just wanting to take it apart line by line but what’s the point? I agree with so much of what we all seem to think about culture, about copyright, and freedoms to tinker. But I don’t want to use shitty computers with shitty operating systems, just like I don’t want to drive cars that come with their own schematics. Instead I want to drive beautifully engineered machines that scream with precision fury. And if they break, I want to take them to a shop and have them fixed. You keep the 3D printer; I’ll take AAA.

A detailed post from Michael Tamblyn of Kobo about the pricing metrics of eBook publishing, particularly focussing on the agency model being proposed by Macmillan, to which Amazon ‘capitulated’ after cutting them off over the weekend.

Jeff brings many of Jon Casasanta’s points down to earth and discovers that, like Mark Twain’s hero, rumours of the death of Mac software have been greatly exaggerated.

So response to my previous post has been fairly positive, despite not achieving the critical mass necessary to land on Daring Fireball— come on @gruber, pay attention ;o)

Since I’m doing some work on AquaticPrime using SecIdentityRefs, SecKeyRefs, etc, and since I want it to be compatible with either Garbage Collection or manual memory management, I need to handle CoreFoundation objects properly in both cases. It’s not difficult to do, but it lends itself to some nice syntactic sugar, which I’ve chosen to implement as the following macros. Hopefully these will prove useful to others as well.

Note that I didn’t say ‘slate computing’ as more and more have done since “the impending Apple Slate”” was mentioned (including Steve Ballmer oh-gosh-why-am-I-not-surprised). It’ll probably happen, similarly to the iPod name, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves in the rush to be the first to embrace the latest buzzword.

A lot of people want to run apps in the background on the iPhone, but I believe that Apple has some very legitimate concerns about the feasibility of doing so, at least on the current hardware platforms. However, I believe that there is a perfectly valid way of accommodating most developers’ background-execution needs. This system is called ‘launchd’, and I believe it would provide a very good means of allowing certain tasks to run in the background under the control of various system policies enforced by Apple.

Following some conversations with the nice folks on the #textmate IRC channel, I’ve tweaked the name and layout of the Go TextMate bundle. The link above now points to the new version of the project.