I love it.

http://www.ifoapplestore.com/db/2010/02/04/revealed-retail-stores-handheld-pos-device/

Here’s an interesting article from ifoAppleStore about those new iPod touch based barcode-scanning, card-swiping, capacitive-stylus-accepting dinguses at the Apple Store.

Teenage intern Daniel Brusilovsky accepted bribes on more than one occasion. TechCrunch has apologized, and Brusilovsky posted an apology on his own site.

Constant vigilance is the price you pay for an elegant application.

This means you have to learn to say no. Your current customers will ask you for a feature they want. Potential customers will tell you that if you add just one specific feature, they’ll buy the app. You can’t be everything for everyone. You have to let some people be customers of your competitors.

For an example of software where no one has ever said “no” to a customer, look no further than Microsoft Office. From later in the post:

If you leave features in your application just because half a dozen people actually use them, you’ll end up with Microsoft Word. Most people only use a small percentage of all features in Word. Unfortunately, most people use a different small percentage of all features in Word. Even the most unpopular, most broken feature is used by somebody. Nadyne Richmond, a user experience researcher in the Macintosh Business Unit at Microsoft, explains it like this:

There are people who insist that Word 5.1 was the pinnacle of word processors, and everything that has been done since then has been nothing more than bloat. They tell us that we should update it to run under OS X (and now they want it as a Universal Binary). Oh, but while we’re in there updating the code, could we please add their ten favourite features? As the ever-insightful Rick [Schaut] points out, ‘by the time you add up all the «Plus’s» you come to something that’s not all that far away from Word 2004, which is how we got here in the first place’.

Presumably, somebody needed Word 5.1 «Plus Web Search», so Microsoft went ahead and added the feature.

Here’s the goods.

Currently a little hacking needs to be done to make it run without OpenDirectory (necessary for Linux). And this particular branch is being gradually merged into the main CalendarServer project, but it’s finally up.

There is however still some sort of bug when adding accounts with Address Book. I’m not sure if it’s because my particular setup lacks the OD support, or if there’s an actual bug in this code. But new accounts added do not work correctly because the principal URL is wrong.

To make it work, edit:
~/Library/Application Support/AddressBook/Sources/{unique ID}/Configuration.plist

And change the ’servername’ key to:
https://server:8843/principals/users/your-user-name

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch lays it all out:

Now regarding performance, given identical hardware, Flash Player on Windows has historically been faster than the Mac, and it is for the most part the same code running in Flash for each operating system. We have and continue to invest significant effort to make Mac OS optimizations to close this gap, and Apple has been helpful in working with us on this. Vector graphics rendering in Flash Player 10 now runs almost exactly the same in terms of CPU usage across Mac and Windows, which is due to this work. In Flash Player 10.1 we are moving to Core Animation, which will further reduce CPU usage and we believe will get us to the point where Mac will be faster than Windows for graphics rendering.

Video rendering is an area we are focusing more attention on — for example, today a 480p video on a 1.8 Ghz Mac Mini in Safari uses about 34% of CPU on Mac versus 16% on Windows (running in BootCamp on same hardware). With Flash Player 10.1, we are optimizing video rendering further on the Mac and expect to reduce CPU usage by half, bringing Mac and Windows closer to parity for video.

I still want Flash to go away, but the current debate over it could result in some intermediary benefits. This is coming from Adobe’s CTO and not someone lower in command. Adobe is taking the war on Flash seriously.

Mindblowing stuff. Content-aware resizing. If you are unfamiliar with the idea, this video from SIGGRAPH 2007 lays it out plainly. And now it’s possible in a $2 iPhone app.

Liquid Scale by Savoy Software.

Frasier Spiers details conventions found in the iPhone OS from public information and demos.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/fraserspeirs/sets/72157623224262135/

http://vladalexa.com/apps/osx/magicprefs/

Nice little Preference Pane to push the Magic Mouse to the fullest ability of its potential as a multi-touch device.

http://github.com/millenomi/swapkit

Art thrives on its limitations. Brilliant new open source framework for iPhone OS that lets apps use the RAM as semi-persistent storage.