Hilarious and profound.

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7GM4Lt5k24s

If there’s any truth to this, Ballmer is as much the unstable psychopath many suspect he is.

Couple of confirmed points:

Apple has asked selected developers to prepare “full screen” versions of their apps for a demo in January.

Apple has rented a stage at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco for an event on January 26.

Anything else is pure speculation.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/12/19/verizon_snuffs_google_for_bing/

The move is part of the five-year search and advertising deal Verizon signed with Microsoft in January for a rumored $500m.

Utterly despicable.

As soon as I posted my last article, I realized how completely insane my backup system is, and sought to simplify it. Let’s start with the biggest problem: 4×1TB disks in a single pool with no mirroring. This means 4x as likely to have a drive failure, and when I did, it would have been catastrophic. Furthermore, it was obvious that I didn’t place much confidence in ZFS, since all the data in that pool was being copied to a single bare drive. Insanity.

So I have gone back and refactored the whole shebang. Those 4×1TB disks are part of a 2TB ZFS pool, with the other 2TB as a full mirror. If any disk fails, replacing it is simple and no data is lost. Over time, I hope to be able to replace each of them with a 2TB disk (4×2TB = 8TB total, 4TB mirrored available).

The ZFS pool is divided into a few filesystems. First, the largest portion is dedicated to /home which is still kept rsynced with the Mac. But there’s also a local /mnt/zpool/backup that the rest of the Linux system is backed up to with 30 days of rotation. And 500GB set aside for an AFP share for Time Machine to use over the wireless.

That’s all. I trust the ZFS way more than I trust the disks not to fail, and when they do, I won’t be panicking. Time Machine works flawlessly, and whether I login as a local user on the Mac or in Linux, the same set of user data is available in ~.

I’m never fully happy with my backups. I’ve gone through many iterations, from burning CD-Rs then DVD-Rs to USB hard drives to finally (mostly) settling on Time Machine, which does an admirable job of getting nearly everything right. Time Machine satisfies the two main requirements of backups: through the use of HFS+ hard links to directories it makes the most efficient use of available storage space, and it does so automatically, reliably, and effortlessly. No one likes to backup any more than one likes to walk around everywhere carrying an umbrella. But when you need it, you’d do anything to have it.

So, after some tweaking, my entire system backup is at a point where I feel safe. I have protection from stupid goofs, from drive failure, and even some off-site redundancy.

First, a bit about my setup. I operate primarily on two computers. There’s a MacBook Pro where I do most of my reading, writing, development, entertainment, and real work. It’s my main computer. Then there’s a midsize scratch-built server running Slackware Linux. I have no real attachment to Slackware or any other distribution in particular, it’s just the simplest for me to install, get it up and running, and offers what I think is the best mix of package management and get-the-hell-out-of-my-way-and-let-me-admin-my-own-box-ness. Popular distributions that use apt or rpm tend to annoy me.

THE SETUP
The MacBook Pro has a 250GB hard drive. The server has a 60GB OCZ Solid State Disk, and 4 1TB drives. The OS, installed software, configuration files, and just about anything that I would not call “my data” is on the SSD and takes up just under 10GB. 3 of those 1TB disks are part of a ZFS pool. The 4th 1TB disk is separately mounted and allocated solely for backup purposes.

FIRST LINE OF DEFENSE
Most of the time, when I need to recover data, it is personal data — the sort of thing in a home directory — on the Mac. For this, I use Time Machine. From a Unix hacker’s point of view, Time Machine really is fantastic, and I wish that directory hard links were possible on most Linux filesystems. I would love to see a feature-complete rip-off clone of TM for Linux.

My Time Machine volume is not an external USB or FireWire hard drive. It’s actually a volume that resides on the isolated 1TB disk in the server. I achieved this by installing the Netatalk package for Linux and running an Apple Filing Protocol server daemon (afpd) included with it. Netatalk’s afpd is as simple as pointing it to a directory on your server, irrespective of the filesystem, and then adding a service entry to a multicast server like avahi so that OS X’s Bonjour will detect it automatically. But that shared volume isn’t exactly where the data is kept.

I had to create a sparsebundle type volume from OS X (using either Disk Utility.app or hdiutil) that sits on that AFP share. Then you tell Time Machine to use the AFP share, not the sparsebundle, for backups, and somehow it works. It’s still using the secondary volume-within-a-volume for Time Machine, but it does so without ever first mounting the AFP volume. To be honest I don’t know how that works, but it does work great. Every hour, when Time Machine has new data to sync, it mounts the ‘deep’ sparsebundle volume, and it alone, to do its work. Then it unmounts it when finished.

I set the size of that sparsebundle to 500GB, which leaves another 500GB on that isolated 1TB disk. I’ll get back to that later.

MANUAL RSYNC to ZFS
ZFS is a wonderful filesystem and if you don’t know about it, you really should go read on it. It’s a shame that it looks like Apple will never include support for it in OS X, and in Linux you have to use it through the FUSE driver. That hurts performance a bit, but for my purposes it doesn’t matter. I have 3TB of ZFS spread over 3 drives. Now, the main thing sitting on this data pool is my $HOME from the Mac. In fact, /home/gregday on the server is almost a direct clone of /Users/gregday on the Mac. I sync ~/Pictures to ~/Pictures, ~/Music to ~/Music, and so on. The only exception is that on the server, I have a ~/Backup that holds macbookpro: ~/Applications, ~/Library, and all of the Unix “dot files” in server: ~/Backup/dotfiles

For some reason it just bothers me that Applications and Library are practically useless in Linux and I think they should be set aside and marked as being there for backup purposes. But the rest of the media, music, pictures, is just data so it can be there as if that’s it’s normal place.

I keep this data in sync using an rsync script I wrote, but I have not yet created a launchd entry for it. I occasionally just run it manually.

Should something happen to the Mac, and Time Machine breaks too, I can rely on the ZFS pool to at least contain a full copy of my personal data. This is my second line of defense.

WHEN ALL ELSE FAILS
In case the Mac hard drive dies, Time Machine takes a dump, and ZFS decides to never mount again, all is not lost. I haven’t forgotten about the data on my Solid State Disk either. That’s the installation and configuration of my server, and a lot of that has taken a very long time to get just right. To protect it, I have a daily cron job that copies the contents of the SSD to a place on the remaining 500GB of the isolated 1TB. I’m currently keeping a full bare metal copy of the past 10 days, but there’s room for expansion if I get more paranoid. And since there’s room, my daily backup job also rsyncs the backup of my home on ZFS to a second backup on the 1TB. But due to space, only 1 copy. After all, this is a backup of a backup, which is also backed up on Time Machine too.

This is all a bit confusing by now, so let’s recap clearly:
MacBook Pro:
- All contents Time Machine’d wirelessly to server on single drive.
- Home periodically manually rsynced to server on ZFS pool.

Server:
- OS backed up daily with 10-day rotation to single drive.
- Most recent instance of ZFS pool contents rsynced to single drive.

This is working remarkably well, and it’s surprisingly hands-off given the level of apparent complexity. And just to go that extra mile, some very critical data is also copied to my USB flash drive keychain and also copied to an off-site server co-located at my employer.

For the past 2 weeks I’ve been working on a script that uses the free software project apcupsd to regularly poll an APC UPS, collect statistics (Line Voltage, Battery Load, Time Remaining) and then create graphs from this data using gnuplot.

If you have a typical Linux system with all the standard tools (bash, grep, awk, sed, tac) and gnuplot installed with libpng support (you probably do) then it should work for you. First, make sure you are running apcupsd and that the “apcaccess” program works for communicating with your UPS. If it does, all you need to do is tweak a few options in the script and setup a cron job to run it at whatever interval of time you’d like your graphs to cover. I currently keep 4032 entries for each data point, run at 5 minute cron intervals which comes out to 1 week’s worth of data.

The graphs are PNG images, intended to be displayed with a web server, but if you just want the images, comment out the HTML portions of the script. I have tried to make it easy to understand and modify.

To see a live example of my UPS data, go to airwaterunix.org/ups.

And here’s the script: http://airwaterunix.org/makegraphs.sh

When I first picked up the new Apple Remote in the store yesterday, I was struck by just how huge it seemed compared to the previous one. I took it as a given that whatever replaced Apple’s previous plain white plastic remote necessarily had to be smaller, maybe iPod shuffle sized, and also thought the buttons would be difficult to use. I was surprised to find that the remote appears designed to be held comfortably in your hand, rather than made as small as possible, and the concave buttons are precisely fingertip sized.

Instead of a combined Play/Pause/Select button, Play/Pause have been moved down right, and the center of the directional pad is Select. Menu is on the bottom left, and the directional pad is marked by simple dots, rather than arrows. There’s a small IR port on top, and a battery door on the back, and nothing else.

Cleverly, since the body is tapered, when the battery door is turned, it sits uneven with the rest of the remote, making it easy to remove.

The battery door perfectly wraps around the battery, keeping it from rattling.

At first I thought the new remote was just a change for change’s sake, and was uglier than the old white one. But having used both, I now think that Apple is serious about Front Row and using your iMac, MacBook, or Mac mini as a media device and they want you to have a nice controller to use it with. The old white one may be cleaner and aesthetically simpler, but feels chintzy compared to the new sculpted unibody. And as yet another unibody product in Apple’s lineup, it passes the squeak test. Go ahead, dig out your white Apple remote and roll it around in your hand squeezing it. Hear those slight creaks? Won’t happen on the new aluminum one. It’s a little thing, but a seamlessly enclosed media remote really does make it feel like a luxury accessory to a luxury product.

In fact, I’m currently puzzled as to how exactly Apple manufactured this thing. The only openings on the entire body are the tiny IR port on top, the 3 button areas, and the battery door. It looks like the battery door is actually just a carved hole, with a little metal contact coming in from above. The hole the directional pad sits in is the largest hole. My current hypothesis is that there’s a very small circuit board, inserted through that opening, with the battery contact at the bottom. Then the buttons are inserted from the outside. They must have sweated the manufacturing process on this for months to figure out how to carve out the necessary space inside a solid block of aluminum, all for a $19 remote. That’s passion.

Lots of great stuff in this article about Ken Segall’s book Think Different, chronicling his time at TBWA/Chiat/Day during Apple’s recovery, but this particular quote stood out to me:

“Dell and Apple: It’s night and day,” Segall says. “It’s a transactional world Dell lives in. It’s all about numbers. Everything they say about Apple making products for themselves is true. Apple — it’s about changing the world. For everyone else, it’s about the money.”

http://boredzo.org/time-machine-growler/

Nifty app that polls syslog to send you Growls of Time Machine updates. Combine this with Prowl for obsessive-compulsive peace-of-mind.

http://www.dragthing.com/blog/?p=285

Here at TLA Systems, we take our responsibility to protect innocent minds very seriously.

Have you, or somebody close to you, ever turned your calculator upside down and accidentally seen a mildly suggestive word? Have you ever been in a maths class, and had to put up with groups of giggling boys performing elaborate calculations that are not part of the lesson?

Yes, it’s one of the main problems affecting the calculator industry today, the so-called “calculator words”. These otherwise harmless devices can be made to display smut at the press of a few buttons. Added to that, the iPhone App Store is very strict about having inappropriate content in apps. Nobody wants their app to get a 17+ rating, or worse, to be rejected entirely.

Which is why we are happy to announce that the latest version of our PCalc scientific calculator for the iPhone contains a new patent-worthy profanity filter.

Simply enter a number such as “5318008″, turn the calculator upside down, and the offending word will be discreetly censored. Many common calculator words have been included as standard, and we plan to increase this over time via software updates.

http://finerthingsinmac.com/post/199348232/smarter-playlist-m3u-handling-in-itunes

I dropped a folder of mp3s that also included an associated .m3u playlist onto iTunes 9. Lo and behold iTunes didn’t double up the tracks! Yay, finally! Previously I’d always needed to remove any playlists before adding to the Library.

As a tiny experiment, I dropped just the .m3u file and iTunes added the tracks fine. Seems iTunes now knows to ignore them when appropriate. About time, really.

New bus technology that Apple has been pushing Intel to develop, with plans for standardization in late 2010. It aims to replace many ports and connectors with one single, very high speed (10Gbs) optical interface. Rumor from Engadget is that Steve Jobs has been speaking to Intel CEO Paul Otellini personally about this.

Intel’s page about Light Peak

via @mattgemmell

Guys, who wants to have a Window 7 Launch Party at my place? It’ll be nut-clenchingly awful.

UPDATE:

Cabel Sasser has his party planned.

Read the full speech on the FCC’s very familiarly styled new site, OpenInternet.gov.

Basically, two rules so far, with the implementation details to be meted out in the coming months via an open process.

1) Broadband providers of any kind can’t discriminate against content or applications.

2) Broadband providers must be transparent about their network management policies.

Look in the coming months for every major ISP to somehow try to wriggle out of these rules by claiming they are somehow not broadband providers. They will also start beating the drum that this is “government interference” in the freedom of the Internet, when in fact it’s the opposite. It’s a cementing of principles that have long been held on the Internet, even to the point of taking them for granted. As the chairman consciously points out in the speech, these conventions have been the norm for the Internet since its inception, and these rules are only a defense against the acts of large, greedy ISPs who would seek to fuck it all up.

Read the entire speech. This is really the best possible statement the FCC could have given.

So, you know that one longstanding iPhone bug whereby it would take every photo in landscape mode, even those where you held the iPhone vertically in portrait mode, and compensate by just adding a JPEG EXIF tag to tell the image viewer (whatever it may be) to simply rotate the image 90 degrees, but that really kind of sucked since nothing in the whole wide world support EXIF rotation directives (notably the Finder, and especially Web browsers) but iPhoto, Preview, and the iPhone itself? And that when you then synced the photo you took with the iPhone back to the iPhone immediately after snapping it and syncing, the syncing process would strip that EXIF data anyway in the process so all your portrait mode photos you took with the iPhone, in the Photos app, would display with the wrong orientation?

Yeah, you know that bug? They fixed it. Photos are now actually rotated when snapped instead of using EXIF orientation metadata.

Unibody MacBook Pro, originally uploaded by g_k_day.

Next to the previous model.

Flavor Flav puppet, originally uploaded by g_k_day.

homemade hip-hop puppetry.

“Hacker Jeff Moss, founder of computer security conferences DEFCON and Black Hat, has been sworn in as one of the new members of the Homeland Security Advisory Council (HSAC) of the DHS. Moss, who goes by the handle ‘the Dark Tangent’ says he was surprised to be asked to join the council and that he was nominated to bring an ‘outside perspective’ to its meetings. He said, ‘I know there is a new-found emphasis on cybersecurity, and they’re looking to diversify the members and to have alternative viewpoints. I think they needed a skeptical outsider’s view because that has been missing.’”

Via Slashdot

http://daringfireball.net/2009/06/palm_saturday

The iPhone was introduced at Macworld Expo on 9 January 2007. On that day, Palm Inc. was screwed.

http://www.whereiwrite.org/

Photos of science fiction authors and their creative spaces.

BoyGeniusReport and Engadget (sourcing Pre Central) are both reporting that:

the Pre will, in fact have IMAP IDLE (AKA Push) Gmail capabilities,

Let’s get one thing straight: IDLE is not Push

IMAP has been around for awhile, and so has the IDLE extension. This allows you to login to your IMAP account and remained logged in while idling, and notifications of new mail are sent to the client. Note that this does not push the mail out itself, just the header, with message marked as new so the client can then download the mail when initiated by the user. I use IMAP with IDLE support on my mail server, and it is fantastic, yes, but it’s not “Push” mail. What Apple and the entire rest of the world mean when they say Push mail is that the entire message is delivered to the client instantly after the server receives it. Push requires more bandwidth, a bit more CPU usage, but most importantly a protocol that is not IMAP.

In my research there are only a small number of ways to achieve Push mail. Microsoft Exchange does it, and while I don’t know what Yahoo Mail is doing or what Apple is using for MobileMe Push, it’s more akin to what Exchange is doing at the protocol level and definitely not IMAP IDLE. There is also some Java based Push mail server implementation available from Sun, but as far as I know it is not open source, or even free of charge. To my best knowledge there is currently no open standard for pushing mail. Believe me, I’d love it if there was and I would be the first person installing “GNU FreePush” or somesuch on my personal Linux mail server if anything existed. But for now, IMAP IDLE is poor man’s Push until there is such a standard. In my crazy imagination, Apple is currently using a homebrew Push protocol and server and they’ll release the source along with Snow Leopard Server.

Rejecting all of them, consistently, would in fact be no good at all. The feeling of being part of the monolith — of being the monolith — really only surges when I use my position to act capriciously.

To act fairly would be to follow the rules. To act capriciously is to be the rules.

Damn, I love John Gruber.

I had thought that Apple’s three-pronged, open answer to Exchange was going to be IMAP+CalDAV+LDAP, but today I learned about [v]CardDAV. It’s an IETF draft spec that combines WebDAV and ACLs to create a vCard server, much in the way they are combined to create CalDAV. Major contributions to the RFC come from Apple, but as yet there’s not really any implementation available yet.

Apple is openly advertising CardDAV server on their Snow Leopard Server info page, so the commitment is real. But it remains to be seen if it will be implemented in the same open source, friendly way as Apple’s CalendarServer.

Great news, especially since LDAP sucks for shared address books.

http://www.demon.cx/icaldavmerge/

Thoughtful script from JJ Spreij to get a list of CalendarServer users and generate single, monolithic webcal feeds for the user’s entire calendar. Mine’s at webcal://calendar.airwaterunix.org

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/completelist/0,29569,1898610,00.html

1. Vista

7. Zune

Ouch.

But the list is suspect, because 5 is YouTube, which aside from the user comments I don’t think anyone could argue is a failure.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-13846_3-10242526-62.html

“I’m a guy who doesn’t see anything good having come from the Internet…(The Internet) created this notion that anyone can have whatever they want at any given time. It’s as if the stores on Madison Avenue were open 24 hours a day. They feel entitled. They say, ‘Give it to me now,’ and if you don’t give it to them for free, they’ll steal it.”

http://furbo.org/2009/04/30/matt-gallagher-deserves-a-medal/

There are some people who think that settings should only be in the Settings app. There are others that think they should only be within the application. I can honestly see how both groups are right, but what both sides fail to realize is that it’s often a matter of context.

If you’re working on a simple application with simple needs, relying on the infrastructure provided by the SDK is fine. You may have some additional support load for users who have problems finding your settings, but that’s a reasonable tradeoff for saving development time. Sophia Teutschler’s Groceries app is a fine example of where the built-in settings shine: I turned off the Marker Felt font several months ago, and I haven’t touched it since.

In the case of Twitterrific, there were three main reasons why we built the settings into the application:

We could not split the settings between two locations. From a user’s point-of-view, it’s incredibly confusing to have an application’s configuration in two places. This would have happened if we had put the account settings in the application and everything else in the Settings app.

Some of the settings are things that people will change on a fairly frequent basis. For example, the dark theme works best at night, while a light theme is better during the day. Leaving the app to make these types of adjustments is inconvenient.

The Settings app can’t handle preferences that are “dynamic.” An example is a vibration setting for the notification: there’s no way to make this appear on an iPhone but not on an iPod touch.

As we start to see more complex applications appearing on the App Store, I think there will be a lot of other developers coming to grips with settings in their applications

http://blog.atebits.com/2008/12/settings-are-in-the-settings-app/

Take the Weather app for example. This offers “configuration options” on the backside to manage different cities. Likewise, the Stocks app flips over to allow configuration of your stocks.

Mail on the other hand makes you manage your accounts and settings in the Settings app itself. This makes sense – you are much more likely to change what stocks you watch or what cities you’d like to check the weather for than make a new email account or change the minimum font size. The only real difference between a “setting” and a “configuration” is how often they change.

There are two problems with the way Settings work on iPhone. The first is a technical problem, the second is a developer problem. The technical problem is that third party applications cannot execute their own code in the Setting app itself. This leaves them crippled, and it’s the only reason why I didn’t include the account management features of Tweetie in Settings.

The second problem is that many developers have chosen to eschew the Settings app altogether, deciding instead to put all their settings in the app itself. In cases where where executing code is required, this is forgivable. In other cases it is not, and just sets bad precedent and teaches users the wrong way of doing things.

On iPhone, you can have one application open at a time. Compare this to the desktop where you can have an almost infinite amount of applications running at once with easy one-click focus-switching. If you keep your application’s settings in the Settings application on iPhone, your users have to go out of their way to change how something works. That means they have to quit your application, go to the Settings app (which is most likely on a different home screen page), find the application in the list (if you have 20 apps that have settings, this can be quite a chore), change a setting, quit Settings, find the application again, open it, and see if it did what you wanted. Especially if the user would like to experiment with a few preferences, that requires them to switch between your app and the Settings app a few times. Talk about inconvenient.
…
See these ×’s? This means your app is temporary. A user can delete your application whenever they so choose. The applications that come standard on the device cannot be removed and have all the settings they require in the Settings app. Your settings should be in your app, as they are just as temporary as the application itself.

http://www.ilounge.com/index.php/news/comments/apple-forces-trackr-to-drop-torrent-features/

Apple is forcing David Muzi, developer of the iPhone and iPod touch RSS application Trackr, to remove all features related to torrent queuing from the next version of the app, or have it pulled from the App Store. Trackr drew extra attention when iLounge reported that Apple had rejected Maza Digital’s Drivetrain torrent remote control application, as Muzi wrote in to point out that Trackr also lets users remotely queue torrents to start downloading, functionality similar to what Apple rejected in DriveTrain. In a message on his software site, Muzi explains that a new version of Trackr, minus the ability to work with torrent RSS feeds, will be submitted to the App Store today; as a result of the reduced feature set, he is dropping the price of Trackr to $1.99.

http://ignorethecode.net/blog/2009/05/16/safari-neat-tab-overflow-menu-feature/ (via Lukas Mathis)

Clever solution for a problem I ran into often.

http://code.google.com/p/istat/downloads/list

Open source iStat Server daemon for Linux, to accompany Bjango’s iStat iPhone app.

http://www.engadget.com/2009/05/12/atandt-issues-official-statement-on-slingplayers-3g-blackout-for/

Slingbox, which would use large amounts of wireless network capacity, could create congestion and potentially prevent other customers from using the network.

Our network is in no way ready for this kind of usage, but we don’t see that as a reason to upgrade our network.

The application does not run on our 3G wireless network. Applications like this, which redirect a TV signal to a personal computer, are specifically prohibited under our terms of service.

Because video on the Internet is a brand new idea in 2009.

We consider smartphones like the iPhone to be personal computers in that they have the same hardware and software attributes as PCs.

And yet, we aren’t going to treat it like a personal computer. Haha, fuck you, customer.

That said, we don’t restrict users from going to a Web site that lets them view videos.

Wait, what? We don’t restrict this yet? Shit. Somebody get Marvin on the phone, we need to clean this mess up ASAP.

But what our terms and conditions prohibit is the transferring, or slinging, of a TV signal to their personal computer or smartphone.

This is, like, way, totally different from streaming video on a web site. Totally different. I mean, TV signals, maaaan.

The Slingbox application for the iPhone runs on WiFi. That’s good news for AT&T’s iPhone 3G customers, who get free WiFi access at our 20,000 owned and operated hot spots in the U.S., including Starbucks, McDonalds, Barnes & Noble, hotels, and airports.

No one on earth uses AT&T owned and operated hotspots and we don’t understand why. Also, we look forward to Apple moving on to a better cellular carrier as soon as the five year exclusivity contract runs out.

AT&T is the industry leader in WiFi.

Kiss our asses.

http://www.marco.org/105602688

Vista is just a logical continuation of Microsoft’s style and culture. Die-hard Windows fans like it.

The bigger problem is that Microsoft isn’t very good, and I mean that in a big way.

Fantastic news: Apple’s site for their open source projects, opensource.apple.com, has been updated to be cleaner, easier to navigate, and no longer requires an ADC login.

From Today’s conference call:

“For us, it’s about doing great products. And when I look at what is being sold in the netbook space today, I see cramped keyboards, terrible software, junky hardware, very small screens, and just not a consumer experience… that we would put the Mac brand on, quite frankly. And so it’s not a space, as it exists today, that we’re interested in, nor do we believe that customers in the long term would be interested in.”

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2009/04/21/fuck-the-foundries

Mark Pilgrim discusses the coming standard that would allow browsers to download fonts directly for display, and how this is upsetting creators and licensors of those fonts:

Seriously. Fuck them. They still think they’re in the business of shuffling little bits of metal around. You want to use a super-cool ultra-awesome totally-not-one-of-the-11-web-safe-fonts? Pick an open source font and get on with your life.

I know what you’re going to say. I can hear it in my head already. It sounds like the voice of the comic book guy from The Simpsons. You’re going to say, “Typography is by professionals, for professionals. Free fonts are worth less than you pay for them. They don’t have good hinting. They don’t come in different weights. They don’t have anything near complete Unicode coverage. They don’t, they don’t, they don’t…”

And you’re right. You’re absolutely, completely, totally, 100% right. “Your Fonts” are professionally designed, traditionally licensed, aggressively marketed, and bought by professional designers who know a professional typeface when they see it. “Our Fonts” are nothing more than toys, and I’m the guy showing up at the Philadelphia Orchestra auditions with a tin drum and a kazoo. “Ha ha, look at the freetard with his little toy fonts, that he wants to put on his little toy web page, where they can be seen by 2 billion people ha h… wait, what?”

Let me put it another way. Your Fonts are superior to Our Fonts in every conceivable way, except one:

WE CAN’T FUCKING USE THEM

Gruber:

They might as well name it “Windows 7: We Hold You in Contempt and Dare You, Fucking Dare You, to Try Something Else Edition”.

And more,

UPDATE: DF reader Michael Tofias, via email: “Worse yet for Microsoft, doesn’t this encourage the browser to be the OS?” Exactly. How is it in Microsoft’s interest to discourage users from using Windows-specific apps and instead use web apps?

There is a similar restriction on Vista Starter Edition, except that it was intended for second-world developing markets, and you won’t ever find one in the first world. With this now, Microsoft is actually going to try pushing this shit on their primary markets.

I was pretty happy with my original iPhone, and since AT&T’s 3G network doesn’t even cover near my area, I’ve held out on upgrading so far. But since everyone is convinced there will be a new iPhone to go with the 3.0 OS release this June, I thought it wise to sell my original iPhone while there was still some value in it, and switch to the 3G. Also, I desperately wanted GPS.

Briefly,

It’s faster. Everything is faster. Launching apps, Mail, Safari browsing, the Phone app — everything. It’s still a 412MHz CPU, but something is different. Network transfer over EDGE is somehow faster than the original iPhone over EDGE. And I dare say even WiFi speeds are faster. I don’t know how exactly or what’s changed, but everything — even syncing — is faster.

The screen is definitely warmer (more yellow tint), but it doesn’t bother nor please me one way or another. I appreciate the metal buttons and improved speaker. In fact, it’s more than twice as loud as the previous iPhone without any distortion. It’s actually feasible to just set the iPhone 3G in front of you playing music while driving, if you don’t mind mono. This is great especially for speakerphone, which I use often to check bank accounts while driving.

The audio jack is standard 3.5mm with none of that recessed bullshit. The way it should have been all along.

The GPS is no small upgrade. It turns Maps into a completely new app. It goes from being a reference tool to becoming a real, live, interactivity tool about you.

And the biggie for me is the case design. I’m a huge fan of the original iPhone’s anodized aluminum case. Sure it bothered me that the antenna section took up the lower quarter and that meant a physical break in material design, and it was so darn smooth that sometimes it was hard to grip, but it looked stellar and right at home with a MacBook Pro.

The new plastic black (most people have black) is definitely better feeling in your hand. It’s not as slippery, and the more tapered edges mean that the part that actually contacts your fingers is thinner, providing for a subtle illusion of being thinner — even though overall, the iPhone 3G is slightly thicker than it’s predecessor. And one solid back piece does — in that regard — look better than 3/4 metal and 1/4 plastic. For a device that is held so often, this is a good tradeoff over the old design. But I sure wish it felt exactly like the new one while looking exactly like the old one (minus the physical break).