Most developers of iOS applications have a love-hate relationship with the main interface with Apple.

No, let me re-phrase that.

Most developers of iOS applications hate iTunes Connect, the main impediment to a good relationship with Apple.

To be fair it has improved since it opened in mid-2008. One of those improvements has been the inclusion of crash reports. A crash report, in case you’re not a developer, is something that iOS devices such as iPhones and iPads write out when an application crashes. It includes all kinds of useful information, including some, but not all, of the internal state of the application in question. It’s very, very useful for diagnosing problems.

It was nothing like as dramatic as my iBook dying one evening, but there was no getting around the fact that my nearly five year old MacBook was no longer up to the tasks that I was trying to throw at it. Developing applications, even for resource limited devices such as the iPhone, needs a pretty substantial piece of Mac software called Xcode. My photography pushed me towards getting Aperture to manage all my pictures. It’s great, but it did have a tendency to grind to a halt when it was least convenient.

• Apple’s Three Laws of Developers – The hidden link from sci-fi books to the App Store. Only funny because it’s true…
• Biting the source that feeds you – “Keller, a journalist of unimpeachable accomplishment and stature, just had to trash a guy whose organization has struck the most powerful blow against official secrecy in a generation, somebody who may yet be jailed for what he did, an eccentric but unquestionably transformational media player.”

• The Mac App Store: It’s an honor thing – “Apple’s approach is simple. It’s an honor thing. The company believes that, given the choice, people will do the right thing. It also understands that anti-piracy techniques don’t stop pirates, but they do get in the way of honest users.”
• Nokia’s 15-year tango to avoid Microsoft – “[PC manufacturers] found it wasn’t worth the effort to differentiate their PCs from the competition, in what had become a commodity business.” The reason’s behind Nokia’s original decision not to licence code from Microsoft in the nineties hasn’t really changed, which makes today a sad day.
• Doctor Who Infographic – Everything you ever wanted to know about Dr Who but were too afraid to ask…

• The rise and rise of the cognitive elite – “It seems unfair that footballers, bankers and tycoons earn more money than they know what to do with whereas jobless folk and single parents struggle to pay the rent, notes Mr Saunders. Yet it also seems unfair to take money from those who have worked hard and give it to those who have not, or to take away the profits of those who have risked their life savings to bring a new invention to market in order to help those who have risked nothing.”
• Jaguar E-Type turns 50 – Some designs can stand the test of time. The Jaguar E-Type is one of them.
• iOS Debugging Magic – Some great iOS debugging hints.

• How the iPhone mail app decides when to show you new mail – This is a really cool, very subtle detail seen in the Mail app on the iPhone.
• The end of the net as we know it – “ISPs are threatening to cripple websites that don’t pay them first.” ISP’s want to be considered common carriers (i.e., not responsible for the content on their network) when it suits them and also charge more for some data. Surely they have to pick one?

• ‘should be cheaper than free’ – “I’m angry at the customers who send me nasty emails or reviews, threatening me with ‘telling Apple to remove it’ or rating it 1 star with a ’should be cheaper than free’ remark because after paying the ridiculously exorbitant 99c, they found it didn’t live up to expectations. "
• Hurdie Ho! – Maybe you had to be there and read the copy of Your Sinclair that this was originally published in, but this still makes me laugh.
• Museum looks at 2000-year history of the computer – The Computer History Museum was excellent even before this new exhibit. Recommended.

When I travel I don’t normally take a laptop with me¹. Too big; too heavy; too fragile; too expensive; too inconvenient.

But the iPad is different. It’s smaller and lighter. The fact that it’s limited compared with my MacBook wasn’t going to a problem as I only had two main use cases for it: reading and downloading my photos.

A new version of my handy URL shortening app for iPhone and iPod touch has just hit Apple’s App Store. Please go and download it — it’s free!

I’ve added to the services that were supported in the previous version and now www.cut supports nine shortening services:

• is.gd
• bit.ly
• cli.gs
• tinyurl.com
• to.ly
• cuthut.com
• uCut.it
• rfly.me
• tiny.cc

Also new in version 2.0 is a “URL Scheme.” This is a technical name for something that’s very useful. Picture the scene: you’re in Safari and you want to send the current URL to www.cut. Previously you had to copy the URL to the clipboard and manually launch it. Now, all you need to do is add “wwwcut:” to the beginning of the URL and www.cut launches automatically.

• Aerial views of New York – Neat pictures of Manhattan (and bits of New Jersey).
• Wallace and Gromit to appear on Christmas stamps – For once: Christmas stamps that I approve of.
• My First Week with the iPhone – I always assumed that a touch device like the iPhone would be pretty much useless for blind users. It’s good to be wrong.