Arab society’s crunch points – Interesting talk about the Middle East and how change might be made. Hint: it doesn't involve "regime change."
iPhone-to-iPad development: How’s the timing going to work out? – "We have very little guidance on how iPad apps should behave, and if we want our apps to be in the store at its launch, we have to do the majority of development without ever running our code on a real iPad (or even having used one)."
Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes? – "Used to be you could argue that Flash, whatever its merits, delivered content to the entire audience you cared about. That’s no longer true, and Adobe’s Flash penetration is shrinking with each iPhone OS device Apple sells."
Penguins, Peaks and Penny-Farthings: Nat Geo Covers 1959-2000 – "The National Geographic Society celebrates its 122nd anniversary on Jan. 27 … Though the early issues had rather drab academic looking covers, by 1959 they were consistently adorned with eye-cathing art and photos."
Verified by Visa bitchslapped by Cambridge researchers – "Secondary credit card security systems for online transactions such as Verified by Visa are all about shifting blame rather then curtailing fraud, Cambridge University security researchers argue." Or put another way: those annoying screens you get when you buy something online are not for your benefit.
The November Plan – Post now updated with my recent trip to Austria.
Apple’s Mistake – "How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that's just so far. The App Store is an ongoing karma leak."
The Daily Shoot – A great idea to help people (myself included!) to take more pictures. I think a lot of us have the will, just not the time or inspiration. Time is hard but inspiration just got a little easier.
News Corp to Offer Plaid Stamps! – "Giving Murdoch the benefit of the doubt, then, I’m guessing he simply doesn’t mean what he said. Perhaps he just wanted to sow a little confusion, get some publicity and maybe a concession or two from Google."
The night the Berlin Wall fell – "For me it was that rare occasion when a story was unqualified good news. After years watching the way communism was practised, I felt no need to mourn its collapse. Whatever came next had to be better." Twenty years since the fall of the Berlin wall.
OMG Ponies!!! (Aka Humanity: Epic Fail) – "The real world has failed us. It has concentrated on local simplicity, leading to global complexity. It's easy to organise a meeting if everyone is in the same time zone – but once you get different continents involved, invariably people get confused. It's easy to get writing to work uniformly left to right or uniformly right to left – but if you've got a mixture, it becomes really hard to keep track of. The diversity which makes humanity such an interesting species is the curse of computing."
A Sense of Entitlement: Tweetie 2 – I think Apple needs to do more here — to allow for paid upgrades — but I also congratulate the author of Tweetie for having the nerve to charge for a significant update. He'll come across a lot of resistance but it's absolutely the right thing to do and it, potentially, paves the way for smaller developers to do the same thing.
Peep Show ‘won’t change’ for anyone – Looking forward to this. Slightly worried that it might overstay its welcome — how can you top eating a family pet in terms of gross out? — but then I thought that for the last couple of series too…
Fail Yet Succeed? – Nice discussion of the kind of things that all software projects go through. Really this is about half of my job!
Hidden Developer Gems in Snow Leopard – I know it's geeky but I'm more excited about the new APIs in Snow Leopard than any of the new stuff or even, to a certain extent, the performance improvements.
Photography, opinions and other random ramblings by Stephen Darlington
