<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">In case you haven't heard already, <a href="http://www.vmware.com/landing_pages/fusion2_beta.html">VMWare Fusion 2.0b2</a> came out a couple of days ago and includes the ability to host Mac OS X 10.5 Server.<br>> <br</br>> This news makes me want to cry with happiness. I've been waiting for this day for a long, long time.<br>> <br</br>> Why is this so important to me? As a developer (and specifically an indie developer) setting up and testing my applications on a clean install of Mac OS X can be a pain in the ass. I'm not the type to have multiple machines for this purpose since I can't stand the clutter. Plus, once I've run my one of my apps on the clean system, it will leave little bits of debris around the file system in the form of preferences, caches, app support folders, etc. Sure, I could write a script to clean everything up; but that just doesn't make me as comfortable as a brand new install of the OS does.<br>> <br</br>> VMWare Fusion makes this process super easy. All I have to do is install OS X once in Fusion and get everything setup how I want it before I run one of my apps, and then make a snapshot of the system. I can muck around with it, run my apps, do unholy things to try and crash VoodooPad, try out preference files customers have sent me, and when I'm done testing I can just rollback to the previous state with a click of a button. It can't possibly be easier than that.<br>> <br</br>> I can also have multiple system setups for different types of testing, and do crazy things like test network communications between the two OS's without leaving my seat. Yes, I could do this with multiple machines and <a href="http://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/">ARD</a>; but why would I want to when a much more elegant solution was available?<br>> <br</br>> About the only thing that could make this awesomer would be support for installing Mac OS X Client in VMWare Fusion. I know this is a legal thing that Apple is enforcing, but they really really need to rethink that. It's stupid to not have this ability.<br>> <br</br>> In conclusion, VMWare Fusion FTW++++++!<br>> <br</br>> If you're going to try out this goodness make sure to read VMWare's article "<a href="http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-6670">Installing Mac OS X Server VM and Optimizing Performance</a>". You will also need a healthy amount of ram in your box.<br>> <br</br>> P.S., why pick VMWare over <a href="http://www.parallels.com/">Parallels</a> or <a href="http://virtualbox.org/">VirtualBox</a>? VMWare beat them all to the punch with support for OS X Server, and besides; it seems like VMWare is quite a bit more "Mac Friendly" than the other companies. They were originally slower out the gate than Parallels, but they seem to get the Mac aesthetic in a way that Parallels or VirtualBox don't.<br>> <br</br>> Also make sure to check out <a href="http://www.joelonsoftware.com/news/fog0000000103.html">Joel on Software's article</a> on VMWare from a couple of years ago.</div></content>

<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Michiel van Meeteren: <a href="http://madebysofa.com/indiefever/">Indie Fever</a><br>> <br</br>> <div class="quote">"The genesis, culture and economy of a community of independent software developers on the Macintosh OS X platform."<br>> <br</br>> 'Indie Fever' is the first result of a multi-year human geography research program to investigate the social and economical world of so-called ‘Indie’ developers on the Macintosh platform.<br>> <</br>div><br>> <br</br>> I was interviewed for this project a couple of months back, and it looks super awesome.<br>> <br</br>> Michiel also <a href="http://indie-research.blogspot.com/">has a blog for the project</a>.</div></content>

<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Via <a href="http://blackwingdiaries.blogspot.com/2008/08/presenting-walt-disney-animation-on-web.html">The Blackwing Diaries</a>:<br>> <br</br>> <div class="quote">"Walt Disney Feature Animation has a new name (Walt Disney Animation), a new head (John Lasseter), a new logo (see below)--and a new official web presence that went live just a short time ago"</div><br>> <br</br>> Go check out <a href="http://disneyanimation.com/">Walt Disney Animation Studios</a>. I'm shocked Disney managed to come up with a website that doesn't look like ass. And I dig the artwork, especially on the <a href="http://disneyanimation.com/careers/index.html">careers</a> and <a href="http://disneyanimation.com/aboutus/index.html">about pages</a> (you've got to hover your mouse around to make the main image changes).</div></content>

<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">I just recorded another podcast with fellow developers Keith Alperin, Steve "Scotty" Scott, and Kevin Hoctor: <a href="http://www.mac-developer-network.com/podcasts/macsb/y1episode2/index.html">MacSB Year 1, Episode 2: The Story Continues</a>.<br>> <br</br>> We talked about lots of things regarding running an indie shop, and I even got the chance to use the phrase "Shitting in the pool". I haven't checked yet to see if Keith edited or bleeped that out yet or not.</div></content>

<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Did you know that <a href="http://barebones.com/products/bbedit/">BBEdit</a> will transparently edit and save binary plists that have been compressed with gzip? This, combined with <a href="http://www.panic.com/transmit/">Transmit's</a> "Edit With BBEdit" feature is coming in handy.<br>> <br</br>> Sweetness!<br>> <br</br>> I bet Rich Siegel thought he was the only one who would ever use this…</div></content>

<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">The Aviary blog: <a href="http://a.viary.com/bizblog/posts/how-to-draw-anything-in-1-step">How to draw anything</a>.<br>> <br</br>> </div></content>

<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><a href="http://www.niallkennedy.com/blog/2008/08/intel-widget-channel.html">Niall Kennedy on the new Yahoo Widget Channel</a>:<br>> <br</br>> <div class="quote"> Intel partnered with Yahoo! to deliver Internet-connected widgets, advertising, and content to potential partners with a software stack branded The Widget Channel. Yahoo! spent about two years customizing Yahoo! Widget Engine for high-definition televisions and hardware-accelerated graphics displays.</div><br>> <br</br>> You still use xml to make a widget, javascript to run it, and it's got WebKit to boot. Only now it's showing up on your TV running under Linux. Neato, Konfabulator is kind of all growns up now.<br>> <br</br>> I wonder if Arlo Rose is still working on it? All of the UI is certainly in his style. Update: Daniel Wilson let me know that Arlo <a href="http://www.mouselabs.com/?p=33">left over a year ago</a>.</div></content>

<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><a href="http://scott-c.blogspot.com/">Scott Campbell</a> creates some pretty whimsical pieces with watercolors.<br>> <br</br>> I especially like his <a href="http://scott-c.blogspot.com/2008/05/et-collection.html">E.T. collection</a>.</div></content>

<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><a href="http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Banksy">A bunch of quotes</a> from one of the greatest, Banksy.<br>> <br</br>> I'd quote the whole thing, but then what would be the point of linking to it? So here's two:<br>> <br</br>> <div class="quote">If you don't own a train company then you go and paint on one instead. It all comes from that thing at school when you had to have name tags in the back of something.. that makes it belong to you. You can own half the city by scribbling your name over it.</div><br>> <br</br>> And:<br>> <br</br>> <div class="quote"> A lot of people never use their initiative because nobody told them to.</div><br>> <br</br>> </div></content>

<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><a href="http://log.carpeaqua.com/post/47389586/ive-officially-been-indie-since-the-end-of-april">Justin Williams on being indie</a> since April.<br>> <br</br>> Justin has nice list of lessons that I think every successful indie experiences. These are also the lessons that you can be told a hundred times, but you will probably never really understand until you actually have the first hand experience yourself. It's probably better off learning via the hard road anyway.<br>> <br</br>> Found via <a href="http://outerlevel.com/blog/2008/08/26/justin-williams-lessons-learned-as-an-indie-mac-developer/">Jon Trainer</a>.</div></content>

<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Bruce Schneier: <a href="http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2008/08/full_disclosure.html">Full Disclosure and the Boston Farecard Hack</a>.<br>> <br</br>> As usual, a great read from Bruce Schneier on full disclosure of security vulnerabilities.</div></content>

<div xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">I've had a "Ruby plugin enabler" for <a href="http://flyingmeat.com/acorn/">Acorn</a> since before it was 1.0, but there was something going on with the RubyCocoa bridge which was causing Acorn to crash in weird ways. Obviously I kept it out of the spotlight because a crashing Acorn is a worthless Acorn. However, I saw an email today from the rubycocoa-devel list which said a patch was checked in to the project which sounded like it might have fixed the problem I had experienced.<br>> <br</br>> Long story short, you can now write plugins for Acorn in the same manner that you could with Python, only with <a href="http://www.ruby-lang.org/">Ruby</a>.<br>> <br</br>> Here's how to use it. First, grab <a href="http://flyingmeat.com/fs/contrib/acorn/RubyPluginEnabler.acplugin.zip">RubyPluginEnabler.acplugin.zip</a>, unpack it, and place RubyPluginEnabler.acplugin in ~/Library/Application Support/Acorn/Plug-Ins/.<br>> <br</br>> Next, grab an example Ruby script plugin, such as <a href="http://flyingmeat.com/fs/contrib/acorn/RubyGrayscale.rb">RubyGrayscale.rb</a>. Save that in the Plug-Ins directory as well, make sure the file extension is .rb, and not something like .txt.<br>> <br</br>> Restart Acorn, open up an image, and choose the "Ruby Convert to Grayscale" under the Plugins/Color menu.<br>> <br</br>> Tada! It's obviously a really simple plugin, and this is the only ruby sample out there, but if you take a look at the <a href="http://flyingmeat.com/wikka/AcornPlugins">Acorn Plugins page</a> on the FM wiki, you'll see a handful of Python examples which should be trivial to port over.<br>> <br</br>> ...<br>> <br</br>> In other news, did you know that all those great filters in Acorn can be manipulated visually? It's a pretty powerful feature, and one that is overlooked quite often. Here's a demo movie of me playing with a gradient filter, along with a bump distortion: <a href="http://gusmueller.com/2008/movies/direct_manipulation.mov">acorn direct_manipulation.mov</a></div></content>

InfoWorld: The Nehalem CPU's secret weapon. If I know Intel, the PCU is locked down tight; they'll never let you (or Microsoft or anybody else) in there. In my experience simple power management policies are best; the value of the PCU may not be that it can run sophisticated firmware but that it reduced the cost of evaluating and verifying some simple policies.

FriendFeed: Simple Update Protocol: Fetch updates from feeds faster. Funky.

I’ve been racking my brain trying to think of an awesome prize for C4[2]’s upcoming Iron Coder contest. I didn’t want to just go around begging random vendors for prizes, and I wasn’t feeling last year’s Golden Dogtag again. (Turns out bling and hackers don’t really mix.)

I’ve come up with something that I feel really good about, a prize that feeds back into the community.

I’m going to award a shiny new MacBook Air to the 1st place winner of C4[2]’s Iron Coder competition. Right there’s a swell prize.

But I’m much more excited about the next part: the winner’s MacBook Air will be preloaded by C4[2] attendees’ own software.

I’m sending out an email asking C4[2] attendees to donate two licenses of the software they’ve written to add to the prize. The first license will get loaded onto that MacBook Air. The second license will be part of the Runner-Up’s software-only prize.

C4 is all about celebrating the indie community, and I can’t think of a better prize than the results of our own handiwork.

Better get crankin’ on your Iron Coder entry. I bet this year’s competition will be stiff.

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.truerwords.net/6242"&gt;Seth Dillingham&lt;/a&gt; is selling bundles of Mac applications to raise money for fighting cancer. Go &lt;a href="http://www.truerwords.net/fundraising/pmcsoftware/bundlebuilder.html"&gt;build your own&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;</content>

&lt;p&gt;First, I&amp;#8217;d just like to say thanks to everybody who has called, written, tweeted, or messaged me wishing us well. I really appreciate your kindness.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;We&amp;#8217;re doing fine.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;It has been two days since we noticed that water had found its way into our house at the base of an exterior wall in the master bedroom. Since the initial discovery, we also found water intrusion in two other areas of that room, as well as in three other rooms, all on exterior walls.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;As I type this, there are three &lt;a href="http://www.jondon.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=21784"&gt;Atlantic &lt;span class="caps"&gt;LGR&lt;/span&gt; Dehumidifiers&lt;/a&gt; in place in the most heavily affected rooms, along with a total of five &lt;a href="http://www.usephoenix.com/Phoenix/Axial-Air-Mover/"&gt;Phoenix Axial Air Movers&lt;/a&gt;, which are industrial strength fans, brought in by a company who specializes in these kinds of things.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The &lt;span class="caps"&gt;LGR&lt;/span&gt;&amp;#8217;s aren&amp;#8217;t too loud, but the air-movers create a whole lot of noise. All four of our bedrooms (one of which is my office) had water intrusion and now have fans and dehumidifiers in them. It&amp;#8217;s like a crazy, loud, wind-tunnel in those rooms, and I&amp;#8217;m probably using enough energy to power a small country.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The whole house is turned upside down, furniture hastily disassembled and moved from one room to another, doors pulled from their hinges and leaned against walls. There&amp;#8217;s a makeshift baby-changing-station on the floor of our living room.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;My wife and 8 month old baby boy are sleeping on a mattress on the floor of our dining room, and I have an inflatable twin-size mattress on the living room floor. If my boy were about 4 or 5 years old, he&amp;#8217;d probably love this. I recall building many forts from sofa cushions in my childhood and wanting to &amp;#8220;camp&amp;#8221; there at night. But right now, it&amp;#8217;s a moment-by-moment challenge keeping him happy and out of harms way. A sleeping baby in your living area makes the time after he goes to sleep and before you go to bed a bit of a challenge as well.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;All in all, though, things could be much worse.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h3&gt;I Am Jack&amp;#8217;s Water Intrusion&lt;/h3&gt; &lt;p&gt;Our house wasn&amp;#8217;t flooded. We weren&amp;#8217;t wading through puddles of water, or canoeing down the road to get to the store, as people in neighboring counties have had to do (you may have seen the footage on television).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;According to the company we&amp;#8217;re working with, almost all of their dozens of service calls over the last few days have been to help with exactly the same problem we&amp;#8217;re having. Regardless of the age, style, location, or type of house, the problem is the same.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Here in our house, and in many houses in our neighborhood and across Central Florida, we have what&amp;#8217;s called &lt;em&gt;water intrusion&lt;/em&gt;. This is where a volume of water gets in to your house, usually through a point where the foundation meets the exterior wall. It gets the carpet wet. It soaks the carpet pads through. It causes the drywall to swell. Baseboards separate from the walls where the drywall absorbed water. You may see paint bubbling or peeling. This is what&amp;#8217;s called a Class 2 intrusion.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;In a Class 2 intrusion, you have water entry at ground level in several places. You&amp;#8217;re in real trouble if you have anything above a Class 2 intrusion. A Class 3 intrusion involves water coming down from the roof and through the walls. A Class 4 intrusion usually occurs when people have evacuated and return some days or weeks later to find that not only has mold set in, but permanent damage has been done, usually requiring the full-on gutting of the affected areas of the structure.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I know this because Tyler knows this.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h3&gt;Cause and Effect&lt;/h3&gt; &lt;p&gt;From my research and in talking with the company helping us out, this isn&amp;#8217;t a result of bad construction or flawed design. This is a result of &lt;a href="http://www.noaawatch.gov/2008/fay.php"&gt;Tropical Storm Fay&lt;/a&gt; dumping between 15 and 20 inches of rain on Central Florida over a period of about 48 hours.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The Florida ground is able to absorb quite a bit of water, typically many inches of rain over a short period of time. A heavy summertime rainstorm might dump several inches of rain in a few hours, and very seldom does this cause any real problems.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But in this case, the ground had become saturated, and was holding water against the house for an extended period of time. Although most homes are somewhat water-tight, none are really &lt;em&gt;waterproof&lt;/em&gt;, and almost any house will leak at the foundation if water sits against it long enough.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;There was nothing we could have done differently to prevent the intrusion, nor was there a way to stop it once it had started.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;You just take steps like peeling up carpet, sopping up wet carpet pads with towels, and doing anything you can think of to start the drying process. Although these measures work pretty well to dry carpets and carpet pads, there&amp;#8217;s not much you can do on your own to dry out the drywall, insulation, and baseboards.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Although many people might touch the walls and say, &amp;#8220;yeah, that &lt;em&gt;feels&lt;/em&gt; dry now,&amp;#8221; they&amp;#8217;re asking for trouble. Worse than the lingering odor, dampness, and mildew, there&amp;#8217;s mold formation to worry about.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h3&gt;Mold: A Homeowner&amp;#8217;s Nightmare&lt;/h3&gt; &lt;p&gt;With a Class 2 intrusion, you have about 96 hours before mold sets in. &lt;a href="http://www.cdc.gov/health/mold.html"&gt;Mold is bad&lt;/a&gt;. You don&amp;#8217;t want it. &lt;a href="http://www.bt.cdc.gov/disasters/mold/protect.asp"&gt;Preventing it&lt;/a&gt; from forming in the first place is critical, because &lt;a href="http://www.cdc.gov/mold/cleanup.htm"&gt;cleanup and remediation&lt;/a&gt; is difficult and costly (we&amp;#8217;ve been through it once in the past).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;So do you take a chance and hope that the wall dries out on its own, that it doesn&amp;#8217;t trap moisture long enough for mold to set in?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Maybe, but I&amp;#8217;m not taking those chances with my house and family.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h3&gt;Right Now&lt;/h3&gt; &lt;p&gt;The carpets and walls are drying out and hopefully in another day, the dehumidifiers and fans will be removed and we&amp;#8217;ll be able to start putting our home back together.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;My digital humidity gauge was reading about 20% in the rooms with the dehumidifiers in them &amp;#8211; down from about 45% (normal for well-insulated Florida homes) in the rest of the house.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;This morning, when I woke up, I could hear my little boy happily calling out to me, saying &amp;#8220;Dada!&amp;#8221; over and over again. He&amp;#8217;d had a rough night but was awake right on schedule and ready to play. So I took him to the family room and made towers from plastic toy cups for him to knock down, zoomed the car around on the floor, and laughed and read books together just like we would on any other morning.&lt;/p&gt;</content>

&lt;p align="center"&gt; &lt;img src="http://www.thinkmac.co.uk/blog/images/artbook.png" alt="ThinkMac Art &amp;amp; Design cover" /&gt; &lt;/p&gt; &lt;p align="center"&gt; &lt;a href="http://www.thinkmac.co.uk/private/artbook.pdf"&gt;Download the PDF&lt;/a&gt; (8MB) &lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt; I thought it would be an interesting exercise to gather together a whole bunch of the artwork I've created over the years for my various applications and compile it all together. A lot of design work is sort of lost in the process so there isn't as much as I'd like but hopefully there is enough here to give you a taste of what goes into designing Mac software. &lt;/p&gt;</content>

&lt;p&gt;The giant robots over at Thoughtbot are looking to hire &amp;#8220;another great designer&amp;#8221; to join their Boston-based team.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt; The right person will have experience designing user interfaces for web applications, have good typographical skills, a strong foundation in design principles, excellent &lt;span class="caps"&gt;XHTML&lt;/span&gt; and &lt;span class="caps"&gt;CSS&lt;/span&gt; skills, and will be as passionate about great design, semantic markup, and web standards as we are about our Ruby code.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;When you apply, tell them I sent you.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://hivelogic.com/articles/2008/08/thoughtbot-is-hiring-a-designer"&gt;[link]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</content>

NewsGator’s widgets business hasn’t overlapped with NetNewsWire, but I felt like learning more about it. (I take it as self-evident that it’s good to be curious about your own company’s products.)

Some other parts of NewsGator’s business, especially NewsGator Enterprise Server (NGES), have overlapped with NetNewsWire. NetNewsWire and the other client apps work with NGES as well as with the online syncing system. (NGES is like the online system, but with a whole bunch of special features that businesses need.)

But I didn’t know that much about widgets, and I got curious. I got curious more about widgets-as-software than widgets-as-business, but I’ll talk about the business part first.

The Scoop on Widgets

They’re web-page widgets, not Dashboard widgets or whatever they’re called in Windows. They embed in a page via JavaScript includes. Though widgets could be anything, NewsGator’s tend to display RSS feeds.

They’re also what the business hepcats like to call “viral” — they can spread. If you see a widget you like, you can add it to your own weblog, social networking thing, whatever.

Why would anyone make a widget? I can guess at some business uses:

1. Get the word out about your site.

2. Get more people to visit your site.

3. Make money from advertising. You could include an ad in a widget.

The more a widget spreads, the better you do with the above. Since anybody can spread a widget, I will guess that an important goal of a widget-maker is to make widgets that people want to spread.

Here’s where it got more interesting for me — I wondered what it was like to build a widget. I’m a developer, after all: I like making things.

Editor’s Desk

Business hipsters call this the “self-serve” model — NewsGator doesn’t have to make every widget by hand: we provide the tools to make widgets and the system to run them. (We do make some widgets, but other people can make widgets too.)

We have a web app called Editor’s Desk where you can build a widget. You can add content from one or more feeds, and there are templates that let you pick the look and feel. Advanced users can edit the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.

I decided right away that I was one of those advanced-user-snobs. (Chianti-drinking, Plato-quoting, CSS-editing…)

So I started futzing around to see what I could make, and at the same time I tried to figure out the basic principles of widget design. (Which is what most geeks would do, since it’s never enough to just learn how to make a thing: we have to get under the hood.)

My first widget

I wondered if the widget design tools were flexible enough for me to create a widget that looked like my weblog. Answer: yes.

Here’s a screenshot, since the actual widget might not make it through your RSS reader.

(You can view the live, running widget.)

My second widget

Then I did a widget that people might actually want to spread: it displays the NetNewsWire news feed. Here’s a screenshot:

(Again, the live version is on my widgets page.)

By this time I’d figured out a few things about widget design.

1. Widgets should be in a bordered box of some kind.

Seems obvious, but worth noting. Rounded corners are nearly a must.

2. Widgets are guests on a page. And no part of the widget starts drawing until after the JavaScript include returns.

This said to me that keeping resources low is a good idea. My widgets all use just one graphic. They don’t even use graphics for the rounded corners — they use the support built into Firefox and Safari for rounded corners. (You get square corners on IE, but I was willing to make the trade-off.)

3. The small canvas means keep things simple.

For each widget I used a limited color palette. News items are separated by space rather than with bullets or lines. The one graphic I use adds visual interest plus a clue to what the widget is about. (Business daddy-Os would call the graphic a “branding” thing.)

I could have also added a mini-toolbar for each item, with an email-this link and a place to rate the article. But I didn’t quite buy the workflow, that you’d open a page, read it, and then come back, find the link on the widget, then email or it or rate it. I think you’re going to email a page when you’re actually on the page, either via a link on that page or your browser’s email command. And I didn’t think you’d remember that you want to come back and rate the page. Not including the mini-toolbar meant I had room to display more news items, and the overall look was more clear.

4. There’s a natural layout: title, feed or feeds, and Get This Widget link.

It’s like so many other things — desktop apps, web pages — with a header, main content area, and footer.

To keep things simple (and, I hope, more striking, better able to compete with other things on the page), my headers and footers are always the same background color, and they’re darker than the news items list (the lighter news items list helps with readability).

I’m sure there are more things to know about widget design, but I've only made a few so far, and I haven’t seen them running on other sites yet, so I’m just a newbie.

My third widget

Now I was on a roll — making widgets is fun, it turns out — so I made a multi-feed widget: Seattle Mac & iPhone Developers. Here’s a screenshot:

And I made one last widget with news from the weblogs of some of my co-workers. (I know about the weblogs of J. B. Holston, Greg Reinacker, Jeff Nolan, Karyn German, Walker Fenton, Dan Larson, Nick Harris, and Nick Bradbury. Apologies to anybody whose weblog I don’t know about. ;)

(I’ve already posted enough screenshots — BRENTSCOWRKRSBLOGSOMG appears on my widgets page.)

Continue reading...

I just got word that NetNewsWire 1.0.8 should be hitting the App Store — if it’s not there yet, it should be soon. (I believe.)

&lt;p&gt;Illustrator Kevin Cornell discusses his work on the graphic-novelization and adaptation of &lt;em&gt;The Curious Case of Benjamin Button&lt;/em&gt; by F. Scott Fitzgerald.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;As usual, Kevin&amp;#8217;s work is nothing short of amazing, and his talent really shines in this context and with this presentation.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;This is the kind of thing you just buy on the spot, you know? It&amp;#8217;s available for &lt;a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/1594742812/ref=nosim/danbenjamin-20"&gt;pre-order from Amazon&lt;/a&gt; now.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;You can find more of Kevin&amp;#8217;s work at &lt;a href="http://alistapart.com"&gt;A List Apart&lt;/a&gt;, for people who make websites. &lt;a href="http://hivelogic.com/articles/2008/08/the-curious-job-of-kevin-cornell"&gt;[link]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</content>

THIS DOESN’T WORK. Logs get confused (logging stops). Haven’t figured out a way to make it *really* work on Leopard.

Receive syslog info from router on iMac (Leopard)
Posted: Nov 28, 2007 6:51 AM in response to: YamaLuha
Solved

To enable your Leopard system to receive network syslog submissions edit /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.syslogd.plist and uncomment the lines specified in the comments so that the end of the file looks something like this.

<key>NetworkListener</key>
<dict>
  <key>SockServiceName</key>
  <string>syslog</string>
  <key>SockType</key>
  <string>dgram</string>
</dict>


NB - the NetworkListener is part of the Socket dict entry!!!

Then execute the following commands (wait a few seconds between commands):
sudo launchctl unload /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.syslogd.plist
sudo launchctl load /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.syslogd.plist

That is enough to get an apple base station to dump it’s log into the system log.

Why is FeedBurner so hard today?

When I decided to remove the Sites Drawer from future versions of NetNewsWire, I replaced it with something else: a feed that lists interesting feeds that I find.

It’s called, simply, the Interesting Feeds feed. You can subscribe.

I thought about doing other things — loading OPML files written by other people into the Sites Drawer, for instance. But every idea like this meant a bunch of work for little benefit — and a big part of the reason to delete features is to be able to spend more time working on the features that matter most.

(Aside: people who don’t write software generally underestimate how much work a given feature takes. People who write just a little software — scripters, for instance — underestimate even worse.)

So, finally, I decided to go with writing a feed. It has the advantage of being low-tech — I don’t have to build anything new. I use MarsEdit to add items to the feed (since it’s just a category on ranchero.com). And there aren’t any deadlines or pressure. I just post whenever I want to.

I’m considering making it a default for new users (for NetNewsWire/Macintosh), though I haven’t decided yet.

Suggestions for the feed are, of course, welcome. I won’t use everything I get. Probably not even half or even a quarter. And it’s not a self-promotion thing: don’t tell me about your feed, tell me about some other interesting feed.

(If you tell me about your feed, I’ll tell my cat on you, and he’ll make long red ribbons of your skin, then eat parts of you that are supposed to stay inside you. Just a warning. ;)

&lt;p&gt; iKana touch is very close to being finished now. I fully expect to submit it to Apple for review during this coming week. Here are those promised screenshots... &lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;Update!&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt; iKana touch is now available on the App Store! &lt;/p&gt; &lt;table border="0" cellpadding="10" cellspacing="0"&gt; &lt;tr&gt; &lt;td&gt; &lt;img src="http://www.thinkmac.co.uk/blog/images/ikanatouch-home.jpg" alt="Kana sets screen"/&gt; &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt; &lt;img src="http://www.thinkmac.co.uk/blog/images/ikanatouch-browser.jpg" alt="Kana selection screen"/&gt; &lt;/td&gt; &lt;/tr&gt; &lt;tr&gt; &lt;td valign="top"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Kana Set Menu&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br /&gt;You choose the kana set you want to practice on this screen.&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td valign="top"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Kana Browser&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Tap a kana to view its flash card or practice this set using the Writing Test or Speed Test.&lt;/td&gt; &lt;/tr&gt; &lt;tr&gt; &lt;td&gt; &lt;img src="http://www.thinkmac.co.uk/blog/images/ikanatouch-flashcard.jpg" alt="Kana flash card screen"/&gt; &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt; &lt;img src="http://www.thinkmac.co.uk/blog/images/ikanatouch-animation.jpg" alt="Kana stroke animation screen"/&gt; &lt;/td&gt; &lt;/tr&gt; &lt;tr&gt; &lt;td valign="top"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Flash cards&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br /&gt;You can browse flash cards by swiping left or right with your finger. Buttons at the bottom let you add this kana to your practice set or hear it pronounced. Some example words are included for completeness.&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td valign="top"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Flash cards&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br /&gt;When you tap the flash card it will flip over to reveal an iKanji style stroke animation.&lt;/td&gt; &lt;/tr&gt; &lt;tr&gt; &lt;td&gt; &lt;img src="http://www.thinkmac.co.uk/blog/images/ikanatouch-speedtest.jpg" alt="Kana speed test screen"/&gt; &lt;/td&gt; &lt;td&gt; &lt;img src="http://www.thinkmac.co.uk/blog/images/ikanatouch-writing.jpg" alt="Kana writing test screen"/&gt; &lt;/td&gt; &lt;/tr&gt; &lt;tr&gt; &lt;td valign="top"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Kana Speed Test&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Tap the correct answer before the timer runs out in the speed test. Any questions you get wrong are added to a special kana set you access from the Kana Sets screen for revision.&lt;/td&gt; &lt;td valign="top"&gt;&lt;b&gt;The Kana Writing Test&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Trace the strokes, starting and stopping within the circles in the correct order and direction.&lt;/td&gt; &lt;/tr&gt; &lt;/table&gt;</content>

This one’s a quickie: the deadline for C4[2] scholarship applications is this Monday, Aug 11th.

Students: apply by sending your name, email address, website if you have one, and why you want to attend C4 (in Markdown format) to c4@redshed.net. Please put “scholarship” in the subject line.

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://db.tidbits.com/article/9726"&gt;Adam Engst&lt;/a&gt; has a nice list of iPhone productivity applications. My favorite, by far, is &lt;a href="http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/OmniFocus/iphone/"&gt;OmniFocus&lt;/a&gt;. I also like &lt;a href="http://www.pcalc.com/iphone/"&gt;PCalc&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt;</content>

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1190-sour-apple-how-an-apple-ad-sets-the-wrong-expectations"&gt;Jason Fried&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote cite="http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/1190-sour-apple-how-an-apple-ad-sets-the-wrong-expectations"&gt; &lt;p&gt;This ad borders on bait-and-switch and it&amp;rsquo;s disappointing to see Apple go there. If the ad wasn&amp;rsquo;t about speed it might be a different story. If they were just showing off as many features as they could in a 30 second spot it would be understandable. If they exercised poetic license and cut out a few frames to make a different point we&amp;rsquo;d understand.&amp;#8230;But Unslow is about selling speed.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;</content>

I just uploaded NetNewsWire for iPhone 1.0.8 — I can’t say when it will appear on the App Store, of course, but it’s in the review process now.

Changes in 1.0.8 (since 1.0.7):

- Fixed a hang/crash at startup affecting some people.

- Fixed a bug restoring a feed or post at startup -- it now makes sure the feed and post still exist in the database.

- Removed the Feeds title and the horizontal stripes from the startup image, so it doesn't look like it's switching views at startup.

- Removed some logging code for when a download fails -- it shouldn't have been left in there.

- No longer showing title in navigation controller in news item detail view -- it was redundant, and it didn't hardly ever fit anyway.

- You can turn off the unread badge count on the home screen via a pref in Settings. (Note: the change in pref doesn't take effect until you next launch NetNewsWire.)

- Fixed a bug parsing dates in news items on systems with non-English date formatting. (It will fix dates for items in the future, but it can't fix existing wrong dates.)

&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#8217;d first heard about the &lt;em&gt;I Am Rich&lt;/em&gt; iPhone application from my &lt;a href="http://thetalkshow.net"&gt;Talk Show&lt;/a&gt; co-host, &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/colophon"&gt;John Gruber&lt;/a&gt;. The application costs $999 and has a single function: it displays the image of a ruby on your iPhone&amp;#8217;s screen.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;According to the description of the app in the iTunes App Store, the developer is making a statement about the willingness of (wealthy or wannabe-wealthy) consumers to purchase incredibly expensive items just to show that they &lt;em&gt;can&lt;/em&gt;. A $999 iPhone app that displays an image of a ruby on the screen would fit into that category.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h3&gt;Maybe It&amp;#8217;s Too Easy?&lt;/h3&gt; &lt;p&gt;A handful of websites, such as VentureBeat, &lt;a href="http://venturebeat.com/2008/08/05/apple-wake-up-or-grow-up-a-99999-iphone-app-that-does-nothing-launches/"&gt;called for Apple to remove the application&lt;/a&gt; from the App Store. As of this moment, the app &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; been removed, but it&amp;#8217;s not clear whether Apple or the developer was the one who removed it.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Soon after, &lt;a href="http://www.kottke.org/08/08/the-1000-iphone-app"&gt;Jason Kottke attacked&lt;/a&gt; VentureBeat and others:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;VentureBeat implored Apple to pull it from the App Store, as did several other humorless blogs.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;The first time I saw the app, I also thought it was funny &amp;#8211; a clever way to make a statement about consumerism. Kottke continues, justifying Apple&amp;#8217;s right to publish the app and the developer&amp;#8217;s right to create it:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;App Store shoppers should get to make the choice of whether or not to buy an iPhone app, not Apple, particularly since the App Store is the only way to legitimately purchase consumer iPhone apps.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Jason is absolutely right about this &amp;#8211; it&amp;#8217;s the responsibility of the shopper to know what they&amp;#8217;re buying. But I think the problem (and what Kottke may have missed &amp;#8211; unless he&amp;#8217;s just playing devil&amp;#8217;s advocate) is in the potential for the &lt;em&gt;accidental&lt;/em&gt; purchase of this application.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;For most people, it&amp;#8217;s almost &lt;em&gt;too easy&lt;/em&gt; to buy something by accident from the iTunes Store. The default option in the iTunes preference pane is to &lt;strong&gt;Buy and download using 1-Click&lt;/strong&gt;. When you click the &lt;strong&gt;Buy Song&lt;/strong&gt; button in a song list, you&amp;#8217;ll be immediately charged for the song (or application), and it&amp;#8217;ll start the download process.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Take a look at the iTunes preference pane:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/danbenjamin/2744335406/" title="iTunes Purchasing Options by Daniel Benjamin, on Flickr"&gt;&lt;img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3251/2744335406_0afefce8ec_o.png" width="450" height="361" alt="iTunes Purchasing Options" /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The second option, unselected by default, is &lt;strong&gt;Buy using a Shopping Cart&lt;/strong&gt;. Using this feature, you can add, remove, and review the items you want to buy before you pull the trigger.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; My friend &lt;a href="http://ryanirelan.com"&gt;Ryan Irelan&lt;/a&gt; just tested this feature, and it seems that the iTunes Shopping Cart &lt;em&gt;only works with music&lt;/em&gt;. Buying iPhone apps still happens instantly, although you are prompted with an &amp;#8220;Are You Sure?&amp;#8221; pop-up dialog window. That&amp;#8217;s at least &lt;em&gt;something&lt;/em&gt;. See my &amp;#8220;Imperfect Solution&amp;#8221; below for yet another alternative.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;From the business standpoint, Apple was &amp;#8220;smart&amp;#8221; to make 1-Click the default option. They realized early on that many of the purchases consumers will make in iTunes will be &lt;em&gt;impulse purchases&lt;/em&gt;. What better way to capitalize on the impulse purchase model than to follow &lt;a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1-Click"&gt;Amazon&amp;#8217;s 1-Click example&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;This &lt;em&gt;sounds&lt;/em&gt; fine until you make your first accidental purchase. A few years ago, I made the mistake of re-purchasing a song I&amp;#8217;d already bought. Fortunately, it was just one song. But it could have easily been an album, a movie, a subscription to a television series, or an artist&amp;#8217;s entire music collection.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Like Kottke, I have a young child. He doesn&amp;#8217;t have access to the computer, but he loves to sit with me at the desk once in a while and when he does, he&amp;#8217;s quick to try and grab the mouse or pound the keyboard. At almost 8 months old, he&amp;#8217;s probably too young to click the &lt;strong&gt;Buy Song&lt;/strong&gt; button &amp;#8211; even if we &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; let him play around.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But what about a two-year old? Or a 10 year old? It&amp;#8217;s clear to me that the potential to mistakenly purchase a $999 iPhone application is all too real.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h3&gt;An Imperfect Solution&lt;/h3&gt; &lt;p&gt;I debated about switching my purchasing option to Shopping Cart, but I wanted to keep the convenience of the 1-Click model. After poking around a bit, I discovered that you can keep iTunes from &amp;#8220;remembering&amp;#8221; your password, requiring that you enter it each time you make a purchase. It&amp;#8217;s like a little reminder saying, &amp;#8220;Are you sure you want to buy this?&amp;#8221;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/danbenjamin/2744335366/" title="Sign-in to Purchase by Daniel Benjamin, on Flickr"&gt;&lt;img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3065/2744335366_b27c6853d6_o.png" width="450" height="224" alt="Sign-in to Purchase" /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, this option isn&amp;#8217;t foolproof. iTunes actually caches your password for the entire session, which means that subsequent purchases will be automatic (passwordless) until you&amp;#8217;ve quit the application. The next time you launch iTunes and try to buy something, you&amp;#8217;ll be prompted again.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h3&gt;The Burden&lt;/h3&gt; &lt;p&gt;So what&amp;#8217;s the real problem? Should Apple prevent developers from creating &amp;#8220;useless&amp;#8221; applications? Should developers be prevented from charging $1000 for their apps? Should Apple make it &lt;em&gt;harder&lt;/em&gt; to make a purchase? Should users be entitled to any recourse if they &amp;#8220;accidentally&amp;#8221; buy a $999 application that does nothing?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I believe that there&amp;#8217;s a shared responsibility here. Apple shouldn&amp;#8217;t restrict application pricing or availability (for non-malicious apps). Users need to be careful about the purchases they make &amp;#8211; and Apple makes provisions for this. At the same time, developers should be conscientious, considerate, and kind when creating and pricing an application.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Of course, there will always be somebody who will push the envelope and test the limits of every system. This isn&amp;#8217;t necessarily a bad thing because it heralds change and inspires innovation, but there&amp;#8217;s a price, and these days, we all have to pay it.&lt;/p&gt;</content>

Evan DiBiase writes that “if you’re only using a method in once place, you have no idea how it’s going to generalize. Maybe you can reuse it, as-is, in many other places. Perhaps it will need to be decomposed.”

Despite the previous post, I still do use categories. ;) They’re not banned-in-BrentLand.

For the iPhone version of NetNewsWire, I put them all in one file: NNWExtras.m. (“Extras” instead of Categories because there are also a few C functions and one macro defined in that file.)

What I like about this is the discipline it brings. I don’t want that one file to become big, so I’m more reluctant to add a category or category method.

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.macworld.com/article/134874/2008/08/opendnsphish.html"&gt;Rob Griffiths&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote cite="http://www.macworld.com/article/134874/2008/08/opendnsphish.html"&gt;&lt;p&gt;Changing your DNS servers isn&amp;rsquo;t very difficult to do, and by using &lt;a href="http://www.opendns.org/"&gt;OpenDNS&lt;/a&gt;, you&amp;rsquo;ll get the benefit of an active and constantly-updated anti-phishing tool, regardless of your browser of choice. If you don&amp;rsquo;t feel you&amp;rsquo;ll always be able to spot a potential phishing scam in your e-mail, using OpenDNS is a great solution that will allow you to keep using Safari with some peace of mind. &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Via &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/08/06/opendns"&gt;John Gruber&lt;/a&gt;, who says &amp;ldquo;it makes web surfing noticeably faster than using the default DNS servers I get from Comcast.&amp;rdquo;&lt;/p&gt;</content>

&lt;p&gt;Applications quietly removed from the App Store:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://gizmodo.com/5032642/apple-yanks-another-popular-app-from-itunes-this-time-box-office"&gt;BoxOffice&lt;/a&gt; (now called &lt;a href="http://code.google.com/p/metasyntactic/"&gt;Now Playing&lt;/a&gt;, was reliable for me, though I like &lt;a href="http://www.avantar.us/OneTap_Movies.html"&gt;OneTap Movies&lt;/a&gt; better; I prefer both to &lt;a href="http://www.moviesapp.com/native/"&gt;Movies.app&lt;/a&gt;)&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.kottke.org/08/08/the-1000-iphone-app"&gt;I Am Rich&lt;/a&gt; (useless, but seems too simple to have caused any problems)&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.nullriver.com"&gt;NetShare&lt;/a&gt; (some service contracts allow it)&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ul&gt; &lt;p&gt;Update (2008-08-07): &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/08/07/i-am-rich"&gt;John Gruber&lt;/a&gt; relays a theory about I Am Rich.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Update (2008-08-08): The &lt;a href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/technology/2008/08/iphone-i-am-ric.html"&gt;LA Times&lt;/a&gt; reports that I Am Rich was not removed at the developer&amp;rsquo;s request (via &lt;a href="http://twitter.com/ddribin/statuses/881604546"&gt;Dave Dribin&lt;/a&gt;). Apple &lt;a href="http://blog.artsiness.com/2008/08/slasher-mysteriously-disappears.html"&gt;removed&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href="http://artsiness.com/Artsiness/Slasher.html"&gt;Slasher&lt;/a&gt; from the App Store, citing &amp;ldquo;objectionable content.&amp;rdquo; The developer has &lt;a href="http://themacbox.co.uk/2008/08/phonesabers-future/"&gt;removed&lt;/a&gt; the popular &lt;a href="http://themacbox.co.uk/phonesaber/"&gt;PhoneSaber&lt;/a&gt; since THQ Wireless owns &amp;ldquo;the rights for Star Wars apps on mobiles&amp;rdquo; (via &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/08/08/slasher"&gt;John Gruber&lt;/a&gt;).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Update (2008-08-14): Now Playing is back, although it still appears as BoxOffice in the search results.&lt;/p&gt;</content>

Remember when I said the next PSIG 117 would be in August? I forgot that DEFCON 16 begins Friday morning. I’ll be flying out Thursday night to attend it, so I’m bumping PSIG 117 back yet again to Sept 4th.

For those of your playing at home, that’s the night before C4[2]. What could possibly go wrong?

Sed is the ultimate stream editor. If that sounds strange, picture a stream flowing through a pipe. Okay, you can't see a stream if it's inside a pipe. That's what I get for attempting a flowing analogy. You want literature, read James Joyce.

Anyhow, sed is a marvelous utility. Unfortunately, most people never learn its real power. The language is very simple, but the documentation is terrible. The Solaris on-line manual pages for sed are five pages long, and two of those pages describe the 34 different errors you can get. A program that spends as much space documenting the errors than it does documenting the language has a serious learning curve.

Do not fret! It is not your fault you don't understand sed. I will cover sed completely. But I will describe the features in the order that I learned them. I didn't learn everything at once. You don't need to either.

Sed - An Introduction and Tutorial.

&lt;p&gt;Ben Lynn has written a &lt;a href="http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~blynn/gitmagic/"&gt;Git cookbook&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote cite="http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~blynn/gitmagic/"&gt;&lt;p&gt;As Arthur C. Clarke observed, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. This is a great way to approach Git: newbies can ignore its inner workings and view Git as a gizmo that can amaze friends and infuriate enemies with its wondrous abilities.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Rather than go into details, we provide rough instructions for particular effects. After repeated use, gradually you will understand how each trick works, and how to tailor the recipes for your needs.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt;</content>

&lt;div align="center"&gt;&lt;a href="http://nihongomac.com/"&gt;&lt;img src="http://nihongomac.com/images/large-logo.jpg" alt="NihongoMac.com" /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/div&gt; &lt;p&gt; I have decided to set up a separate blog dedicated to learning Japanese with &lt;a href="http://www.thinkmac.co.uk/ikana"&gt;iKana&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href="http://www.thinkmac.co.uk/ikanji"&gt;iKanji&lt;/a&gt; and their upcoming &lt;a href="http://www.thinkmac.co.uk/blog/2008/07/spy-shot.html"&gt;mobile companions&lt;/a&gt;. There will be various tutorials and general learning tips and tricks posted every few weeks. &lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;iKana touch update&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt; iKana touch is coming along beautifully, it's going together faster than I had anticipated and I hope to have it in the app store by the end of the month, Apple permitting. I will post some screen shots and maybe a video in the next few days so you can see what's coming. &lt;/p&gt;</content>

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/536/unit-testing-roadblocks"&gt;Daniel Jalkut&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote cite="http://www.red-sweater.com/blog/536/unit-testing-roadblocks"&gt; &lt;p&gt;I&amp;rsquo;m ashamed to admit that this is how many a unit test has been put off. Other laziness incubators include the friction of adding a suitable unit test bundle target to a project, and the difficulty of deciding how to factor your unit tests so that they make sense in the context of your project.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;[&amp;#8230;]&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But now you&amp;rsquo;re bound to run into a vexing question: &amp;ldquo;how the heck do I debug this thing?&amp;rdquo;. Since unit tests are generally built into a standalone bundle, there&amp;rsquo;s nothing for Xcode to run. But when you come across a failing unit test and you can&amp;rsquo;t figure out why, you find yourself wishing you could step through the code just as you might in an application.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Jalkut points to various tips for unit testing with Xcode. That&amp;rsquo;s how I originally wrote and ran my unit tests (using &lt;a href="http://www.oops.se/objcunit/"&gt;ObjcUnit&lt;/a&gt;, since Xcode didn&amp;rsquo;t yet have built-in testing support). Now I&amp;rsquo;m taking a different approach: using Python and &lt;a href="http://pyobjc.sourceforge.net"&gt;PyObjC&lt;/a&gt; to write the tests and &lt;a href="http://codespeak.net/py/dist/test.html"&gt;py.test&lt;/a&gt; to run them. You may prefer not to deploy an application written in Python or Ruby, but that&amp;rsquo;s no reason not to take advantage of those languages during development. The strengths of dynamic languages are a good fit for writing and debugging unit tests, and the weaknesses don&amp;rsquo;t matter so much in the context of testing.&lt;/p&gt;</content>

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/welcome-to-iphone-your-crappy-mac-of-tomorrow-today.html"&gt;Mike Ash&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote cite="http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/welcome-to-iphone-your-crappy-mac-of-tomorrow-today.html"&gt; &lt;p&gt;I&amp;rsquo;ve come to realize that the iPhone platform is really pretty crappy in a lot of ways. And these ways are mostly not due to hardware limitations, but rather artificial limitations put in place by Apple. And mostly these are limitations which have been put in place For Our Own Protection, and which have been, shockingly, praised from many quarters.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Well, there was also a crowd who praised the announcement that developers would only be able to write Web applications and ridiculed those who wanted native ones.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote cite="http://www.mikeash.com/?page=pyblog/welcome-to-iphone-your-crappy-mac-of-tomorrow-today.html"&gt; &lt;p&gt;Apple&amp;rsquo;s focus and attention seems to be on the iPhone, and the sentiment coming out of Cupertino is one that the iPhone is good, all of the stupid, crippling restrictions on how it works are good, and Apple always knows best.&amp;#8230;This is the same keynote, let&amp;rsquo;s remember, where high-up Apple people ridiculed the idea that anyone would ever have a legitimate reason to run applications in the background. Unless that application is made by Apple, of course. And then they came up with their brilliant idea of push notifications, which totally replace the need for background processes, unless you&amp;rsquo;re writing a music player, or a Web browser, or GPS logger, or a terminal emulator, or file downloader, or&amp;#8230;. &lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I think most of what Apple has &lt;em&gt;done&lt;/em&gt; is defensible. With a new platform and limited engineering resources, a case can be made for a conservative approach that starts with a very closed platform and slowly opens it up. You don&amp;rsquo;t maximize the device&amp;rsquo;s potential, but you prevent any bad surprises from occurring. Theoretically, by controlling everything, you can keep the quality of the experience high while you build market share. You can get away with this for a while because there are no significant competitors. This is not the approach I would have taken&amp;mdash;I like Ash&amp;rsquo;s idea of third-party developers stepping in to do what Apple won&amp;rsquo;t or hasn&amp;rsquo;t yet&amp;mdash;but I can easily believe that Apple thinks it&amp;rsquo;s a good idea, and they may be right.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;What&amp;rsquo;s not so defensible is what Apple has been &lt;em&gt;saying&lt;/em&gt; these past few years. It&amp;rsquo;s been spinning like crazy. They introduced the iPhone as a platform that included Cocoa and lots of great developer technologies, but soon it became clear that these were only for Apple&amp;rsquo;s use. &lt;a href="http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2007/1/12/6597"&gt;First&lt;/a&gt; there was, &amp;ldquo;Cingular doesn&amp;rsquo;t want to see their West Coast network go down because some application messed up.&amp;rdquo; As far as I can tell this was just &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/2007/06/wherefore_art_thou_iphone_sdk"&gt;FUD&lt;/a&gt;. &lt;a href="http://mjtsai.com/blog/2007/06/13/a-very-sweet-solution/"&gt;Then&lt;/a&gt;: &amp;ldquo;You can write amazing Web 2.0 and AJAX apps that look exactly and behave exactly like apps on the iPhone. And these apps can integrate perfectly with iPhone services.&amp;rdquo; Turns out there were significant look and behavior &lt;a href="http://furbo.org/2007/07/10/bittersweet/"&gt;differences&lt;/a&gt; compared with native applications, and nearly all of the phone&amp;rsquo;s data and services were off limits. It was reasonable for Apple not to have an SDK ready at that time. It was not reasonable to suggest that Web applications, which we already knew would be supported, were something new and &amp;ldquo;innovative&amp;rdquo; and &amp;ldquo;a very sweet solution.&amp;rdquo; Since Steve Jobs said that this was something Apple had just &amp;ldquo;come up with,&amp;rdquo; some people assumed that there would be a JavaScript API or perhaps a widget environment. In fact, there was nothing. The touted integration ended up being that Google Maps and YouTube URLs would open in those applications rather than in Safari. Then, finally, the SDK was announced, and developers saw that far more was missing from the OS than the Mac &lt;a href="http://www.engadget.com/2007/05/30/steve-jobs-live-from-d-2007/"&gt;desktop patterns and sounds&lt;/a&gt;. How would iPhone applications be developed and deployed? With &lt;a href="http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughtsonmusic/"&gt;music&lt;/a&gt;, Apple had given the appearance of being against DRM, but for applications &lt;a href="http://www.extinguishedscholar.com/wpglob/?p=339"&gt;it delivered&lt;/a&gt; one that was even more restrictive.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;On the Mac side, Apple encouraged developers to write &lt;a href="http://mjtsai.com/blog/2007/06/13/64-bit-carbon/"&gt;64-bit Carbon&lt;/a&gt; applications, but then quietly removed this option. Developers would have been better off following the conventional wisdom, that Carbon was a transitional API and Cocoa was the future, than listening to Apple&amp;rsquo;s explicit statements to the contrary. At WWDC 2006, Steve Jobs declined to demonstrate Leopard&amp;rsquo;s &lt;a href="http://arstechnica.com/staff/fatbits.ars/2006/11/20/6038"&gt;top secret features&lt;/a&gt; because &amp;ldquo;We don&amp;#8217;t want our friends to start their photocopiers any sooner than they have to.&amp;rdquo; Once Leopard shipped, we saw that there were no such features. At WWDC 2008, Jobs looked sickly and Apple PR claimed that he just had a &amp;ldquo;common bug,&amp;rdquo; though he eventually admitted &lt;a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/26/business/26nocera.html"&gt;off the record&lt;/a&gt; that this wasn&amp;rsquo;t true.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Ash now worries about what Apple has planned for the future of the Mac. It could be bleak. It seems like a crazy idea, but Apple is known for betting (often successfully) on crazy ideas. I don&amp;rsquo;t think Apple would go that far, but it&amp;rsquo;s frightening that it would be possible.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I think the bottom line is that, because of the way Apple has behaved, people don&amp;rsquo;t trust it as much. This makes them less willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. And it increases uncertainty, which makes it difficult to plan. Mac developers were encouraged to learn how to write Web applications when a Cocoa-based SDK was just around the corner. It ended up being better to act based on supposition (that there would be an SDK) and experiment with a jailbroken phone, than to do what Apple had recommended. I&amp;rsquo;m not suggesting that Apple should reveal all the details or make commitments prematurely, but in most cases I think the spinning is counterproductive. I would prefer &lt;a href="http://www.rogueamoeba.com/utm/posts/News/More-on-iPhone-SDK-2007-06-12-15-00#1181694290.9"&gt;candor&lt;/a&gt;. If the reality doesn&amp;rsquo;t match the rhetoric, people will find out. They could be unhappy that they were talked down to and misled, or they could appreciate being told the straight story, even if it&amp;rsquo;s less than insanely great.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://gusmueller.com/blog/archives/2008/08/vmware_and_os_x__sitting_in_a_tree.html"&gt;Gus Mueller&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote cite="http://gusmueller.com/blog/archives/2008/08/vmware_and_os_x__sitting_in_a_tree.html"&gt; &lt;p&gt;Why is this so important to me? As a developer (and specifically an indie developer) setting up and testing my applications on a clean install of Mac OS X can be a pain in the ass. I&amp;rsquo;m not the type to have multiple machines for this purpose since I can&amp;rsquo;t stand the clutter. Plus, once I&amp;rsquo;ve run my one of my apps on the clean system, it will leave little bits of debris around the file system in the form of preferences &lt;/p&gt;&lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I&amp;rsquo;ve been using multiple Macs and SuperDuper, but using virtual machines would be better in some ways. This would be best for testing with older versions of the OS, some of which require older hardware that I might not want to keep around. For how long after a version of Mac OS X Server is discontinued does ADC provide serial numbers?&lt;/p&gt;</content>

cat /System/Library/CoreServices/backupd.bundle/Contents/Resources/StdExclusions.plist

&lt;p&gt;A half-hearted run through the last month worth of news, including the new iPhone and MobileMe.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Also, we&amp;#8217;re about to change our format a bit, so this episode is the last of its kind.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://hivelogic.com/articles/2008/08/thetalkshow-episode-24"&gt;[link]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</content>

defaults write com.apple.mail DisableDataDetectors YES

&lt;p&gt;The &lt;a href="http://www.atpm.com/14.08/"&gt;August issue of ATPM&lt;/a&gt; is out:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;ul&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.atpm.com/14.08/index.shtml"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Cover&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.atpm.com/14.08/sponsors.shtml"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Sponsors&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.atpm.com/14.08/welcome.shtml"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Welcome&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.atpm.com/14.08/e-mail.shtml"&gt;&lt;b&gt;E-Mail&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.atpm.com/14.08/apple-talk.shtml"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Apple Talk:&lt;/b&gt; Microsoft, Revisited&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.atpm.com/14.08/mac-about-town.shtml"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Mac About Town:&lt;/b&gt; A Midsummer Night&amp;rsquo;s Mare (a comedy in multiple acts)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.atpm.com/14.08/macmuser-rowing.shtml"&gt;&lt;b&gt;MacMuser:&lt;/b&gt; Rowing Through Roquefort&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.atpm.com/14.08/macmuser-smartscale.shtml"&gt;&lt;b&gt;MacMuser:&lt;/b&gt; How to Get Pxl SmartScale Running on Intel Macs&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.atpm.com/14.08/next-actions.shtml"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Next Actions:&lt;/b&gt; iPhone App Roundup, GTD&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.atpm.com/14.08/photoshop.shtml"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Photoshop For the Curious:&lt;/b&gt; What If I Just Left It Alone?&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.atpm.com/14.08/desktop-pictures.shtml"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Desktop Pictures:&lt;/b&gt; San Francisco&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.atpm.com/14.08/cartoon.shtml"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Cortland&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.atpm.com/14.08/comic-life-magiq.shtml"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Software Review:&lt;/b&gt; Comic Life Magiq 1.0.1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.atpm.com/14.08/knapsack.shtml"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Software Review:&lt;/b&gt; Knapsack 1.1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.atpm.com/14.08/smartmask.shtml"&gt;&lt;b&gt;Software Review:&lt;/b&gt; SmartMask 2.0&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.atpm.com/14.08/faq.shtml"&gt;&lt;b&gt;FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions&lt;/b&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/li&gt;&lt;/ul&gt;</content>

C4[2], scheduled for September 5-7 2008, is now open. Register now. Update: C4[2] sold out inside 40 hours.

Speakers

Alex Payne: Why Scala? How a serial language enthusiast settled down with a nice Swiss language

Alex Payne spent over a year researching the best language with which to approach the architectural challenges at Twitter, the popular social messaging platform on which he works. In this talk, he’ll share for the first time in public why he settled on Scala. Learn about Scala’s winning combination of object-oriented and functional programming, its robust concurrency model, and other sexy features. Get a quick tour of the Scala community, including standout apps and emerging best practices. Find out why Scala sets the standard for next generation languages. Even if you’re happy with your language toolbox, you’ll learn something from Scala you want to take back to your daily coding.

Brent Simmons: On Going Free

NewsGator dropped a bombshell on the feed reader market by making the Brent’s market-leading NetNewsWire free of charge. Brent will talk about what the transition was like and the mistakes he made with NetNewsWire Touch 1.0.

Buzz Andersen: Apple to Indie

Buzz started out as an indie developer in Colorado, only to be lured to Cupertino for a spell. He’s since returned to indiehood, and is eager to share with us about life after Apple.

Craig Hockenberry: IPHONE ITS NOT A FRICKEN MINATURE LAPTOP OK

Follow Craig on a journey from DOS to a touch-based UI, learn about current best practices for iPhone development, and start to think about where this technology will take us in the future. Effective use of the CAPS LOCK key may also be discussed.

Mike Lee: Pimp My App

After a while at Delicious Monster, Mike has gone on to co-found Tapulous, which got in early on the iPhone App Store game with three apps. Mike will take a volunteer (or two) with a preferably shipping Mac or iPhone app. He’ll give it a complete makeover, from interface and interaction to having a graphic artist create new assets for it. He’ll unveil the new design over the course of his talk.

Rich Siegel: Red Meat and Gin

Rich Siegel opened the doors of Bare Bones Software 15 years ago, and has turned the company into one of the longest-running indie Mac shops in history. He’ll share some of the lessons he learned along the way, and offer advice on how to make it big while staying small. And he promises not to yell at any of you #&@$ kids to get off of his lawn. This time.

Richard Hipp: SELECT * FROM SQLite_internals

Hidden under the hood, SQLite powers modern software’s data storage needs. It’s built into each Mac, iPhone and copies of Firefox, PHP and Skype. Richard – SQLite’s original author – will talk about the creation and evolution of SQLite, its internals, its testing system, the license controversy and common client mistakes.

Thomas Ptacek: Everything an indie Mac developer needs to know about software security but didn’t want to pay consultants to find out

Thomas has been in the security ring for over a decade, and can spot your exploitable code five miles away before you’ve even written it. He’ll provide a basic backgrounder on writing secure applications that every indie developer should know.

Troy Gaul: Lightroom Exposed

In my mind, Lightroom is Adobe’s most interesting product. A fairly new product, version 2 just shipped – Adobe’s first 64-bit application. Troy is Lightroom’s lead and will talk about its evolution and unconventional architecture (large parts are written in Lua).

Wil Shipley: Delicious Panel

Wil leads this year’s panel discussion. He’s threatening to bring booze and custom software. Enough said.

Iron Coder Live: Engineer Idol

Come show off your mad coding skillz. I’ll give you an API and theme to code against. You’ll present your wicked app live in front of all attendees. The audience will loudly judge you. This year the API is Core Location and the theme is paranoia.

And of course expect the standard C4 fare: lunch, dinner, late night poolside parties and Gino’s East Chicago-style deep-dish pizza.

Registration

Register here.

C4[2] costs $512 including meals and is held in downtown Chicago. Strive to arrive at the hotel by Fri Sep 5 at 5:30 pm. It all comes to an end Sun Sep 7 around 4 pm.

The hotel (which I ask that you stay at if at all possible) runs ~$190/night until the group block runs out. Update: The hotel block is sold out. Feel free to book your room any way you'd like. Here's a hotels.com starter link.

Scholarship

Three lucky students will receive free admission to C4. Here’s how it works:

• Students: register by sending your name, email address, website if you have one, and why you want to attend C4 (in Markdown format) to c4@redshed.net. (View last year’s essays here and the winners here.)
• C4 attendees will be given a list of potentials and three votes to spend.
• The three top-voted students receive free admission.

If you’d like to sponsor an additional scholarship slot for $512, toss me an email.

&lt;p&gt;My main man Zeldman and the merry A List Apart team has put together an updated, streamlined, and otherwise improved version of &lt;em&gt;The Survey&lt;/em&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Calling all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. It is time once again to pool our information so as to begin sketching a true picture of the way our profession is practiced worldwide.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Although many Hivelogic readers are developers as opposed to pure designers, this survey still applies. It&amp;#8217;s well worth your time, and there&amp;#8217;s even a button you can post on your website once you&amp;#8217;ve taken the survey.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://alistapart.com/articles/survey2008" title="The ALA Survey, 2008"&gt;&lt;img src="http://www.zeldman.com/i/tookit.gif" alt="The ALA Survey, 2008" /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://hivelogic.com/articles/2008/07/ala-2008-design-survey"&gt;[link]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</content>

&lt;p&gt;Can I just say that I really, really hate &lt;a href="http://www.versiontracker.com"&gt;VersionTracker&lt;/a&gt;? It is the slowest, most cumbersome and utterly frustrating Mac software listing site in existence. &lt;a href="http://www.macupdate.com"&gt;MacUpdate&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="http://www.apple.com/downloads"&gt;Apple Downloads&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="http://osx.iusethis.com"&gt;iusethis.com&lt;/a&gt; are all fantastic, I simply enter my applications details and hit submit and shortly there after the updates appear for people to be able to download. With VersionTracker on the other hand I frequently have to wait a good 30 seconds for their site to even load (over broadband!!) then adding a product is nothing short of a nightmare. You have to specify the category to put your application in, not once but twice and you need to specify your OS compatibility in 3 separate places, two of which are nicely tucked away in little popup panes that are hidden until you click them. Then you hit submit and the chances are it will find something you've supposedly not filled in (which you of course have) and refuse to submit the update no matter how many changes you make. In fact I have a feeling the JavaScript is probably throwing a wobbly or it's trying to talk to some database over a 1200 baud connection. The page doesn't even reload after pressing the submit button subsequent times and Safari's status bar seems to indicate parts of the page are still loading, which of course they never do. &lt;/p&gt; &lt;img src="http://www.thinkmac.co.uk/blog/images/versionnightmare.gif" alt="VersonTracker submission form. The horror" /&gt; &lt;p&gt; Anyway that's my rant over with. Maybe I'll be able to submit iKanji on my 3rd attempt... Wait no that didn't work either! &lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;Addendum&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;Oh and another thing that bugs me about VT is you have to submit your icon and screenshots in a separate form after submitting your application listing. Just because the whole process wasn't cumbersome enough already. When I submitted an icon for my iKana listing they replaced the existing screenshot with a nice blown up version of the icon. *sigh* &lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;Update&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt; Oh look at that iKanji has suddenly popped up on VersionTracker, so someone managed to get it listed then. It also mysteriously has a 3 star rating even though no one has reviewed it yet and the Feedback summary shows no ratings in any category. Suspicious much? &lt;p&gt;</content>

I guess I should first admit I hate the show &lt;i&gt;Punk’d&lt;/i&gt;. I mean, here’s a guy who is famous for lying about his age so he seems hipper, telling us that his show’s purpose it to deflate the big egos on other stars, and show them what truly matters in life. So he sets up situations where anyone would get upset, and then laughs when he upsets people. I call *cough*bullshit*cough*. (Also *cough*jerkface*cough*.)&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;So I have to admit I’m not predisposed to like &lt;a href="http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/" target="other"&gt;The Mojave Experiment&lt;/a&gt;, where Microsoft took a bunch of “regular folks” XP users who were afraid of Vista, and told them Microsoft was going to show them a secret new operating system &amp;mdash; which was actually Vista.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;UNSURPRISINGLY, these people mostly said they liked Vista.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Now, if you read this blog, you know I pretty much hate Microsoft, because of their incredibly shady business practices (moreso in the early 1990s) and their shoddy products, most especially their operating systems, whose crappy user experience and programmer interfaces hold back the advance of technology. However, I’m not going to rail on Vista here. Seriously, I’m not.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;What I &lt;i&gt;am&lt;/i&gt; going to rail on is this “experiment.” (I use that word advisedly.)&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;--&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I &lt;b&gt;hate&lt;/b&gt; bad science. Hate it. Hate. So let’s look at not one, not two, but FOUR, yes FOUR (ah-ah-ah!) key flaws in this experiment, any single one of which would render its results meaningless:&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;• &lt;b&gt;The Placebo Effect:&lt;/b&gt; Every time I do a software release, no matter how minor, even if I just change one word, in French, to another French word, someone will send me mail or post on a forum, “Thanks, this release seems a lot faster!” Do I make fun of them? Or videotape them and put it on a blog? No. Because it’s just human nature. If we are told something is new-and-improved, we prime ourselves to believe it (c.f. &lt;i&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.amazon.com/Blink-Power-Thinking-Without/dp/0316172324" target="other"&gt;Blink&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/i&gt; by Malcolm Gladwell, which I’ll refer to again in a bit) and make it so in our minds.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;This is why we have, for example, blind taste tests: because humans are proven to not be able make dispassionate judgments about subjects they already know about. So, if you say to someone, “Hey, I’m giving you a top-secret peek at a new operating system from Microsoft, you’re incredibly lucky and special, and I really value your opinion!” of COURSE they are going to like it. They almost can’t not like it.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;• &lt;b&gt;The Pepsi Challenge Effect:&lt;/b&gt; “The Pepsi Challenge” was a blind taste test that Pepsi overwhelmingly won (again, from Blink). Yet, most people still drink Coke. Why? Gladwell’s thesis is that a &lt;i&gt;single sip&lt;/i&gt; of a soft drink is very different from drinking a &lt;i&gt;whole can&lt;/i&gt;, which is the smallest unit most people imbibe. Pepsi usually wins the challenge because it's a sweeter drink, and initially people respond to this extra sweetness. But after drinking a can, Pepsi becomes cloying.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;So, here I am, sat down in front of Mojave-err-Vista, and all I've ever used is XP. Well, look, nobody is doubting the graphics are prettier in Vista. It looks nice compare to XP (it &lt;i&gt;should&lt;/i&gt; &amp;mdash; they hired the guy who designed Aqua for Mac OS X).&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I play with Mojave, and, yes, some system tasks are easier. Again, nobody doubts there are things that work much better. When I plug my iSight camera into Vista it shows up as a device and offers to let me take pictures in the Vista Explorer thingy. That’s kind of cool! Hey, I kind of like Mojave-nee-Vista!&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Except, &lt;i&gt;those glossy features aren’t why people downgrade from Vista to XP.&lt;/i&gt; Those are &lt;b&gt;not&lt;/b&gt; the reason people hate on Vista!&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Now, again, look &amp;mdash; I don’t use Vista or XP for anything but games. I liked using Vista better, until the new UFO (X-Com) game that I had played great on XP, and wouldn’t launch at all on Vista. Then I bailed. That’s my story. There are apparently hundreds of others.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;You, personally, may never have encountered a piece of hardware or an app that didn’t work on Vista, and you might be perfectly happy with it. I’m not going to try to argue you out of that happiness. My point is that &lt;b&gt;the problems that Vista has become famous for are not the kinds of problems you encounter in a few minutes of playing with it in a controlled environment.&lt;/b&gt;&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Vista is known for people initially &lt;i&gt;liking it&lt;/i&gt;, then after a while discovering it’s not working for them, and “downgrading” to XP. This study has told us exactly what we already knew: that, &lt;i&gt;initially&lt;/i&gt;, people like Vista. (&lt;i&gt;Initially&lt;/i&gt;, people like having sex without condoms, too... it’s simply not a very good criterion all by itself.)&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;• &lt;b&gt;The Perfectly Controlled Environment Effect:&lt;/b&gt; Microsoft set up the hardware. Microsoft brought the accessories. Microsoft picked the software. Microsoft sat people down with Vista experts driving the mouse, and walked people through Vista. What an INCREDIBLE SHOCKER that in this INCREDIBLY TIGHTLY CONTROLLED ENVIRONMENT Vista performed OK!&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Microsoft had set up an environment with a philosophy similar to Apple’s: “Look, we work well with this hardware and software, and too bad if you want something different.” Unfortunately, that’s NOT why people choose Windows. They hack together their own machines, and they want their software to still run.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Did &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; of these customers bring in their favorite games and try to play them? Did they bring in their graphics tablets and discover they fail?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Did &lt;i&gt;any&lt;/i&gt; of the test machines ever say, “Oh, I’m sorry, Windows Genuine Advantage has determined that you may be running an invalid copy of Windows, so please jump through these hoops or we’ll disable some of your hardware”? I’m going to guess no. But I’ve seen this message a lot. And I own three valid licenses to Windows.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;• &lt;b&gt;The Personal Tutor Effect:&lt;/b&gt; If you sit &lt;i&gt;anyone&lt;/i&gt; down with an expert in a particular program, and the expert walks them through the features and answers their every question, chances are good that person is going to report that she had a good experience with the program. Very good, indeed.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Personal training is so important to customer experience that Apple thinks of it as a key asset of its Apple Stores. But Microsoft doesn’t have Apple Stores in real life. Or any analog. It’s you and a box with a holographic sticker on it. Good luck!&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;--&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Microsoft has managed to prove that if you have a friendly expert on a controlled machine (with Vista pre-installed) showing a carefully selected subset of Vista features to an ignorant XP user for a few minutes, the XP user will often say he finds Vista acceptable. Wow.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;This so-called experiment of Microsoft’s is an insult to science, and to our intelligence. And I am &lt;i&gt;dying&lt;/i&gt; to see the out-takes from their shoot. I mean, how many people do you suppose like being told, “Hey, this giant, unpopular monopolistic software company just made an ass out of you! Ha ha! Our leading scienticians just PROVED that you LOVE VISTA and WANT TO MARRY IT. You are TOTALLY GAY for Vista! Haaaaaaa HAAAAAAA!”&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Vista may or may not be an upgrade in user experience for most Windows customers. I personally prefer the feel of Vista over XP when the former works as well as the latter, but Vista has failed me on several occasions, and I also don’t enjoy running games MORE slowly than XP.&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;I've got to imagine that the Microsoft customers who took all the damn time to upgrade their machines to Vista, determined it was unworkable, and then had to take all the time to go BACK to XP, &lt;b&gt;probably&lt;/b&gt; did so for a reason, possibly even a &lt;i&gt;valid&lt;/i&gt; reason, and not because they had been swayed by bad word-of-mouth. I further imagine that these customers are &lt;i&gt;completely livid&lt;/i&gt; at having Microsoft not say, “Oh, sorry, we’ll get right on those bugs,” but, instead, “You’re just stupidly following the crowd, and if you’d just free your mind up, you’ll discover you actually love Vista... hater.”&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Is “Our Customers Are Stupid and Have No Idea What They Really Want” really Microsoft’s new mantra?&lt;br /&gt;&lt;br /&gt;Again, wow.</content>

&lt;h2&gt;Hmm what could this be?&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;img src="http://www.thinkmac.co.uk/private/spyshot.jpg" alt="Kore wa iKana touch ne ;)"&gt;</content>

&lt;p&gt;Sarah, one of the 37signals team members, totally nails the theory behind &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; offering phone support:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; Phone calls require you to stop what you&#8217;re doing, go to a quiet place, and concentrate. It requires waiting on the line, listening to hold music, being transferred and possibly having the call lost, all so you have to start over again. You can&#8217;t share a phone call with your colleagues, you can&#8217;t get someone else&#8217;s input or feedback. &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;At the end of the day, it&amp;#8217;s the &lt;em&gt;quality of the support you get&lt;/em&gt; rather than the method used that counts.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://hivelogic.com/articles/2008/07/37signals-on-phone-support"&gt;[link]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</content>

&lt;p&gt; It's taken a little while to get there, but iKanji is finally available for everyone to &lt;a href="http://www.thinkmac.co.uk/ikanji"&gt;download and enjoy&lt;/a&gt;. Many thanks to all who helped with the beta testing over the last few days. I've been overwhelmed by the amount of interest and support I've received from the community. I hope iKanji will make a lot of people's lives a bit simpler when it comes to studying kanji. &lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;Yes iKana and iKanji will be coming to the iPhone/iPod touch!&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt; I've said this before but I'm getting asked this question so frequently now I want it on the record again, I do plan to port both apps to the iPhone OS. In fact I already have an alpha of iKana touch up and running on my development Touch. iKana Touch will come first as it's a nice relatively simple starting point and the data set is fairly limited and easy to deal with. I'm hoping it will be ready by the end of August, but then again I'm pretty lousy at hitting deadlines as long time followers of this blog will realise ;) Someone asked me if I'll do a similar bundle as with iKana and iKanji on the Mac or a bundle that includes both Mac and iPhone versions. The simple answer is no, I'm not able to offer a bundle of these due to the limitations imposed by Apple's App Store. Each application has to be sold separately. &lt;/p&gt;</content>

&lt;p&gt;Brent Simmons, creator of &lt;a href="http://www.newsgator.com/Individuals/NetNewsWire/"&gt;NetNewsWire&lt;/a&gt;, writes about minimalism in software development and deleting features:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;When working on a new version of the app, before I think about the features I want to add, I take a look at what I can get rid of first. It&#8217;s a quality-of-app thing. I think of it as making space for the new stuff &#8212; but first I have to take the wrecking ball to some old stuff.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;It&amp;#8217;s like a balancing act &amp;#8211; moving an application with a large user base forward into the future.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://hivelogic.com/articles/2008/07/about-deleting-features"&gt;[link]&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;</content>

&lt;p&gt; I'm happy to announce that iKanji is now in beta and I hope to have 1.0 released by Thursday if no major issues turn up. The &lt;a href="http://www.thinkmac.co.uk/ikanji"&gt;iKanji product page&lt;/a&gt; has also been updated. iKanji will cost &amp;euro; 20 ($30~) when it goes on sale so now is your last chance to get it at the reduced price. &lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt; &lt;strike&gt; If you would like to try the beta &lt;a href="http://www.thinkmac.co.uk/contact/contactform.html"&gt;please get in touch&lt;/a&gt;. I can't promise everyone who applies will be accepted. Priority will be given to students studying Japanese and native Japanese speakers.&lt;/strike&gt; &lt;/p&gt; &lt;b&gt;Update&lt;/b&gt; &lt;p&gt; Thanks for the overwhelming response! No more beta requests please, I've just dealt with the last 50. &lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt; Here's another preview of what's to come: &lt;/p&gt; &lt;img src="http://www.thinkmac.co.uk/ikanji/images/tests-large.jpg" width="700" alt="iKanji test modules"&gt;</content>

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