February 2012
14 posts
Retina display Mac OSX laptops →
So, it seems Apple’s Messages App is already building in support for Retina displays on the Mac. Rumors have even suggested that we might see our first Retina Display Macs in 2012. One early report claimed Apple was working on a 2880x1800 MacBook Pro for the middle of this year.
Can’t wait to play with those Retina powered laptops.
Mail tool for Rails developers →
MailCatcher runs a super simple SMTP server which catches any message sent to it to display in a web interface. Run mailcatcher, set your favourite app to deliver to smtp://127.0.0.1:1025 instead of your default SMTP server, then check out http://127.0.0.1:1080 to see the mail that’s arrived so far.
Super nifty tool, easy to install too.
Color web tools →
It’s not about this catastrophic iPhone application, it’s about color tools on the web.
A weekly e-mail digest for programmers. →
Email isn’t dead after all.
Status Code is a language agnostic roundup of the latest ideas, releases, trends, events and must-read articles from the field of software development.
Sent every Wednesday by Peter Cooper.
The best (to come) iPhone dock gets lasering →
1.2 millions US dollars raised (1 million the last time I’ve checked, a few days ago) and getting custom lasering. Kickstarter really is a money raising whore.
Path2 contact upload issue follow up →
So, as a clear signal of our commitment to your privacy, we’ve deleted the entire collection of user uploaded contact information from our servers.
Nice move.
Tweetbot available on iPad →
It was one of the first complain people had on Tweetbot for iPhone. Grab yours.
Boring default profile picture about to change →
Basecamp about to change that boring gray profile picture to something way more artsy. The funny thing is, I actually like it.
Forget your laptop password, go to jail. →
It appears that bad memory is now a federal offense.
Clever email marketing →
of course I still have to enter my credit card information before I can benefit from the free month.
Of course you do, but the email is nice. I can see some AB testing on those.
Bad behavior from a nice designed App →
Path uploads your full address book on their server, without asking or even warning you. Dave Morin (CEO) answered in the post saying they’ll change this, but my answer is:
It is important for services/companies to have as many email addresses in database as possible, whatever they are saying. It is worth a lot of money for them, for now or a later use (note: it also allows Path to tell you...
UIStoryboard Issues →
While working on this I found out you can’t have user defined relationships in StoryBoard. What a lack…
(Yes I had already blogged this link here)
Giving away the secrets of 99.3% email delivery →
A very very nice article from 37signals about email delivery. I had similar issues at Causes and worked on email for months, and I can confirm all points are good to know.
Images from the Fujifilm X-Pro 1 →
On one side Kodak files up for bankruptcy, and on the other Fuji releases a Leica M9 look a like camera, for 25% the price…
It looks super nice on video, might end up getting one.
January 2012
13 posts
FBI closes megaupload.com, DNS no more →
150 millions registered users, now 7 arrests and facing 20 years of jail.
Kodak files for bankruptcy →
It had been announced earlier these days, but it’s now official. Sad for the 130 year old company, and I’ll miss Portra films if I can’t find those anymore.
French FreeMobile: close to 1 million customer in... →
100,000 new customers per day, and 500k within the first days. Not bad for a new carrier…
(French article, via @jpoiraud)
Primary language in iTunes connect →
I used to create another iTunes developer account to change this. I had set my primary to French, meaning iTunes stores which I would not put specific description for my apps would see a French description instead of English.
How much they make from the Appstore? →
All in all, you can’t be serious about making games and “earning a living” out of it without at least a $40k budget. (And I’m really being cheap here; I think to be competitive today on the App Store you need $100k.)
Great article and a must read if you ever want to make iOS games, and even for other iOS developers.
What TV shows you watch ? →
They intercepted and manipulated the data using Fritzbox! and WireShark and returned to the company a negative energy consumption rate of -106610 kWh
Sounds like a good way to not pay electricity bills again ever (actually, you’d get money from the company). I love the CCC, you learn fun things every single year.
4 clicks to register for the Free mobile service →
Yesterday there were no way to subscribe for the new Free.fr mobile contract, but today I’ve done it successfully.
Entered my ADSL Free.fr username, they already had my address and bank informations. I clicked about 4 times and approved, done in less than a minute.
15.99 euros / month for unlimited data, tethering, usenet binaries, unlimited international calls. I’d pay more for an...
Free Mobile : All time records →
You probably know by now Free.fr released a 19.99 euros per month mobile contract, with unlimited data (hotspots included, you can even do usenet binaries…), voice calls with International calls to 40 countries, SMS, MMS, etc. But do you know they also broke all time records:
4.6 millions unique visitors on their live website (more than 2011 superbowl), and 450,000 simultaneous...
More Thunderbolt at CES11 →
Hard drives, Express Dock, and Thunderbolt in more laptops. Finally taking off…
The Belkin Thunderbolt Express Dock will be available in September 2012.
Ah no, not really. Why so long? …
Shooting with the Nikon D4 →
For camera geek and photographers, the D4 is here.
this camera makes the reverential memories of Kodachrome 25 fade like an old color print.
Samsung inspired by Apple ads: same actor →
Samsung probably get lots of inspiration from Apple, but they now use the same actor for their ads, funny.
Convert your iPhone to Leica →
And if you want to check out the back.
Peepcode: Advanced Git →
Another great peepcode screencast, covering advanced Git usage. 60 minutes long.
December 2011
48 posts
Next iPhone name: simply iPhone →
After all, Apple doesn’t put the extra label on the back of the products. They simply say “iPhone” or “iPad.” Honestly, I think they need to lose the numbering scheme. They’re starting to resemble names like “Dell XPS” and “BMW X3 SAV.”
I agree the next iPhone could simply be “iPhone” and not iPhone 5 or iPhone 6. Same goes with iPad.
Artisanal Raw Denim →
Christopher J. Brown:
My goal is to offer an honest labor by hand and resurrect the practices of the formative years with American Denim. The two vital claims to the brand: no external marketing, hand crafted.
“He intends to only produce 100 pairs of denim per year and indeed this is how denim was produced in the early 1900′s”.
You can buy it here, however I just won the...
Recruiting programmers to your startup →
Post-traction companies can use the old numbers – you can’t. Your first two engineers? They’re just late founders. Treat them as such. Expect as much.
This is a quote from Naval Ravikant, and I know just too many people who should apply this to their project.
Peepcode: Backbone part III →
Backbone.js is a capable framework for building client-side applications. But even with method-by-method documentation, the details of how to actually build full-featured, useful applications can be elusive.
I add this one to my list.
Apology from Compiz Author →
Compiz was one of the software than impressed me so much on my Linux laptop (note: I don’t use Linux laptops anymore, I use Macbook Air with osx these days). It was an awesome addition to my window manager, with superb effects (rotation, etc).
Apparently it didn’t go too well since, as its author blogged an apology. Still, I wish I had it on my Mac…
Free Wi-Fi coming to japanese vending machines →
30 minutes free wifi, no purchase required. I love this idea.
Facebook: Write Once, Run Everywhere →
All of our developers are good at HTML. Only a few of them are really good at Objective-C and Android.
Don’t worry Facebook, we can tell.
A good review on the last years of Facebook development including the mobile part of it. To make it short, they go the Adobe way, write once, run everywhere (aka Flash). It’s very understandable from a corporate point of view, but very wrong...
28c3: Chaos Communication Congress →
Every year around Christmas / New year, and worth to go if you’re a geek, hacker, developer, and more.
The Chaos Communication Congress the annual four-day conference organized by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) in Berlin, Germany. First held in 1984, it has since established itself as “The European Hacker Conference” attracting a diverse audience of thousands of hackers, scientists, artists,...
GnuPG short ID collision has occurred. →
Start checking GnuPG keys with full IDs instead of short ones.
Asheesh Laroia now has two GPG different keys with the same short ID (70096AD1) circulating on keyservers.
Satellite piece crashes through man's roof →
If walking in dog shits with left foot means luck, I wonder what’s the meaning of a satellite crash on your head.
“A Siberian resident miraculously escaped serious injury or even death when a fragment of a Russian communication satellite crashed through the roof of his house. A Meridian satellite that was launched Friday from the Plesetsk space center in northern Russia on board a...
Apple reportedly building TV sets in Q1 for... →
Apple has reportedly instructed suppliers to begin “preparing materials” for the manufacturing of its new televisions sets in the first-quarter of 2012, preparing for a second or third quarter launch, Digitimes reports.
(…)
The same sources indicate that Apple will focus on 32-inch and 37-inch television sets initially, which will move away from the company’s existing set-top boxes and...
Google and Mozilla: partners for better browsers →
Peter Kasting (Google Employee, Chrome developer):
People never seem to understand why Google builds Chrome no matter how many times I try to pound it into their heads. It’s very simple: the primary goal of Chrome is to make the web advance as much and as quickly as possible. That’s it. It’s completely irrelevant to this goal whether Chrome actually gains tons of users or...
Upgrading Rails 2.3 to 3.1 : Worse performance →
Upgrading of a non-trivial project may take several days, and at the end you may get a system which performs worse than before. So you’d better have a good set of system tests, including performance tests.
Some hints about upgrading, once you’ve read it you might rethink upgrading a complex application.
Volkswagen turns off e-mail after work-hours →
“Responding to complaints from employees that email outside of working hours was disrupting their lives, Volkswagen has taken the step of shutting their email servers outside work-hours.
Bally. Maybe Gmail should do the same.
Pictures of Royal Enfield - India →
I’m currently riding India on an Enfield, and I found good and bad mechanics on the way (you need lots of mechanics if you ride this bike). I thought it would make sense to share my experience, and yours, somewhere. Quick and dirty, just pictures of bike bought in India.
You’re welcome to contribute, Enfield India Bikes.
PushPress PubSubHubBub Wordpress plugin broken
The PushPress plugin for Wordpress allows blogs to implement the pubsubhubbub protocol (real time pushes for RSS feeds). This feature is so important these days it should be bundled by default in Wordpress.
But it’s broken, example:
I want to get pushes for http://feeds.feedburner.com/newteevee, the feed includes 2...
Real World data about Android and iPhone →
May to November 2011, Android gained marketshare (up 13.3%), iPhone also gained marketshare (up 1.21%), and BlackBerry, lost lots (down 65.8%).
Android is gaining marketshare, but not from the iPhone. Both are expanding their marketshare; Android is just gaining it at a greater rate than the iPhone and from second-tier players.
TouchFire: Silicone iPad keyboard idea gets... →
Modify a silicone keyboard cover for Macs, get $200,000 on Kickstarter. Not bad.
Source.
Bridging C++ and C# →
I used to write C#, a very very long time ago. It’s actually a good language, and I had more fun using it than I had with Java (fact: I hated the very little Java I had to write). You can now use C++ in C#, see this sample.
However I will probably never need to write C# anymore. I hope.
Key evidence in Manning trial because of default... →
Adium potentially damages the privacy of thousands of people by enabling logging on OTR chats by default. This needs to be fixed immediately. It’s as easy as making this checkbox unchecked by default
This update about the Manning trial confirms this issue. This is bad.
Method chaining and lazy evaluation in Ruby →
Nice article if you wonder how to achieve the User.where().where() patterns we see more and more in Ruby (thanks to Rails). “Method chaining” might not be the proper words as we have alias_method_chain for extending functionality, which is different.
Martin Fowler names it fluent interface.
CouchDB coming to iPhone developers →
TouchDB is a lightweight CouchDB -compatible database engine suitable for embedding into mobile apps. Think of it this way: If CouchDB is MySQL, then TouchDB is SQLite.
Currently, iOS 5+ and Mac OS X 10.7+.
Looks like iPhone developers might soon have another option to SQLite and Core Data.
Rare Steve Jobs autographed iPod goes for sale →
To be honest, I think I’m the last person who should sign something. A writer signing a book I can understand, but I think if anybody within our company should sign something, it should be members from our R&D team and all the others responsible for product innovation.
So Steve Jobs actually did give autographs, sometimes. Don’t rush, the auction was pulled for unknown reason.