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.
Top 10 Feed & RSS Technologies of 2011: Push4 →
@marshallk:
A double digit percentage of the stories I reported on this year came from feeds I consumed in this app.
My Push iPhone application makes it in the top geeky 2011 RSS application by ReadWriteWeb. Thanks @marshallk, I now know why I work on the next release.
Growl on the AppStore: bad reviews →
Growl went the AppStore way (which I understand, they want to make money from their work) but apparently, reading their reviews, they changed their API meaning your apps have to move to the new API. Until then, no more notifications for you.
I wanted to upgrade to the AppStore version, but the reviews killed me before I did. Too bad I wanted to support this nice piece of software. Why upgrade...
MKNetworkKit: Advanced Networking for iOS →
“most-watched” repository on Github last week.
ARC based, seamless and transparent caching, offline mode to resend network calls. Looks like a nice alternative to AFNetworking (doesn’t support ARC) or the now dead ASIHTTPRequest.
GPL, Copyleft Use Declining Fast →
Use of the GPL, LGPL, and AGPL set of licenses is declining at an accelerating rate, according to new analysis by the 451 Group’s Matthew Aslett. In fact, the 451 Group projects that GPL usage will hit 50% by September 2012. Instead, developers are licensing projects under permissive licenses such as the MIT, Apache (ASL), BSD, and Ms-PL.
Exactly what happened to my projects.
Disposable camera app on iphone →
Paul from tapbot: “You know what’d be a great joke app? A Camera app that charges you per picture taken, like you are using film. Oh wait.”
Someone did it, can’t believe this.
Facebook timeline on mobile →
And it’s beautiful.
MG Siegler on blogging →
“Negative feedback is much more valuable than slobbery kisses.”
Can’t agree more on this. And I tend to apply it to companies I work for/with.
Google Adsense: account blocked, 2 months later
I’ve set Google Adsense (well admob) for the Lite version of my Push app, and got blocked for suspicious activity. I’ve sent a request through their website on October 10th, and never heard back from them since. The last update of my app doesn’t have those Ads anymore (only iAd for now).
I just received a reply from Google, no joke:
we’ve searched our system, but we...
Bug prediction at Google →
if a file keeps requiring bug-fixes, it must be a hot spot because developers are clearly struggling with it.
50% of the Google code base changes every month, that’s quiet a lot more than I expected! @igrigorik started a Ruby gem based on this.
Someone steals your phone and then gets your... →
This happens even when you wiped your phone. The advice from Apple is quiet funny:
Twitter user Kim Hunter told me that he spoke with “Apple [security],” who told him it’s not a security problem and to turn iMessage off on the offending device. When I pointed out that you can’t turn iMessage off on a device that has been stolen because it’s not in your hands anymore, he agreed: “exactly, i...
AES on the iPhone is Broken by Default →
Apple should look into this immediately.
Firefox too big to link on 32-bit Windows →
Firefox has gotten so large that it cannot be compiled with PGO on a 32-bit linker anymore, due to the virtual memory limitation of 3 GB.
Who said Firefox was getting too big?
Gmail for iOS gets an update →
Custom signature and a vacation responder but no multiple account support. I guess every one will be happier with Sparrow for iOS anyway.
Interview of Paul Haddad, Tweetbot's developer →
So pre-sale but post Twitter 4.0’s launch we did about 2.5x our usual volume. After the sale we’ve been running at 10x+.
Looks like going on sale is useful, the rest of the interview is worth a read if you’re into iOS development.
Proper iphone dock raised $95k in a few hours →
I see myself so much in the video. As blogged by Gruber and Marco.
UIStoryboard issues →
After a few months of development with UIStoryboard I’ve decided that the technology just isn’t mature enough to be used in a complex iOS application and have now replaced all* UIStoryboard with traditional NIBs.
Probably has lots of potential, but it’s not there yet.
For some people Jean (Denim) is not art, but it's... →
I love the fades on this one, you can see more photos of denims at denimarchive.com. I keep going there regularly.
TwitterLilly : Manage your Twitter community →
I like Tigerlily in general, not so many French Paris based companies with a San Francisco mind set.
Textmate 2.0 alpha available →
Oh boy, is next Hurd and Enlightenment 0.17? But I don’t use Textmate, can’t get ride of Vim…
Google Voice: Free calling within the US and... →
Nice, thanks Google.
Adblock Plus Developers To Allow 'Acceptable' Ads →
I wonder what ‘acceptable’ is, apparently it is defined as :
The description of “acceptable” ads includes the following criteria: “Static advertisements only (no animations, sounds or similar); Preferably text only, no attention-grabbing images; At most one script that will delay page load (in particular, only a single DNS request).”
NodeJS gets a website →
Node.js is a platform built on Chrome’s JavaScript runtime for easily building fast, scalable network applications. Node.js uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.
Nice website ; Hopefully won’t get Slashdoted.
RFC 6465: Websocket →
The WebSocket Protocol enables two-way communication between a client running untrusted code in a controlled environment to a remote host that has opted-in to communications from that code.
Websocket RFC approved.
Mac App Store: 100 millions downloads →
The App Store has a catalog of over 500,000 apps, and customers are downloading apps at a rate of 1 billion apps per month. Since the iOS store’s launch in July 2008, Apple has recorded a staggering 18 billion apps downloaded.
Largest PC store around the world. Period.
Apps go iOS first →
Robert Scoble:
Right after that an entrepreneur walked up to me with his app, which looked like Instagram. He wondered why the press doesn’t cover apps not designed on iOS. I said “come with me.”
(…)
I think we saw one Android phone, nine iPhones, and no WP7′s. (…) “Had enough yet?” I asked the entrepreneur.
(…)
Path statistics: “80% iOS, 20% Android,”. Anyone needs more?