Regarding The Personal Web
Dan Benjamin: “While Twitter seems to make some people want to write and blog less often or at a slower pace, I’ve found that I’ve been inspired to write and publish much more often.”
04:17 pm - #

Macworld expected to attract faithful despite Steve Jobs' absence
Glenn Fleishman, Seattle Times: “Smaller software developers and service providers have typically found Macworld a great way to reach larger audiences than what they could afford in advertising or direct mail. Developers in the Seattle area... have managed to get a disproportionate amount of attention for bringing great products to the floor, sometimes through booths, but also through informal press and attendee meetings and get-togethers.”
10:08 am - #

Spring & Struts
Spring & Struts Engineering and Design: “We can provide not only Objective-C and Cocoa ninjutsu but also interface and interaction design know-how.”

Colin Barrett’s company — cool website.
09:27 am - #

NNWInstaPost - two great tastes
protagonist: “NNWInstaPost makes NetNewsWire and Instapaper play nice together. Think of it like the peanut butter and jelly script.”

Very cool! (We are, by the way, planning to add a send-to-Instapaper command for both Mac and iPhone versions of NetNewsWire. But the thing I love about scripting is that you don’t have to wait for us to do it.)
01:05 pm - NetNewsWire-Scripts - #

iPhone Intelligence Party @ Macworld 2009
raven.me: “Meet some of the leading iPhone game developers and publishers. Network with iPhone users, entrepreneurs, and developers. See demos of new iPhone games. Compete in iPhone gaming contests. Celebrate the success of the iPhone platform.”
10:50 am - #

CocoaHeads Jan 6: Mike Lee Pimps Apps
Theocacao: “Mike will give an updated 2.0 version of his popular Pimp My App presentation for this special meeting during Macworld.”
10:17 am - #

The MondoTextField, a Formal Introduction
Cocoa Mondo: “One of the the UI quirks I noticed when developing SunFlower is that when trying to present an URL in an inspector panel it is most likely going to be truncated... This makes editing a long url in an inspector panel a nuisance.”

Though it uses private APIs, it’s still an interesting solution. (And surely there’s a way to do it without private APIs, though it would take more work.)
09:59 am - #

On using private APIs
Mike Ash: “One extreme is that private APIs should never be used, period, full stop. They’re bad, don’t want to touch them, don’t even acknowledge that they exist. The other extreme is that they’re fine and dandy, use them like you’d use anything else.”

Me, I’m pretty much in the don’t-use-’em camp. It’s a recipe for heartache. For angry users with pitchforks and weblogs and Twitter accounts.
04:48 pm - #

Rails 4 years later
Manton Reece: “The community is huge now. What’s not to like?”
04:41 pm - #

Say Hello To Pulsar!
Rogue Amoeba: “Pulsar is a desktop client for listening to XM Radio Online and SIRIUS Internet Radio, the internet streaming services provided by XM and SIRIUS satellite radio.”

Looks pretty cool.
04:02 pm - #

Defining legal input characters
Erica Sadun, Inside iPhone Blog: “A UITextField delegate can catch each character as its typed and decide whether to add items to the active text field.”
11:58 am - #

The Problem with “Feeling Creative”
43 Folders: “Because ‘feeling creative’ produces great work in approximately the same way that ‘feeling like a doctor’ makes you a gifted thoracic surgeon.”
11:31 am - #

Vote for 2008 Best App Ever Awards (iPhone)
Voting is open through January 6 for best iPhone apps. You don’t have to create an account to vote — you can just vote. So go vote.

NetNewsWire is on the Best Free or Ad Supported App category — but I’m not telling you how to vote. Just saying it’s on the list. :) (Voting is anonymous, of course.)

It was a pleasure casting votes for apps that I know and love.

I’m totally looking forward to all the cool stuff to come in 2009. Now that developers have some experience with the platform, things should get even more interesting.
11:49 am - #

Building a Better Twitter Feed Reader
Nick Bradbury: “First, URLs are automatically hyperlinked and benefit from the short URL preview feature I mentioned last week. Author names and @replies are automatically hyperlinked as well so you can click to view that person’s Twitter stream. I’ve also added hyperlinking of #hashtags — just click to go to a Twitter search page which shows all tweets with that same hashtag. And since Twitter isn’t meant to be a read-only service, I’ve added a ‘Reply’ icon to enable replying to a specific tweet.”
09:50 am - #

It Sucks to Throw Away New Code
Nick Bradbury: “I almost didn’t make the change since the idea of throwing away hundreds of lines of freshly-painted code was too painful, but in the end I convinced myself that making the feature more usable was more important than saving my fragile programmer ego.”

I kind of like throwing away new code, too. But I know I’m weird.
08:33 am - #

Heterogeneous cells in a UITableViewController
Cocoa with Love: “The design pattern of separate CellController implementations to simplify a UITableViewController should apply, in a more generalised way, throughout your programming: you shouldn’t have multiple conditionals switching on the same piece of data.”
09:32 am - #

Acorn 1.5 Beta
Gus Mueller: “The big new feature of 1.5 is a new brush tool, along with the ‘Brush Designer.’ The designer lets you make new brushes and change existing ones.”

Sounds pretty cool. I’ll be downloading it myself. (I’ve been using Acorn a ton lately.)
05:27 pm - #

Touch And Go Pricing
Red Sweater Blog: “Attempting to understand the App Store, and how customers relate to it, is the first step in speculating about what tweaks might be made to improve the situation for everybody.”
03:02 pm - #

The App Store Effect
Paul Kafasis, Inside iPhone: “When price is no longer tied to a developer’s costs, however, the market is unstable.”
01:09 pm - #

Blocks
Mike Ash: “All that horrible boilerplate just flies right out the window. Code flow suddenly becomes completely logical, you can read it top to bottom, and you can access any local variables you please.”
11:36 am - #