Mobile Orchard: “Alocola is a free web-helper application [for iPhone] that we’ve created that lets users provide their location information when websites ask for it.”
Interesting. Uses a URL scheme — a website can launch the app via the scheme, and get back location data.
Daring Fireball: “It’s worth noting that because WebKit is just a phantom version of Safari, it shares the exact same scripting dictionary. A script that works with Safari should work exactly the same with WebKit — except that you need to make WebKit the target of the tell block.”
Scotty of Mac Developer Network interviewed me as part of the Developer Lives series.
Jason Snell, Macworld: “So I was struck with the idea—what if I could get the Talking Moose Twitter stream to speak out loud, in the style of the old Talking Moose? What a useless idea.”
Brad Feld: “I think the next 20 years of innovation around software and the Internet will make the last 20 years look like child’s play... I don’t see an endpoint to the human animal’s desire to innovate.”
I love Brad’s optimism. It matches my own. We’re all just barely getting started here.
When I initially read the piece, I mis-read the line as “I don’t see an endpoint to the human animal’s desire to communicate.” Which is also true, and it’s why the internet, that great communication machine, is still brand-new.
Mike Ash: “Code injection is dangerous and nasty and very special care needs to be taken when doing it.”
Fraser Speirs: “I acquired my copy of iLife ’09 yesterday and decided to dive deep on how Apple have implemented Flickr integration in iPhoto ’09.”
Domain of the Bored: “Speaking of everybody’s favorite WebKit plug-in, here’s how it works. This should help you understand how it fails on some sites, and maybe aid you in contributing to its development.”
Dan Frakes, Macworld: “Chances are you’re looking for something with a good interface and that ultimately helps you be more productive; Hog Bay Software’s TaskPaper 2.1 satisfies both requirements.”
Joe Heck: “Perspectives are the key to making OmniFocus really sing. You can set up one (or several) views into your world based on due dates, contexts, projects, etc. You can save a window’s view as a ‘Perspective’ — and I’m making aggressive use of that setup.”
Shawn Blanc: “Things not only scales horizontally — working transparently for the light GTDer and the guru alike. It also scales vertically, easily allowing you to create massively-long lists, multiple projects and detailed notes. Or, if you prefer, very few.”
Noodlings: “What is stealing preferences? Simply enough, it’s using the preferences of some other app instead of having your own for a particular feature. The point of this is to avoid having to provide a separate interface for settings when the user has already made their choices known somewhere else.”
Question on Stack Overflow: “Programming has given me a lot and it still does every single day. But I have however also gotten some bad habits from the mindset that I have put myself in.”
(Via newsgatortechie and Chris Liscio.)
Nick Bradbury: “I should make it clear that it’s not 100% definite that this feature will see the light of day — it’s still in the experimental stage.”
Hamster Emporium: “In classic Objective-C, methods are mostly non-fragile, thanks to dynamic message dispatch. You can freely add methods to a superclass, as long as you don’t have name conflicts. But Objective-C ivars are fragile on 32-bit Mac.”
Jürgen Schweizer interviewed by MacApper: “There are so many methods of becoming more organized, but most of them require quite an amount of mental energy. With Things we wanted to create a product where users only need to spend the least possible amount of energy to get organized.”
Via Shawn Blanc.
Greg Reinacker: “RSS use in the enterprise is definitely alive and well. But it’s not in the obvious places.”
Raven Zachary, Inside iPhone Blog: “For the first time in the history of the App Store, the same iPhone application holds the #1 spot in both the Top 25 Paid and Free apps lists.”
43 Folders: “If, tomorrow morning, you had 60% of the time and resources you needed to start making anything you wanted, what would it be? And, what would you do first?”
Ken Clark: “I believe that if you only use these ten keyboard shortcuts, you will be blazing through your news feeds in record time.”
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.”
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.”
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.
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.)
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.”
Theocacao: “Mike will give an updated 2.0 version of his popular Pimp My App presentation for this special meeting during Macworld.”
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.)
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.
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.
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.”
43 Folders: “Because ‘feeling creative’ produces great work in approximately the same way that ‘feeling like a doctor’ makes you a gifted thoracic surgeon.”
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.
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.”