The latest version of the free social networking + fashion app is now on the App Store. Learn things about pants.

If you’re an iPhone contractor, taking this (very short) survey would help us out. Just six multiple-choice questions, no essays. Thanks!

(You can also win one of several $25 Amazon gift certificates.)

Usability Post: “User interface patterns and conventions can, and should, be broken, provided one criterion is met: the new solution is better at its task than the one it replaces.”

Cocoa with Love: “There are many implementations of CSV parsing for Cocoa strings but the purpose of this post is to use the example of an RFC4180 compliant CSV parser implementation to show you the basics of writing a proper parser for importing data into your Cocoa applications.”

Justin Williams: “I believe that with the current crop of Web technologies available in MobileSafari, apps like Hahlo, PocketTweets and Showtime could thrive as an alternative to their native counterparts if Apple allowed developers to adjust the scrolling/drag coefficient of Mobile WebKit.”

New version — just go get it.

Daring Fireball: “A common programming problem: identify the URLs in an arbitrary string of text, where by ‘arbitrary’ let’s agree we mean something unstructured such as an email message or a tweet.”

Mike Ash takes up the question of using accessors in init and dealloc.

Me, I don’t use accessors in init/dealloc. I used to. I never had any problems when I did.

But the recommendation from folks at Apple is to not do that, and my general philosophy is to take those recommendations seriously (though I will differ when there are good reasons).

Marcus Zarra: “ZSync is an open source syncing library designed to allow easy syncing of data between an iPhone/iPod Touch and the OS X Desktop.”

Look for a public release in January.

Uli Kusterer: “You read Apple’s excellent documentation, but need code to fill in some blanks? You can’t find your way in Apple’s sample code? Well, here’s a few spots I found really helpful...”

I’ve often wondered what Uli’s last name means. I’ve decided it means “one who kusters” — and I’ll leave it at that. Whatever it means “to kuster” I’ll leave as a mystery, though I like to imagine it involves mayhem, havoc, and flavored coffees.

Also see Sensible Defaults and Anticipating User Needs: “If the user does not select any files, why not offer them a list of changed files and ask them: ‘These 4 files have changed, did you perhaps want to upload them?’”

In the latest Mac Developer Network Show podcast, me and co-worker Jenny Blumberg (TapLynx support) are interviewed.

(The interview took place before we decided to do the BlackFriday $500 sale, so consider this a reminder.)

I didn’t get a TapLynx update done in time for the sale, since I’ve been concentrating on NetNewsWire for iPhone. (Performance work.) But the work I’m doing there will then get moved into TapLynx and NetNewsWire for Mac.

Neven Mrgan: “Remember the original joy of gaming - you know, before the distraction of drawn-out story lines, tutorials, endless dialog, and complicated rules? You want to just fire up a game and go, cucumber-cool 8-bit graphics blazing under your fingers.”

It’s for iPhone — and it’s a web app.

Victorian FanBoi by Brad Ellis.

Daring Fireball: “Successful iPhone developers don’t just want to write software that works on the iPhone. They want to write software for the iPhone that’s just as good as Apple’s.”

TapLynx blog: “So in the spirit of BlackFriday, for 24 hours we’re going to sell 50 TapLynx licenses at $500 per license. The offer will only be available from midnight to midnight (EST) on 11/27, and only 50 licenses will be sold at that price.”

At $500, that’s over 85% off. Pretty nice deal, I think. :)

I’m hoping to get a new release done before the sale, with a performance enhancement in the code that handles images. But if it’s not this week it should be next week.

Paul ‘Squeaky’ Kafasis, Rogue Amoeba, Airfoil Speakers Touch 1.0.2 Is Now Available: “This update restores functionality we reluctantly removed at the behest of Apple, in order to ship Airfoil Speakers Touch 1.0.1.”

Inside RogueSheep: “The notice from Apple indicated that we had used a private method of UIViewController called previousViewController. Interestingly enough, we did not explicitly use this call anywhere in our code.”

If Apple is indeed using a static code analyzer, it would be great if developers could have it and run it too. I’d probably just make it part of my build process.

Mac Indie Marketing Blog: “One great way to get some exposure to your application is to get it in front of as many Apple employees as you can. Ideally, give your program away!”

Macworld reports on a new Star Wars game.

I don’t have time for games. No time. None whatsoever. (Well, a little WordSpin lately. But really, no time. Zero. Well, okay, it would be sacrilege not to play Trench Run.)

Discovery News (iTunes link) is now on the App Store. It’s a new TapLynx app. (The cool thing (for me!) about TapLynx is that other people can make the apps. I didn’t have to, and didn’t, make this one.)

I spent the weekend working on some performance enhancements for both TapLynx and NetNewsWire for iPhone. (I love doing performance work: I’m a speedaholic.)

But I’m taking a day off from programming to prepare a guest lecture I’m delivering tonight at Hal Mueller’s Mac programming class. I used to fall asleep during class (ended up with a 2.25 GPA in high school; didn’t finish college). Let’s hope that I can stay awake when in front of the class. :)

Tim O’Reilly, O'Reilly Radar: “I've outlined a few of the ways that big players like Facebook, Apple, and News Corp are potentially breaking the ‘small pieces loosely joined’ model of the Internet. But perhaps most threatening of all are the natural monopolies created by Web 2.0 network effects.”

Cocoa for Scientists: “Once you start playing with blocks, a whole new style of programming opens up to you, and you find uses for blocks in places where you may not have expected them.”

Mike Ash: “I’m going to cover calls which are subtly dangerous, things which you might easily use in an innocent manner, only to discover later that bad things can occur.”

Rogue Amoeba: “We hope that developers will be allowed to ship software without needing Apple’s approval at all, the same way we do on Mac OS X. We hope the App Store will get better, review times will be shorter, reviews will be more intelligent, and that we can all focus on making great software.”

Also, Rogue Amoeba “no longer has any plans for additional iPhone applications, and updates to our existing iPhone applications will likely be rare.”

See also Daring Fireball on The Airfoil Speakers Touch Situation and Manton Reece on The only 2 fixes for the iPhone platform.

We’ve updated both NetNewsWire free (iTunes link) and NetNewsWire Premium (iTunes link) on the App Store.

This release fixes some crashing bugs and the confused-navigation bug. We recommend updating right away, if you haven’t already.

And now back to work on 2.0.3... (We’re also working on NetNewsWire/Mac 3.2.4 at the moment.)

Peter Hosey lists the warnings he turns on in Xcode and, for each, explains why.

Brian C. Lane reports on the recent iPhone Tech Talk in Seattle.

Fraser Hess, Cocoa Is My Girlfriend: “The most unexpected (and incredibly positive) side effect was that once I started using version control, the quality of my code went up dramatically.”

Mike Ash talks “about Mac OS X linking, install names, @executable_path, and friends.”

Macworld reports on the “One Finger Discount (OFD) [which] features a growing number of Mac developers who are selling their fine wares at 20 percent off.”

Dan Wood: “With all the material fresh, I thought I would point out some of the cool marketing things that I noticed Fraser & co. do.”

Connected Flow: “Viewfinder searches Flickr’s four billion photos in a snap to bring you the images you need. You can search tags, titles and descriptions and sort by most interesting, most relevant or most recent.”

Looks cool and useful. Congrats to Fraser!

Mac Indie Marketing Blog: “If you are an indie developer selling software, you really ought to start up a mailing list for your customers and prospective customers.”

Mockingbird “is an online tool that makes it easy for you to create, link together, preview, and share mockups of your website or application.”

I gave it a quick try, and I can easily see myself using it, which came as a surprise. (It’s Cappuccino-based, by the way.)

Via carpeaqua.

Surfin’ Safari highlights some of the changes coming in the Web Inspector.

The TapLynx blog reports that I’ll be in a webinar next week — and that we’re working on a contest that will give you the chance to win a free license.

(That word webinar — it vexes me. But it’s what people call these things. I’d sure love to see a better replacement word come along.)

Update 1:20 PM: The sign-up page is now up — click here.

Cocoa with Love: “The goal of this series is to show non-graphics professionals how to create graphics of an acceptable level for their applications that follow the established visual trends for iPhone and Mac apps.”

This new NewsGator weblog, written by Christy Schoon, may not be of interest to the average ranchero.com reader — it’s about enterprise software, and if you’re reading this you’re probably a Mac or iPhone user or developer. (Not that enterprise software and Macs and iPhones are mutually exclusive.)

But what I like about it is that, even though it’s a company weblog, and it’s about enterprise software, it’s clearly written in a human voice by a human. One post is called Pimp My Site. “My second blog post and I’ve already used the word Pimp. My Mom would be so proud.”

The current most recent post starts out, “Can I act a little dweeby and tell you I’m excited...”

I love this stuff. I’m incredibly proud of my company.

(I only hope the several authors of the TapLynx blog — including me — can do as well.)

Cocoa Is My Girlfriend: “Here’s how to limit 32/64-bit Intel apps to only run 64-bit Intel on 10.6.0 and later.”

Uli’s Web Site: “These are just unix shell scripts. Notice the shebang at the top?... You could use Perl, or Ruby, or...”