Sichel on Sandboxing
Peter Sichel: Forcing an application like Phone Amego to be sandboxed puts the developer in the awkward position of choosing between dumbing down the application by removing features, or abandoning the...
View ArticleCreating iCal Events
Kirk McElhearn: If you double-click to create an event in Month view, and then type a time along with the name of the event (Read Walden 8pm), iCal will create a one-hour event at the time you specify....
View ArticleApple Edicts
Pierre Lebeaupin: In the future, Apple may claim that they warned developers of such things in advance but the truth is most of the stuff they warned about did not come to pass in the way they warned...
View ArticlekABUIDProperty
Mike Zornek: For example, with the release of iCloud I received emails from some ProfitTrain users who were getting warnings that the link between clients and the AddressBook cards were breaking. Turns...
View ArticleFlash Is Dead
Jeff LaMarche: I assumed the performance issues they were having back then were simply technical hurdles that would be overcome by Adobe's engineers before long. In the end, the lack of a monoculture...
View ArticleLuma Loop Discontinued Due to Bad Patents
James Duncan Davidson and Greg Koenig: In short, the idea of a sliding camera sling isn’t an amazing new invention. It’s just a really good idea that’s been around for a while and has been iteratively...
View ArticleThe Real Cost of Patent Trolls
Adam C. Engst on a paper from Boston University: [T]he cost has averaged $80 billion per year. Moreover, very little of this money ever makes it to the actual inventors, meaning that the money lost by...
View ArticleArithmetic Expressions in Shell Scripts
Mark Dominus: I had assumed that bc was a later development than expr, but it appeared in Unix version 6, while expr did not appear until version 7. So then I thought perhaps expr had been thrown in as...
View ArticleApple Removes “Texas Hold’em” From App Store
Eric Slivka reports that Apple has silently removed its own game from the App Store. It hadn’t been updated since 2008, but it still worked, and I know people who still play it. Rather than explaining...
View ArticleApple’s Aesthetic Dichotomy
James Higgs: When Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone—perhaps his greatest product presentation—he joked that the iPhone was an iPod with a rotary dialing system on the front. It was deliberately...
View ArticleSteve Jobs and iAds
Jesper: His weirdly strong enthusiasm for iAds bothered me at the time and still does because he was more excited about people making ads than he’s ever been (publicly) about people making apps. For a...
View ArticleDeath and Resurrection of an SSD
Jonathan Rentzsch: SSDs live fast, die young, and pretend to be OK even while they’re dying. Don’t use one without awesome backups.
View ArticleNearly Hygienic C Macros via __COUNTER__
Jonathan Rentzsch shows how to use __COUNTER__ to generate “unique” identifiers for use in macros.
View ArticleSiri and OmniFocus
OmniFocus for iPhone 1.13 can now pick up reminders that you’ve entered via Siri. You have to give OmniFocus your Apple ID and password. Then it checks the iCloud calendar server for new reminders,...
View ArticleKindle Annotations Lost in Book Update
I’ve been reading the Steve Jobs biography on my Kindle and highlighting the interesting passages. On November 19, I received this e-mail from Amazon: We are happy to announce that an updated version...
View ArticleManual Entry in the iPhone Reminders App
Aaron Pressman: But there’s a big glitch by Apple with this system and that’s when Siri is offline as “she” frequently is. Then you are left to set the reminder by hand. And the problem is that the new...
View ArticleSteve Jobs NeXT Videos
Matthew Panzarino collected some links to videos of Steve Jobs from the NeXT era. (My favorite is probably still the one from WWDC 1997.)
View ArticleThe Sketchbook of Susan Kare
Steve Silberman: Inspired by the collaborative intelligence of her fellow software designers, Kare stayed on at Apple to craft the navigational elements for Mac’s GUI. Because an application for...
View ArticleDeleting Dave Winer’s FaceBook Account
Dave Winer deleted his FaceBook account, and it seems to be gone, but now there’s a page with his name and information from his Wikipedia page. It seems that you have to maintain your own profile just...
View ArticleYou Guys Are Millionaires Right?
shiftyjelly: Let’s not even get into the long debates you get into with people about whether they should buy your $1.99 app. People will spend hours researching a $2 purchase, browsing reviews,...
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