Linked List: November 17, 2009

Tuesday, 17 November 2009

Now in beta, 280 North’s developer tool for building and designing Cappuccino apps for the web and desktop. Access to the beta program is $20.

Indie iPhone Developers Band Against Jackass Tim Langdell’s ‘Edge’ Trademark Claims ★

This is great:

In an apparent move to band against Tim Langdell’s over aggressive defense of the trademark “EDGE”, a number of indie developers have made announcements today that their games will incorporate the EDGE name.

Microsoft’s Ray Ozzie on Mobile Apps ★

Anthony Ha for VentureBeat:

Microsoft’s chief software architect Ray Ozzie weighed in at Microsoft’s Professional Developers Conference today on the battle between different smartphone platforms (including Windows Mobile). It’s not the applications available on the different platforms that will be the differentiators, Ozzie said, even though that’s what many companies and writers seem to focus on.

“All the apps that count will be ported to every one of them,” he said. It’s a completely different situation from the PC market, where software’s built to run on a Windows or a Mac, he said. Mobile apps require very little development, so it’s much easier to bring them onto every platform.

Stupid and wrong, but what else is he going to say? There’s nothing truthful or accurate he could say about mobile development that looks good for Microsoft. If I were at Microsoft, I’d say their best bet should be to start arguing that mobile web apps are the future of mobile development, rather than native apps. That might actually be true, and it actually gives them a chance — if they were either able to produce a WebKit-caliber mobile browser or willing simply to adopt WebKit themselves. A big if, but at least that’s possible.

Good Question ★

Good question raised by Guy English: Why is it OK for the new Star Wars: Trench Run iPhone game to include this image of an iPhone, when many other apps, like for example Instapaper, have been rejected for including original icon artwork that merely resembles an iPhone?

Scene From a Microsoft Store ★

Jiminy.

‘My Perfect Day Is Sitting in a Room With Some Blank Paper. That’s Heaven. That’s Gold and Anything Else Is Just a Waste of Time.’ ★

Terrific WSJ interview with Cormac McCarthy:

WSJ: How does that ticking clock affect your work? Does it make you want to write more shorter pieces, or to cap things with a large, all-encompassing work?

CM: I’m not interested in writing short stories. Anything that doesn’t take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

Silent Over-the-Air Software Update Fixes Droid Camera Bug? ★

Am I the only one who thinks that if Apple issued an over-the-air iPhone software update — no notice, no confirmation — that it would generate a Category 5 shit storm?

Update: Oops, too quick to judge on this one. Here’s a forum thread suggesting that there was no software update, but instead that it is a date-based bug:

There’s a rounding-error bug in the camera driver’s autofocus routine (which uses a timestamp) that causes autofocus to behave poorly on a 24.5-day cycle. That is, it’ll work for 24.5 days, then have poor performance for 24.5 days, then work again.

The 17th is the start of a new “works correctly” cycle, so the devices will be fine for a while. A permanent fix is in the works.

Droid users who set their clocks back a few days now have the autofocus problem again.

Basic Maths ★

New from Khoi Vinh and Allan Cole: a sharp, clever, grid-based theme for WordPress. Customizable and well-documented. $45.

Dan Provost on Interruptions From the iPhone SMS App ★

Dan Provost:

My proposal has nothing to do with running apps in the background, but rather, to improve the way the native out-of-the-box apps run in the foreground. As an iPhone user, my ultimate annoyance is receiving a text message notification while using an app, and not being able to reply to the message without exiting the app. The proposed solution (demonstrated in the video below) has the messaging interface open up in the foreground when “Reply” is tapped, rather than exiting the app.

Receiving an SMS you wish to reply to while using an app that loses context when you quit/relaunch is, without question, one of my biggest iPhone peeves. I filed a Radar enhancement request on this back in July and it was marked as a duplicate.

(Also, dig the title of Provost’s weblog.)

Star Wars: Trench Run Game Released for iPhone ★

Oh hell yeah.