I got about 14 minutes of fame back in January with a blog post, wherein I grumbled about (among other things) how I disliked Apple’s culture of secrecy, and announced that I’d left Apple to work on my own, unspecified, project. In the intervening three months, I haven’t said anything about what that project is, almost as though it were … secret.

The irony of this is not lost on me.

Admittedly, there are things about my … MORE

I’ve been waiting eagerly for my pre-ordered copy of Photoshop Elements 6 to arrive. The previous version I had was 2.0(!) which had been balky for a long time and totally lost the will to live (or launch) when I installed Leopard two years ago. Acorn and Pixelmator are nice apps, but they just don’t do everything I need an image editor to do — I don’t mean the “pro” features, rather the labor-saving conveniences … MORE

Speaking of Arthur C. Clarke, another of his achievements was to live a long life without making a complete ass of himself. A goal we should all emulate, but one that’s eluded too many other SF writers.

For example! Take Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, who, having ceased putting any mental effort into their writing at least 25 years ago, now have the free time, in their dotage, to advise top government officials on … MORE

Cabel Sasser, of indie developer Panic, reports from Japan:

“Within minutes of riding on the first trains in Japan, I notice a significant change in advertising, from train to television. The trend? No more printed URLs. The replacement? Search boxes! With recommended search terms!” [*]

He goes on to note how common it is for people to type URLs or domain names into their browser’s search box instead of the address field. To American geeks this … MORE

Arthur C. Clarke’s death hit me harder than other recent obituaries, even though it’s been decades since I read much by him. His were some of the first science fiction stories I read, at the age of ten or eleven; and for several years after that he was my favorite author.

I remember, during one of our long summer trips visiting the extended family in Germany, finding one of his story collections in the small English-language … MORE

I bow to my esteemed colleague Craig Hockenberry’s greater experience in iPhone development; but I must disagree with his take on the infeasibility of background applications. He gives two reasons why networked apps shouldn’t run in the background — one technical and one user-interface.

Battery life.

The heart of the problem are the radios. Both the EDGE and Wi-Fi transceivers have significant power requirements. Whenever that hardware is on, your battery life is going to … MORE

I had lost this historical document for a long time, but finally found it the other day on an old backup CD. It’s the original 1997 sketch I made of a chat user interface based on speech balloons.
… MORE

CUPERTINO, California—March 14, 2008—Apple® today announced that more than 10,000 iPhone™ developers have received enigmatically-worded rejection letters for the beta iPhone Developer Program. The iPhone Developer Program provides developers with a complete and integrated process for developing, debugging, and distributing applications for iPhone and iPod touch, complete with real-world testing on iPhone.

“Developer reaction to our email has been incredible with more than 1,000 snarky posts and irate comments on high-profile Mac websites,” said Philip Schiller, … MORE

This is pretty scary — a proof-of-concept attack that disables authentication in Windows within seconds, just by plugging in a special FireWire peripheral. It’s well-known that with physical access to a computer you can compromise it; but generally that involves activities that are time-consuming or blatantly obvious, like rebooting from a CD or swapping out hard drives. This new attack, though, takes only a few seconds; and the peripheral might look as innocuous as an … MORE