iPhone patents
Wil Shipley on Apple's decision to be aggressive on their iPhone patents: "But when you sue someone for doing something you do yourself, you become one of the bad guys. Can you name a company you admire that spends its... Read MoreMarch 3, 2010 12:31 PM
iPad
My quote from Cult of Mac sums up my feelings about the iPad from a business perspective: "I was so annoyed with the closed nature of the App Store that I stopped developing for the iPhone. The iPad will still... Read MoreFebruary 8, 2010 10:54 AM
Bodega bootstrap
I wrote the following before the iPad was announced. The world may have changed since then, but I'm posting it anyway. Enjoy. I like the content but not the title in John Casasanta's blog post about the so-called death of... Read MoreFebruary 2, 2010 10:24 PM
Clipstart 1.2.4
Clipstart 1.2.4 is done! It's a minor bug fix update but includes dozens of small improvements (and some not so small, if you're measuring not with new UI but in number of lines of code changed). I'm very happy with... Read MoreDecember 31, 2009 02:59 PM
Decentralization and no-SQL
I've been meaning to link to this since it was posted earlier in the year. Jens Alfke hopes for a decentralized future Web 3.0: "Centralization creates concentrations of power, and that's dangerous. The people who run the servers have total... Read MoreDecember 12, 2009 04:32 PM
The only 2 fixes for the iPhone platform
I let my iPhone developer account expire last week. Even though I had already stopped development on my iPhone projects, officially letting go of even the temptation to build for the iPhone platform has really helped me focus. The Rogue... Read MoreNovember 13, 2009 02:07 PM
It's okay to ignore the iPhone
I talked in Core Intuition episode 22 about how I've stopped working on my indie iPhone apps. Mike Ash is also done with it. He writes: "I have abandoned the platform. Apple's nonsense is just too much for me. There's... Read MoreSeptember 18, 2009 08:02 AM
Crippled iPhone LGPL
I mentioned on the latest Core Intuition that I no longer have any plans to release my own iPhone software. While that decision is mostly based on my unwillingness to give Apple so much control over my business, and frustrations... Read MoreSeptember 5, 2009 05:04 PM
Dreamhost scale
I get a lot of funny looks when I tell people I host everything on Dreamhost. It's not a great fit for everything — I have some ideas for projects that would be better suited to Amazon EC2, and who... Read MoreJuly 24, 2009 05:38 PM
$999 hope
Huge post from Craig Hockenberry on the App Store. Lots of good points. I especially like the insight comparing it to the music store, the need for upgrade revenue, and ideas for improving discoverability. Where I have a problem is... Read MoreJuly 14, 2009 02:41 AM
Apple competition in iPhone 3.0
There's always the risk when developing for Mac OS X that Apple will compete directly with your product. iTunes, Mail, and Safari are high-profile examples, as well as the "lightning strikes twice" hit of Watson/Sherlock and Sandvox/iWeb. That history is... Read MoreApril 17, 2009 10:19 AM
Twitter @wii
Last week my @wii account on Twitter passed 3000 followers and seems to finally be growing strong after a year of neglect. I now try to post once every couple days with Nintendo news, and I'll eventually throw in a... Read MoreMarch 30, 2009 09:46 PM
Brent Simmons on Git, plus blog anniversary
Brent Simmons is still looking for the perfect version control system: "People talk about how wonderful are features like re-writing history — and I read that stuff and think, 'Wow, Git's really cool and powerful.' But then I know it... Read MoreMarch 9, 2009 08:33 AM
Dave Winer rethinks auth
Dave Winer proposes a simple solution to revoking authentication in web services: "Now imagine that Twitter had a page that showed all the IP addresses that have used your login in the last 30 days, with a start date for... Read MoreJanuary 5, 2009 12:09 PM
Gruber on The Fear
I don't link to Daring Fireball much anymore. Everyone who cares about the Mac and reads my blog, also likely reads his. I will link or write about obviously redundant topics that everyone else is also writing about only when... Read MoreOctober 2, 2008 11:17 PM
Ajax as a scaling tool
When MobileMe launched with a beautiful new design, the web application suite was essentially unusable because of terrible performance. Timeouts and slow page refreshes were the norm. At the time, I didn't think too much of this. I just waited... Read MoreSeptember 30, 2008 01:05 PM
Developer-hostile platform
Paul Kafasis writes on the Rogue Amoeba blog: "I certainly feel like I've been talking about the iPhone a lot, particularly for a company that doesn't currently have any iPhone software available. There are many reasons for that, but perhaps... Read MoreSeptember 25, 2008 01:26 PM
River of news
No, I don't mean Dave Winer's thoughts on RSS reader design exactly, although that's part of it. It's more the way we in the technology community interact with the world. Hundreds of news feeds, company chat, external IRC channels, private... Read MoreSeptember 22, 2008 11:24 AM
BBEdit 9
BBEdit 9 is out, and it's a solid upgrade. A recently came across an old BBEdit 4 CD, which Rich Siegel gave me back in the mid 90s when I was helping run the WebEdge Mac web developer conference. Good... Read MoreSeptember 1, 2008 10:51 AM
Buzz on software entrepreneurship
Buzz Andersen responds to some of Mike Lee's recent blog posts: "We're living in the 'anyone can play guitar' era of software entrepreneurship. Because of the confluence of increasingly accessible developer tools and the Internet, it's now reasonable to think... Read MoreAugust 27, 2008 10:42 AM
I Am Rich
I wasn't going to give the silly $999 "I Am Rich" iPhone application any more attention after the initial laugh, but the more that everyone reacts to what went wrong the more clear it becomes that there is something to... Read MoreAugust 8, 2008 01:20 PM
Flip Ultra
I first heard of the Flip a few months ago, but it wasn't until this 37signals post that I started paying attention. I was attracted to the simplicity of the video camera: few buttons, decent quality, and kid-proof design. Here... Read MoreApril 24, 2008 08:07 AM
MacBook Air and Europe trip
The MacBook Air is the first Apple product to come along in years that I don't want to buy. It looks great, the multi-touch trackpad is cool and unexpected, and I like Remote Disk. But it's just not significantly different... Read MoreJanuary 17, 2008 02:38 PM
Give us a tablet already
I'm going to skip the usual Macworld predictions and cut straight to the good stuff: Apple needs a tablet for the huge numbers of artists and creative professionals who have stuck with the Mac for so long, or who are... Read MoreJanuary 15, 2008 10:31 AM
Android and getting real
Steven Frank on Google's phone announcement: "Find someone, ONE person, with a unique vision. Lock them in a room with some programmers and a graphic designer. Twenty people, tops. Change the world. Quit re-hashing the same old bullshit and telling... Read MoreNovember 9, 2007 07:45 AM
Welch on iPhone ringtones
Ambrosia Software's Andrew Welch in a TUAW interview: "The tack they are taking with the ringtones, though, is not 'We'll provide such great ringtones that you'll want to buy from us' but rather 'This is all you're ever going to... Read MoreOctober 3, 2007 10:38 AM
The Talk Show ad and porting to Windows
Episode 11 of The Talk Show is up, and I'm happy to say that Wii Transfer is this week's sponsor. Even if you've been subscribed since the first show, click over to see the new site design by Airbag Industries.... Read MoreOctober 1, 2007 01:28 AM
Not a C4 wrap-up post (iPhone!)
Soundtrack for this blog post: The Touch from the 1980s Transformers feature. Yesterday Apple announced new iPods, plus cool stuff like the Starbucks integration and iTunes Wi-fi Store. I was out at lunch and errands, so I followed the announcements... Read MoreSeptember 7, 2007 02:21 AM
Professional email app
Ignore that this post is a week late. While I was out sick last week there was a great discussion across blogs about email clients, starting with Brent Simmons and then to Paul Kafasis while passing through several good blogs... Read MoreJuly 13, 2007 03:42 PM
Apple announcements and Flash video
If you are wondering why I haven't posted here in over a month, it's because I've been getting my writing fix over on Twitter, in 140 characters or less a couple times a day. Still trying to figure out the... Read MoreMay 30, 2007 11:09 PM
Spoiled by iTunes, and the future of music
I have been iTunes-free for four weeks now, and I hate it. It must be like quitting smoking, except without the fear of dying always at your back. I stopped by a Best Buy the other day and couldn't find... Read MoreFebruary 7, 2007 11:37 PM
I hate domains
There is a story behind the name Riverfold, but it's probably not a very good one and I won't go on a tangent by telling it here. What I will say is that I hate domain names. Maybe it's because... Read MoreJanuary 29, 2007 11:21 PM
Macworld 2007 predictions
Dan covers his Macworld predictions in great detail. Instead of predictions, since mine will probably be wrong, I'm going to list what I want to see: Tablet. I tend to agree with Steven Frank's analysis more than this former Apple... Read MoreJanuary 5, 2007 07:27 AM
Goodbye iTMS
When I started on the music sharing feature in the upcoming 2.0 release of Wii Transfer, I knew it couldn't support protected songs from the iTunes Music Store. Still, it was disappointing when I started using it and such a... Read MoreJanuary 3, 2007 11:36 PM
The web is incomplete
When we use Google everyday and mostly work with technology and related topics that are well indexed, it's easy to forget the truth: the web is horribly incomplete. I've been doing some research for an upcoming podcast and it's very... Read MoreSeptember 2, 2006 10:34 PM
RailsConf 2006
I attended RailsConf in Chicago last month. There's a lot of excitement in the Rails community right now, and it was nice to be there for the first year before it explodes to the even bigger event that the... Read MoreJuly 20, 2006 09:31 AM
Three text editors
I love reading about the setup for other Mac users: what kind of desks, computers, and software they use. The full list of applications usually overlaps quite a bit with my own Dock, but every once in a while there... Read MoreApril 20, 2006 11:13 PM
Happy Easter, and TextDrive to DreamHost
Easter is a time of rebirth and starting over. So today I’m flipping over two new things. The first, to fulfill a new year’s resolution that died before February. I rearranged my office and drawing desk yesterday to make... Read MoreApril 16, 2006 09:21 PM
iPods, videos, and U2
Steve Jobs in yesterday’s special event, discussing the white iPods: “It’s been a huge success for us, and therefore it’s time to replace it.” The new iPods look great. At first I was disappointed by the $1.99 price for music... Read MoreOctober 13, 2005 02:50 PM
Transitions
Even before I arrived in San Francisco, and even before the rumors surfaced of Apple switching to Intel, this WWDC looked to be a unique one. For the first time since I can remember, the conference was mostly going to... Read MoreJune 7, 2005 12:18 AM
Integrating web applications
We all use web apps. Google Maps or Mapquest, Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail, Basecamp and FogBugz. The ubiquity of these services has reached the point where it is increasingly useful to point to them from other applications, web or native.... Read MoreMay 17, 2005 08:32 PM
WebTV in the trash
The other day I went for a walk and on the way back picked up a candy wrapper on the sidewalk, to throw away when I got home. If I pick up other people’s trash (not a frequent activity, but... Read MoreMay 9, 2005 12:04 AM
Respect to Dave
Dave Winer turned 50 today. I first met Dave over 9 years ago, back when the free release of Frontier ruled web application development and automation on the Mac. I ran the frontier-talk mailing list for a time, was... Read MoreMay 2, 2005 09:16 PM
Ajax, Flash, and web standards
We should all be weary of new acronyms lest we promote and give significance to half-baked ideas and fads. But Jesse James Garrett’s Ajax essay is a good read — a concise, high-level look at how JavaScript and XML will... Read MoreFebruary 22, 2005 01:51 PM
Google and the great apps to come
Google Desktop Search is a neat app. The integration of local and global results is brilliant. But it’s not the future of desktop search. David Galbraith said something interesting in a post titled “Google lock in”: “Whatever Microsoft do, Google... Read MoreDecember 10, 2004 08:57 PM
Voice recording
I bought a Griffin iTalk earlier this week. Not entirely an impulse buy, but I did drive over to the local Apple Store instead of ordering online. I’ve been wanting the ability to record on my iPod since I received... Read MoreOctober 14, 2004 02:36 PM
Lowercase web
Wired News will no longer capitalize internet, web, or net: “But in the case of internet, web and net, a change in our house style was necessary to put into perspective what the internet is: another medium for delivering and... Read MoreAugust 20, 2004 12:07 PM
The iTunes Platform
It’s no secret that iTunes is one of Apple’s best apps. Of all the iApps, iTunes remains the only one I have no critical feature requests for. With version 4.5, Apple adds to what was already a solid app, and... Read MoreMay 12, 2004 03:54 PM
Thank you Radio, and TypeKey
After two years of using Radio Userland, I decided to migrate this weblog to Movable Type. I wrote a UserTalk script to export my data for importing into Movable Type, and everything went about as well as could be expected.... Read MoreMarch 20, 2004 11:27 PM
Reading, ASCII, and PDF
I started reading the electronic version of Eastern Standard Tribe. Hoping to get through some of it by SXSW and pick up a hard-copy there. I've also been reviewing my Cocoa books, since I've been porting the user interface of... Read MoreMarch 10, 2004 08:46 PM
VoodooPad
Something interesting is going on with VoodooPad, winner of O'Reilly's Mac OS X Innovators Content. It's the best front-end to a Wiki I've seen, but more than that, the implementation for talking to servers is XML-RPC based and open (overview... Read MoreNovember 17, 2003 09:36 AM
G5 vs. Power Mac 9600
My new G5 arrived last week. This machine replaces (supplements) my old TiBook, which was really showing signs of age even with Panther. It is an understatement to say the G5 is a fast machine, and it makes programming a... Read MoreNovember 15, 2003 09:36 AM
Apple and Pepsi
Today: Apple and Pepsi to Give Away 100 Million Free Songs Two decades ago, Steve Jobs to John Scully of Pepsi: "Do you want to sell sugar water for the rest of your life, or do you want to come... Read MoreOctober 16, 2003 06:27 PM
New and old web standards
Jeffrey Veen argues for the practical advantages of new web standards: "Huge interfaces squeezed through plodding modem connections have been a plague since the Web's inception. The increasing dominance of broadband has only helped a bit. A hotel phone line... Read MoreSeptember 19, 2003 11:14 AM
Email mistakes
John Gruber: "The elephant in the middle of the room, of course, is Apple Mail." For a while now I have regretted switching to Apple Mail. But this is not unusual, because I have regretted switching to every single email... Read MoreJune 23, 2003 01:38 PM
Simple friendly formats
SXSW has wrapped up for me, although many others will still be out partying long after I post this. I've had the chance to meet some interesting people. Some of them I have names and URLs for, some just faces... Read MoreMarch 11, 2003 09:29 PM
HTML 3.2 forever
In My Experience: "I still use html tables": "Fully abstracting your UI from its content takes skill and time. If you don't follow thru, you can negate much of the benefit you seek to create. Now stop and think. Do... Read MoreJanuary 13, 2003 10:56 AM
Zopey OpenDoc
Jeffrey Shell is building an OpenDoc-inspired framework on top of Zope.... Read MoreNovember 12, 2002 09:29 AM
Jeffrey Veen: Standards Still Matter.
Jeffrey Veen: Standards Still Matter. "Will there ever be a day when we can just assume that browsers will render our code correctly? Can we imagine a future in which we don't budget an extra 40 percent to ensure our... Read MoreSeptember 5, 2002 01:31 PM
Doug Baron points to an
Doug Baron points to an article on Schlotzsky's plan for free wireless around their restaurants. They're also looking into providing access for other areas such as libraries and schools. There's a Schlotzsky's about a mile from here, so I'll have... Read MoreAugust 10, 2002 01:16 PM
Yahoo Mail reset
I have used Yahoo for almost a decade. It wasn't long ago that I pointed to Yahoo and Google as great successes -- sites based on the idea that a simple, functional interface is what users want rather than some... Read MoreJuly 18, 2002 04:41 PM
Everyone's talking about web services
Everyone's talking about web services this week. Megnut: "All this talk about APIs and web services warms my heart. We've passed the nadir of the dot-com hype and we're coming back to the Web in interesting and important ways." Kottke:... Read MoreApril 19, 2002 01:57 PM
Hack the Planet has a
Hack the Planet has a long thread on publish and subscribe, OpenDoc, Microsoft, and the new Apple. From Paul Snively: "It's a commonplace among folks I know that Microsoft doesn't get anything right until it's at 3.0, but implicit in... Read MoreApril 16, 2002 09:58 AM
Joel Spolsky, on Picking a
Joel Spolsky, on Picking a Ship Date: "Generally, people who buy "off-the-shelf" software don't want to be part of a Grand Development Experiment; they want something that anticipates their needs. As a customer, the only thing better than getting feature... Read MoreApril 15, 2002 08:18 AM
Peter Merholz: "I believe the
Peter Merholz: "I believe the degree of security folks are forced to place on their own system is far too draconian." Jacob Nielsen, from November 2000: "In reality, users simply write down difficult passwords, leaving the system vulnerable."... Read MoreApril 4, 2002 02:06 PM
From the Six Degrees weblog:
From the Six Degrees weblog: "Disorganized or Just Disorderly?", on the mess that we're in with email filters and the hierarchical file system. I've been eagerly awaiting a look at their product since I heard Joel mention it, but it's... Read MoreMarch 29, 2002 10:43 AM
In the latest CRYPTO-GRAM, Bruce
In the latest CRYPTO-GRAM, Bruce Schneier weighs in on the factoring breakthrough covered recently on SlashDot. While reading all the SlashDot posts -- that could best be summed up as "everyone update their PGP key sizes, quick!" -- I knew... Read MoreMarch 16, 2002 03:36 PM
