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Items tagged apple in 2009

Filters: Year: 2009 × apple × Sorted by date


Programmers don’t use launch-fast-and-iterate out of laziness. They use it because it yields the best results. By obstructing that process, Apple is making them do bad work, and programmers hate that as much as Apple would.

Paul Graham # 19th November 2009, 10:13 pm

Multitouch on Unibody MacBooks. FingerMgt is a lovely little app that illustrates quite how sensitive the touchpad on modern MacBooks is —it can track up to 11 touch points and measure pressure as well as location. # 6th November 2009, 2:44 pm

This is very interesting technology. But that Adobe would go to this length suggests that they suspect that Apple will never allow the Flash runtime on the iPhone.

John Gruber # 6th October 2009, 7:33 am

Look at Sony, or Microsoft, or Google, or anyone. They still don’t get it. They’re still out there talking about chips, or features, or whatever. Or now they’re all hot for design. But they think design means making pretty objects. It doesn’t. It means making a system of pieces that all work together seamlessly. It’s not about calling attention to the technology. It’s about making the technology invisible.

Fake Steve Jobs # 28th September 2009, 10:40 pm

Developing for the iPhone at the moment is like picking up dimes in front of a bulldozer.

Tim Bray # 21st September 2009, 5:30 pm

Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard: the Ars Technica review. The essential review: 23 pages of information-dense but readable goodness. Pretty much everything I know about Mac OS X internals I learnt from reading John Siracusa’s reviews—this one is particularly juice when it gets to Grand Central Dispatch and blocks (aka closures) in C and Objective-C. # 1st September 2009, 7:05 pm

When we get the tools to do distributed Twitter, etc., we get the tools to communicate in stanzas richer than those allowed by our decades-old email clients. Never mind Apple being anti-competitive, social networks are the peak of monopolistic behaviour today.

Blaine Cook # 13th August 2009, 1:06 pm

Unlike progressive downloads, HTTP Live Streaming actually does stream content in real time, although there can be a latency of as much as 30 seconds. [...] the content to be broadcast is encoded into an MPEG transport stream and chopped into segments that are around ten seconds long. Rather than getting a continuous stream of new data over RTSP, the new protocol simply asks for the first couple clips, then asks for additional clips as needed. This works great through firewalls, and doesn’t require any special servers because any standard web server can deliver the chopped up video segments.

Prince McLean # 9th July 2009, 12:52 pm

Fake Reviews. Now now kids, play nice... Not at all surprised to hear this—nefarious iPhone app developers (in this case the team behind “London Tube”, an inferior version of Malcolm Barclay’s marvellous “Tube Deluxe”) have been caught leaving fake negative reviews on rival applications in the App Store. This is an excellent argument for adding friends/followers or importing an existing social graph—I’d much rather see reviews from people in my social network than strangers who may turn out to be sock puppets. # 22nd May 2009, 12:49 am

Critical Mac OS X Java Vulnerabilities. There’s a five month old Java arbitrary code execution vulnerability which hasn’t yet been patched by Apple. Disable Java applets in your browser until it’s fixed, or random web pages could execute commands on your machine as your user account. # 19th May 2009, 7:07 pm

Perhaps it’s just frustration speaking here, but when Apple ties my hands behind my back and lets users punch me publicly in the face without allowing me to at least respond back, it’s hard to get excited about building an app.

Garrett Murray # 22nd April 2009, 12:17 pm

The App Store has an inscrutable, time-consuming, whim-dependent approval process. The App Store newsgroup postings are full of angry claims that this is a bug, but I bet it’s a feature. If you can’t get an app approved until it’s working perfectly, and you have to wait a week or two -- or more -- between approval rounds, you’re much more likely to put a lot more effort in up front to get it right.

Marc Hedlund # 12th April 2009, 1:49 pm

Apple shows us DRM’s true colors. The EFF reviews the various places that Apple still applies DRM (including locking iPhones to carriers, licensing authentication chips for iPod accessory vendors, preventing OS X from loading on generic PCs) and concludes that “the majority of these DRM efforts do not have even an arguable relation to ’piracy.’” # 18th January 2009, 10:16 am