Marco Arment lays out the arguments against Apple’s new in-app purchase requirements for iOS apps:
This is partially defensible: Apple’s promotions in the App Store certainly bring a lot of people to apps, and it’s all happening on their hardware and platform. But if someone wants the Wall Street Journal app and finds it by searching for “WSJ†in the App Store and selecting it directly, who really brought that customer to the app?
On February 3, 2011, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA), which manages the allocation and assignment of IP addresses from the IPv4 address space, allocated the last remaining /8 blocks to the five regional Internet registries. While the Internet isn’t going to break because of this, it’s an important milestone on the road to worldwide IPv6 deployment. Read More
The life of a professional developer became so much easier in the late ’90s. With the Internet at our fingertips, the answer to almost every problem as close as a well-crafted search query. Read More
Kwoon is a French post-rock band. I discovered them when a friend sent me a link to the video for “I lived on the Moon,” from their first record Tales and Dreams.
I lived on the Moon from Yannick Puig on Vimeo.
Tales and Dreams (iTunes, Amazon MP3
When the flowers were singing… (iTunes, Amazon CD
I’m pleased to announce the availability of mod_proxy_content, an Apache 2.x module that is essential for reverse proxying modern web content. It is a fork of mod_proxy_html 3.0.1, with bug fix patches through 3.1.2, enhanced to better handle CSS and Javascript content without the need to create messy regular expressions in the Apache configuration files. It does not depend on mod_xml2enc, and so has the same problems with non-ASCII/UTF-8 as mod_proxy_html without mod_xml2enc. Read More
Much has been said over the last 2½ years about the App Store and places where Apple is failing third-party developers. Many things have been fixed, but unfortunately, many more have been neglected or only partially addressed. On January 22, 2011, the App Store surpassed 10 billion downloads. Let’s assume 1% of those are paid and Apple only takes the minimum 29¢ for each one. That’s still $29 million. Apple needs to do a lot more to earn their 30% cut. Read More
For 2011, I’m going to start a new semi-regular series called Music to Code By. I’ve worked enough places to know that most developers often resort to headphones to shut out the distractions around them, especially on “open plan” work areas. Even in a private office, I find that music can help me to focus on solving a thorny problem. Different styles work for different times, and of course everyone’s taste varies, but I’m hoping that you’ll be introduced to records you might not have found otherwise.
Following Josh’s lead, this is what I shipped in 2010. Read More
Our latest iOS app, Christmas Lights Finder, is now available on the App Store.
This app has been tumbling around in my head for almost a year. Our kids really like looking at the lights people put on their houses and in their yards, but they don’t always have the longest attention span, especially at night when they are tired. While it’s fine to aimlessly drive around and look at lights, I thought it would be far better, and more fun for mom and dad, if we had an idea of where to go to see really great lights. What better than an app on your phone to point the way? Read More
Of the handful of plug-ins I’ve written for Rails over the years, the one I install on new projects almost with thinking is sql_logging. I wrote that plug-in almost three years ago and it continues to work on Rails 2.3 apps today.
That isn’t true on Rails 3, though, so over the last few days I’ve taken the time to reevaluate the plug-in and figure out how to do the same work in Rails 3. The result is the new sql-logging gem. The source is hosted on GitHub and the gem itself is available, like any other, on rubygems.org.
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