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That’s What She Said Jokes – Teaser

 

My first iPhone application, That’s What She Said Jokes, is waiting for approval from Apple and will soon be available on the iTunes Store.

For more information about the application and to sign up to be emailed once the application is live on the store, visit the That’s What She Said Jokes site at: http://twss.macfanatic.net/

I’d love to hear some feedback on the site design and can’t wait to get this application into your hands!

Upcoming iPhone Application

 

I’m really excited to announce that my first iPhone application, That’s What She Said Jokes, wil soon be available on the iTunes App Store!

From the App Store description:

That’s What She Said Jokes is the perfect companion for your iPhone or iPod Touch. Browse both user submitted and featured scenarios focusing on That’s What She Said! Get involved by submitting your own That’s What She Said funnies and commenting and rating hilarious entries submitted by others just like you!

I’ll be submitting the application for review later today and then the wait is on the App Store review team. Hopefully the app will be for sale later this week, at $0.99USD.

TechCrunch Intern Accepts Gifts for Writing

 

An intern writing for TechCrunch has taken responsibility for accepting a gift in exchange for writing one article, and asking for compensation on at least one other occasion.

Michael Arrington from Tech Cruch:

This was not one of our full time writers, and so the frequency of posts was light. Nevertheless, we’ve also deleted all content created by this person on our blogs. We are fairly certain that most of the posts weren’t tainted in any way, but to be sure we’ve removed every word written by this person on the TechCrunch network.

I agree that this is a very sad occasion for Tech Crunch, which will undoubtedly have to defend opinions and reviews for a few months at the very least.  While I don’t condone the intern’s actions, he was a young adult writing for a large website and probably got carried away.  I personally won’t take the information found on Tech Crunch any less seriously than I had before.

Daniel Brusilovsky, the intern from Tech Crunch, has publicly made a statement on his blog entitled, The Line was Crossed.

This is the first day of the next learning stage for me. Yes, I am young, but from here, I can only learn more. To my family, friends, colleagues and especially, TechCrunch, I am sorry. I am taking this entire experience, learning and moving on.

The basis of this situation is simply trust.  No matter if you are using an international news publication or a tech blog for all the Mac enthusiasts out there, you have to trust the authors.  Sadly, that trust has been broken.

Microsoft’s Internal Struggle

 

NY Times Contributor Dick Brass provides some insight into Microsoft’s corporate culture and why the giant company struggles in delivering cohesive products to the masses.

Internal competition is common at great companies. It can be wisely encouraged to force ideas to compete. The problem comes when the competition becomes uncontrolled and destructive. At Microsoft, it has created a dysfunctional corporate culture in which the big established groups are allowed to prey upon emerging teams, belittle their efforts, compete unfairly against them for resources, and over time hector them out of existence.

This statement actually makes me feel a little sorry for Microsoft engineers.  I hadn’t given much thought to the fact that there are many talented people at Microsoft and sadly the internal competition and office politics restrict the company’s effectiveness.

Read more from the NY Times.

EMKeychain 1.0 Released

 

EMKeychain is a Cocoa class-wrapper  for viewing and modifying the Mac OS X Keychain.

Very simple interface and would be a great addition to any developer’s toolkit.  From ExtendedMac Software:

EMKeychain v1.0 is now available. With it comes the following changes:

  • Re-written for Objective-C 2.0 features, like properties.
  • Ability to remove a keychain item.
  • Streamlined design — no more proxy!
  • Fixes for memory leaks and other bugs.
  • Complete documentation.

Check out the ExtendedMac article here.

“Open Access to Content and Applications” – Adobe CTO

 

It took the Adobe executive a few days to release an official announcement regarding the recently announced iPad and the lack of Flash support on the new device, but a statement has been made.

CTO Kevin Lynch wrote a wonderful snippet regarding user choice in technologies:

Engaging with ideas and information also means ensuring there is an open ecosystem and freedom to view and interact with the content and applications a user chooses. This model of open access has proven to be more effective in the long term than a walled approach, where a manufacturer tries to determine what users are able to see or approves and disapproves individual content and applications. We strongly believe the web should remain an open environment with consistent access to content and applications regardless of your viewing device.

While I personally hate developing in Flash and whole heartedly embrace HTML5 and CSS3 as the future of web development, that’s a personal choice.  I love the freedom to make that choice and I’ve mad the decision based on my experiences.

I think that most developers would probably switch to something besides Adobe Flash, if there were solutions available to all users.  I applaud Apple for attempting to make “the world a better place” by removing Flash from its devices, but Apple is making a choice for all users.

It’s a tough decision to make.  Do you as a company restrict users to certain content and limit their ability to do general purpose computing?  Or are you in fact doing them a favor by removing possible headaches down the road?  Only time will tell.

Found via Webmonkey

Here, File File!

 

Just a heads up about a cute little iPhone application to be released “this coming January” – hopefully not January 2011 I would assume.

Here, File File! will simply allow you to access all your files from your Mac on the phone.  Including such nice things as streaming video from your Mac to your iPhone (and hopefully iPad once it comes out).  Definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Hit up the teaser site to signup for more news when it’s available.

Google Drops Support for IE6

 

In a win for everyone the world over, Google announced it was no longer supporting Internet Explorer 6 on Friday January 29th, 2010.

By no longer providing support for production products and in the development process, Google will free up more resources to innovate and provide better experiences for users.  As a developer of mostly web technologies, I would personally love to drop support for IE6 and move forward with HTML5.

Read more about the announcement on the Google Blog.

Pastebot for iPhone

 

Pastebot for iPhone warrants mentioning for two very important reasons.  It is an important enough application to have earned its place on my dock.  Phone, Messages, Pastebot, and Mail.  That is what is most important to me throughout my day.

First, the UI of the application is absolutely superb.  I place it in the top 5 of iPhone apps I have seen that leave no detail unthought, every pixel is used and beautifully designed.  The fact the application actually works like a charm and makes me more productive is merely convenience.

What really prompted this post, however, was the stunning website that accompanies the application.  It just reminds me that the iTunes store and the application aren’t the only places a developer really has to pour resources and soul into.  The simplest and gorgeously architected site really do go a good ways in creating a resoundingly impressive user experience.

Facebook Releases PHP Compiler

 

Facebook has just taken PHP to an entirely new level:

One common way to address these inefficiencies is to rewrite the more complex parts of your PHP application directly in C++ as PHP Extensions. This largely transforms PHP into a glue language between your front end HTML and application logic in C++. From a technical perspective this works well, but drastically reduces the number of engineers who are able to work on your entire application. Learning C++ is only the first step to writing PHP Extensions, the second is understanding the Zend APIs. Given that our engineering team is relatively small — there are over one million users to every engineer — we can’t afford to make parts of our codebase less accessible than others.

I can’t wait to download the source to this project and really give it a go through. As a computer science major, this interests me greatly on an academic level. As a programmer, I’d love to see how this performs in a production environment and if I could handle the changes to my PHP development workflow.

The facebook developer article explaining the changes and why it is such a big deal is a great read.  Highly encourage it.