PEBKAC

Over the last 5-10 years though C has fallen out of favor with the young hipster coders. You know the guys I'm talking about. The ones that have those hot pictures of their slightly pimply faces all done up in their best super model "Blue Steel" looks off to the right of their eloquent prose about how awesome Ruby's latest incremental feature is the coming of Jesus. Or, the guys who just write endlessly about Cucumber, or whatever the testing framework of the week is.

These are also the guys who love Apple. Mostly because DHH loves Apple. Never mind that getting up and running with Ruby on Rails on a Mac takes a metric fuck ton of ass raping while on Linux it's next to trivial (well, at least if you aren't on Debian). Nope, real coders use Apple because the typography is sooooo awesome. "Look at the serifs on my Ruby do block!"

I have even heard one ruby coder say these words:

"Typography is the most important part of information science."

What?! Uh, huh? Information science has nothing to do with typography. Why would anyone ever think that? Information science is about books and human knowledge and how it's stored and searched for and the fucking font doesn't matter. That's like saying 1+1=2 but 1+1=3 because it's "emphasized font".

Well today, I am in love with Steve Jobs. He apparently agrees with me that these guys shouldn't be coding.

In 1987, my company, Living Videotext, had a hit product -- MORE. It was one of very few products selling on the Mac platform, having shipped in the prior year. It led a new category we called Desktop Presentations. The other product in the category was PowerPoint, produced by a company named Forethought. 

I had a meeting with Bill Gates at Esther Dyson's conference in 1987, and he popped the question every developer wants to hear -- Can we buy you? I said of course. So we started negotiation, agreed on a price and due diligence began. Then I got a letter from Frank Gaudette, the CFO of the company, and a phone call from Gates, saying they decided not to do the deal. They were buying our competitor, PowerPoint.  

I totally wanted the deal. In 1987 Microsoft was freshly IPO'd. The deal was for stock, and its value had doubled while they deliberated. So I sent a letter basically begging them to do the deal, but I got back the rejection above. PowerPoint became a household name, and MORE did well, but I probably would have had more fun at Microsoft, and certainly would have made more money.

Seventeen years ago, on April 10th 1991, a plane landed in John F. Kennedy airport. That plane had just crossed the Atlantic carrying, amongst others, passengers escaping the crumbling Soviet empire. One of whom was me. I walked off that plane with a first ever taste of Coca-Cola in my mouth, a lame teenage mustache, and not a clue about what to expect.

When my sister emailed me on April 10th 2008 and reminded me of our immigration anniversary, I was suddenly overwhelmed with memories. A lot has happened since then. 17 years is such a long time that it is difficult to fathom. I am left with bits and pieces of memories and the person that I am today. Each memory by itself is rarely strong and profound. A single memory is a just a dot in your timeline. But when you pile the memories on top of each other, you get a bigger and better picture. Here is to everyone who made my American Dream come true and all of you who helped me grow as a software engineer.

In the new version of the iPhone Developer Program License Agreement released by Apple today (and which developers must agree to before downloading the 4.0 SDK beta), section 3.3.1 now reads:

3.3.1 — Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

My reading of this new language is that cross-compilers, such as the Flash-to-iPhone compiler in Adobe’s upcoming Flash Professional CS5 release, are prohibited. This also bans apps compiled using MonoTouch and Unity3D — tools that compiles C# and .NET apps to the iPhone. It’s unclear what this means for tools like Titanium and PhoneGap, but it sounds to me like they’re on the wrong side of this new rule, and the folks behind Appcelerator already realize they might be out of bounds.

There was no mention of this change during the announcement event today, but the language in the agreement doesn’t leave much wiggle room. It could hardly be more clear if they singled out Flash CS5 by name. (Wonder what Adobe does now? CS5 is thisclose to release and the iPhone compiler is the flagship feature in this version of Flash. They’re pretty much royally fucked.)

An animal that forages will hang out in a small area, looking for nuts or berries, then will realize it has used up all the likely sources in this spot. It will then head off in a random direction, walk many paces, and start foraging again. When you plot the Levy flight, it looks like this:

Someone discovers your site. They poke and prod and join and return and return again. Then they feel as though there's no more benefit and they move on, surfing until they find another place to forage.

Back in December of last year, John Gruber noticed that the on-handset iPhone user guide exhibited a bunch of behaviors that web apps normally couldn’t. Tool bars locked in place, clicks felt natural, and scrolling elements seem to emulate those found in native apps. He did a bit of tinkering, discovering that this was all made possible by a custom Javascript framework built by Apple called “PastryKit”. This iPad sorcery appears to be an extension of that.

The guys who brought it to our attention, Done21, are tentatively referring to this unannounced, not-quite-public framework as “AdLib”, after the file that contained it all: AdLib-ug-ipad.js. This name is by no means official – it’s just the best thing we’ve got, so far.

Coming in at just shy of 45,000 lines of code, the entire purpose of AdLib appears to be to bring native app-esque functionality to Web Apps, often counteracting the default behaviors that make Safari play nice with the rest of the web.