Decent disclosure: Apple has “decided to drop the non-disclosure agreement for released iPhone software.” In a just world, the inevitable apologists that told everyone to “stop complaining” would be unable to consume this fruit of dissent. But they’ll enjoy the better software that discussion permits (oh, the controversy) the same as earlier anti-whining-whiners cashed their early-adopter penalty rebates. (Yes, it’s a great idea to raise prices when supply is tight—they should try that on gasoline in the American south right now—but you need to let your longtime customers in on a strategy that breaks with company history so that they can make an informed choice to wait otherwise you’re not constraining demand very much, duh.)

Moving at Spde: the OpenGL library works now, on Mac at least, and most of the other libraries too. Spde is available in date-stamped application package torrents. Here’s a challenge: rewrite the Matrix example to be less flagrantly procedural! (Don’t hate—it was a rush job.)

Lazy code successful! A reader has offered an improved Matrix for Spde, slaying the whiles with sweet for expressions. The diff is good and bloody.

DF states its position: “a closed, controlled App Store can work, but by definition that requires developers to place trust in Apple. The problem is that Apple is managing the App Store in certain untrustworthy ways.” It’s about as likely that Apple will behave itself with this awesome power as it is that they will give it up. Odds are, they’ll do neither until an app shows up on a competing platform that captures the the public’s imagination, an app that would or might have been rejected, or whose programmers just had too much self-respect to play the App Store game. This will happen eventually. Until then we’ll probably keep complaining, frustrated by dashed hopes of the next-generation Apple computer that might have been.

If you hate dependency injection, you’ll hate it less with compile-time checking!

Dvorak and other non-Qwerty layouts benefit from a clever newish feature in Ubuntu: if a command key combo isn’t mapped in the current layout, it’s looked for in other layouts. This is almost as good as the DQ layout that the Mac has had forever, where command keys always map to their Qwerty positions. For all fifteen people in the world that use Dvorak and care about handy command keys, Ubuntu has surpassed Windows and approached Mac OS in yet another measure. (And if the typing layout is something other than Dvorak or Qwerty, Ubuntu is tops.) When will we be able to customize the order that command layouts are attempted, or is it already possible outside the UI?

Friggin’ tips: Enabling parallel garbage collection can smooth out animation based on immutable data structures, even on single-core machines. Update: but you have to tell Java 6 that you really mean it.

Jetty’s original, killer feature was that it could easily be embedded in an application. Everyone thought this was useless and lined up to buy licenses for big honking app servers that made debugging impossible, but now Jetty is suddenly inside the Java webprojects with the most street cred. { previously }

Which MacBook are you? None of the below, but isn’t it cute how the Air, as of this afternoon, shamefully turns away in product shots to hide its old timey non-black screen border? The current iMac is the best computer Apple has ever made, and all, but the screen border fetish it kicked off is lame-o. No one cares. They’re more concerned that those aren’t pixels, and that the enclosed functional area is obscured by glare. Also aluminum is cold, or hot, and generally uncomfortable to rest palms upon. When you come up with something that doesn’t resemble a cookie sheet, give us a call. { related }

What You Are Not Seeing “every user of a WYSIWYG processor has to acquire intuitive knowledge of their editor’s internal markup language and its quirks without actually ever seeing it displayed on the screen. The ease of use is an illusion that fades away as soon as you need to create a docum­ent that is more complex than a one page memo or a thank you letter.”

Scala books in progress

xkcd blows the Dinosaur Comics stack.

Can’t touch this: “Today i read about touchless an open­source sdk microsoft has released. it enables you to track objects using a simple webcam to create apps similar to a multitouch display. then i spent about 20 minutes coding a pro­cessing sketch that does roughly the same :-)”. Oh, snap! And yes it does work.

Off key: “You can say a lot of things about C#, but writing C# in Visual Studio is a far smoother experience than is writing Objective-C in Xcode.”

Programming in Scala is at the famous printers: “we’ll be shipping printed copies to all those who bought them the second and third week of November.”

Flight to old text editors: “This bothers me because I value craftsmanship in software, and most of these application-like Emacs modes are crude solutions to the problems they attempt to solve. They’re deemed acceptable only because they have the feature of being Emacs-hosted and thus customized to the user’s peculiarities.” { related }

If your office uses Sonicwall, the TSA of small business computer networks, here is the magical setting to make it stop screwing up Safari.

Jetty for Android: “the coolest new feature is the ability to download and install webapps from remote http servers on the fly. All you need to do is enter the url of the remote webapp and the context path at which you’d like it to be deployed.” Funny what happens when you let people program. What will local webapps on a hand-held device be good for? If there weren’t any open—or, traditional—platforms, we’d never know.