“150-300 ms - Occupant becomes aware of collision.”

Catching up on my RSS reading, my eyes were drawn to this article, from the excellent “Mind Hacks” blog (which you really should subscribe to if your feed selection could do with some broadening). The drive of the article is just how slow a human is to react to a fast-changing situation - that a person in a car crash is not actually aware of it until after it’s ‘complete’. Their timeline of a crash, however, also gives an amazing insight into just how much self-analysis a modern car ...

“The Application “Application Name” was not installed on the iPhone “iPhone Name” because it could not be verified.”

I seem to have the worst luck with creating ad-hoc-provisioned iPhone apps. Fresh from discovering this when trying to release the last beta version of my app, I was hit with another problem with the same outward symptoms this time. Here it is, for web-posterity too, in the hope that it may save others from the hours of frustration and completely unnecessary futzing with certificates, keys, and the iPhone Program Portal site:

Don’t have files with colon characters (‘:’, displayed as ‘/’ ...

I think the sentiment expressed in this strip is the single main sapper of my productivity when coding. Whenever I approach something that I haven’t yet nailed down the implementation details of, I become almost paralysed, trapped in a negotiation with myself on what the “easiest”, “best”, “cleanest” way to do it would be. There should be a term for it. “Implementation Anxiety”?

[With thanks to Sanjay Samani for the Calvin and Hobbes snap]

John Gruber’s latest post, “Private”, calls Erica Sadun to task for her invention of a distinction between “private APIs” and “unpublished API’s”.  I completely agree.  The distinction is nonsensical.

On technical grounds, of course, it’s a valid distinction, if not a valid characterisation.  Her “unpublished” APIs are APIs that are available in public frameworks, but not documented in the headers.  Her “private” APIs are APIs in private frameworks (i.e. those with no headers, installed in the “PrivateFrameworks” directory, as opposed to the “Frameworks” directory).

There’s also a distinction from a programmer-level point of view.  It’s much easier to ...

“The Application “Application Name” was not installed on the iPhone “iPhone Name” because it could not be verified.”

For web-posterity, a small thing I discovered: If your iPhone app beta testers are getting this error (probably along with an “ApplicationVerificationFailed” message from iTunes in the console), it’s possibly because you used command-line ‘zip’ to compress your app file, and it clobbered the symlinks within it, rendering the signature invalid.

If want to use command line zip to compress signed iPhone apps, you need to use the -y flag to get it to preserve symlinks.