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latest post, “Private”, calls Erica Sadun to task for her invention of a distinction between “private APIs” and “unpublished API’s”.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  Her “unpublished” APIs are APIs that are available in public frameworks, but not documented in the headers.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.

In which a semi-automated system for the versioning of iPhone applications is detailed. Said system ensures that the reader’s apps are always correctly versioned, and his users’ iTunes applications are never confused by an update of his beta builds.

Versioning your iPhone applications properly ensures that your app updates go smoothly, and also that when you make a beta build testers never get into the frustrating state where iTunes refuses to accept it because of versioning conflicts, leaving them to have to delete the older version, and its settings and documents along with it.

The system presented here is largely ...

In which a category allowing the creation of UIImages from Unicode characters, suitable for use as Tab Bar icons, is created, but a state of mild displeasure at the implementation of said category is engendered.

Adding a ‘test’ tab to my in-development iPhone app, I had a dilemma. My troublesome aesthetic sense was telling me that, despite being seen by no-one but me, it needed a good looking icon. My sense of efficiency, though, was telling me “No! Don’t ...

The FSF has published their “5 reasons to avoid iPhone 3G”.  They have some valid points, but I’d be much more likely to respect them if the things like this they produced were not laden in hyperbole.  The article is full of it, but one piece of ‘information’ in particular struck me:

It's also a tracking device, and like other proprietary GPS-enabled phones, can transmit your location without your knowledge

First, GPS is passive.  The phone receives GPS signals from the satellites, it doesn’t transmit them to the satellites.  ‘They’ can’t track you just because you have a GPS ...