I think that the idea, and it was almost taken as religion, is that once we got to the point where you could write web apps, and that web apps would run everywhere, that was some sort of end point in the continuum of how software evolved. […] Not everybody, certainly not everybody, but there were a large number of people who I think sort of took it, and still take it […], this dogma that web apps are the future.

Google has acquired the development team that produces the excellent Mac and iPhone email app Sparrow. Development of the app is being stopped so that the developers can “[join] the Gmail team to accomplish a bigger vision.” Like many, I find this news disappointing. I bought both the iPhone and Mac versions of Sparrow. I use it daily on my iPhone, and intermittently on my Mac. It’s a great app on both platforms.

I posted YACYAML, the Cocoa YAML parser/object archiver I’ve been working on for a little while to GitHub today. It converts Cocoa objects to and from YAML, a plain text, human friendly data serialization format. YACYAML can be used in lots of ways - from replacing plists or JSON for simple config files, up to storing entire custom documents in an easy to view (and easy to hand-edit) format. Why have I made this?

It’s commonly held that iOS has no built in Base64 routines (a strange omission, if you ask me). Pootling around in the BSD headers today though, I discovered this is not entirely true. There are a couple of functions hidden away in libresolv.dylib. That’s the, err, BIND-9 DNS resolution library… If you’re not put off by linking to BIND just to get Base64 translation, it’s easy to use. Here’s the interface (publicly declared in a less readable fashion in resolv.

By all means, learn enough programming to put together a prototype and have a better perspective on hiring and managing engineers. Just don’t mistake a foothold in the world of coding for true engineering expertise. Buzz Andersen, commenting on Jeff Atwood’s Please Don’t Learn to Code This “Don’t Learn to Code” vs. “Everyone Should Learn to Code” meme fascinates me. I pretty much agree with everything Buzz says.

It’s painful, hard, and often time-consuming to restart when you’re already done, but you can’t argue with the results. Both Apple and Nintendo create some of the best, most inspired design out there. Lukas Mathis, in Chabudai Gaeshi When people ask me what Apple’s dev process has that’s different to other places, I always gravitate towards this, even though it sometimes seems ludicrous. In my time working there, I must personally have seen years-worth, probably decades-worth (and, from afar perhaps even centuries-worth) of work simply discarded because it turned out not to be ‘right’ or ‘good’.