• Apple iPhone Developers Mostly Don’t Make Much Money – “Martin surveyed 100 development teams, received 85 usable responses, and found that 52% of the developers had earned less than $15,000 for their efforts and 33% earned less than $250.” Missed this one when it was first published. Bizarre to think that I’m doing better than a third of other iPhone developers!
• Trust, hostility, and the human side of Apple – “When the relationship’s power is so lopsided, the only sensible reason to stay in it is trust. If we can reasonably trust Apple to use its power reasonably and fairly, we can sustain the imbalance.”
• Don’t call what happened in Iran last week an election – Christopher Hitchens’ take on the recent events in Iran.

As if wandering around a conference centre before the start of the conference wasn’t enough, I also went to the south of the Bay Area to visit some of the major sights in Silicon Valley.

I started at the excellent Computer History Museum. I don’t doubt that most people would find this mind-numbingly dull but I thought that the large archive of “significant” computers was great. It would be easy to argue over the machines that were on display, the ones that were more significant or, well, less American¹.

Ever since I’ve been “into” Macs, Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference has been a draw. As an iPhone developer this years was especially interesting to me. Unfortunately it’s not a full time job to me so it was hard to justify the time off work or the expense of the ticket.

I was, however, in the Bay Area just before the event and managed to have a quick walk around Moscone. I felt a bit geeky taking pictures of a trade conference, but I wasn’t the only one doing so and I didn’t have my nose pressed against the glass unlike certain people!

• Apple drawing 3.0 line in the sand for iPhone developers – This can only mean that the release is getting pretty close. And, significantly, that the APIs are stabilising — I had to rewrite almost everything I did with the first beta when the latest version of the developer kit came out.
• DNA Database Doublecross – “Yet again this government shows its deep contempt for international courts, and demonstrates its profoundly cynical belief that the innocent simply haven’t been proved guilty yet.”
• Jacqui Smith enlists high street help for ID cards scheme – Doesn’t using high street shops to make ID cards make it substantially less secure? Wasn’t the whole point that ID cards were an unbreakable scheme? This just gets worse and worse.

• American Stonehenge: Monumental Instructions for the Post-Apocalypse – Who doesn’t love a good mystery?
• The Holy Faceble: Genesis:1-2 – The more I learn about Facebook, the less I want to join. Same with this god stuff.
• Rejected. – “It’s just frustrating when the problems crop up, because compared to nearly everything else about the whole setup, the problems seem so arbitrary, avoidable, and developer-hostile. For instance, this problem wouldn’t be nearly as frustrating if approval, even for minor updates to established apps, took less than 7-14 days.” Not that I’m bitter than a minor update to Yummy recently got rejected or anything…

• A thought experiment – “This presents a problem for customers who are still running the 2.2.1 firmware: they can’t get your fix until they upgrade to the 3.0 firmware.”
• U.S. support for Detroit would buy 50 million Tata Nanos – “What else might we do with $100 billion in this industry? Assuming that we could get a wholesale price of $2000 per car, that’s enough to buy 50 million four-passenger 54 mpg Tata Nanos. The fuel savings from driving Nanos to the 7-11 instead of monster SUVs would save taxpayers $100 billion every year.”
• Right to privacy broken by a quarter of UK’s public databases, says report – “The report, Database State by the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust, says that more than half of Whitehall’s 46 databases and systems have significant problems with privacy or effectiveness, and could fall foul of a legal challenge.” And people wonder why I’m against ID cards and internet snooping laws.

I’ve had my iPhone for over a year now. O2 have got more money out of me than they really deserve given how much I actually use it as a phone, but overall I’m still very happy with it. This is all the more surprising when you consider that I’ve been disappointed with pretty much every phone I’ve had over the years. The last one I was actually happy with was a Nokia 6310i, one of those boring but ultra-competent devices that basically just works. I even got nearly two weeks on a single charge; I barely get two days on the iPhone.

• ID Card Database *Already* Breached – “Yes, that will be a good excuse, won’t it: honest guv, I just inadvertently clicked on Gordon Brown’s ID card information….” Does anyone still think they’re a good idea? I especially like the argument that because it’s been broken it’s more secure. Nice.
• Who profits from the App Store? – A rather more balanced piece about the iTunes App Store than we typically see. Certainly I’m nearer the one copy a day end of the spectrum than the quarter of a million dollar in a couple of weeks you normally see in articles like this… (via @neilinglis)
• Straw slaps ban on Iraq debate docs – How, in a democracy, does one person get to decide this? Surely taking a country to war is in the public interest?!

I’ve started to get “into” Twitter, the micro-blogging site, in the last month or so. One trend that I picked up on is that of “hashtags” where you put a hash (pound) symbol followed by a word somewhere in your message. This makes is searchable. The most recent that I’ve participated in is #firstmac, for which my contribution was:

A white iBook G3, paid extra to get the 600Mhz version with the faster bus speed and an impossible-to-use-it -all 384Mb of memory

• Yummy Version 1.0.3 – New minor release of Yummy, my Delicious.com client for iPhone. Fix for something that took me two weeks to track down, an annoying edge condition I found when editing bookmarks under certain conditions and a problem that Apple rejected the original binary for.
• Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard – Sounds almost plausible…
• Travel time to major cities: A global map of Accessibility – Fascinating.