It’s hard to explain to someone who is not already a programmer the kinds of things that you have to do when building an application. The thing you’re trying to explain is often very abstract and the answer frequently would involve lots of code.

That’s why I thought this particular problem might make an interesting discussion. In talking about this very simple problem we can talk about the things that developers deal with every day and, hopefully, the process can be followed by most people who have used an iPhone (or, actually, any computer). You won’t be a programmer at the end but you might have a greater appreciation for what happens behind the scenes.

• Ideas are Nothing – Execution is Everything – “How often have you been approached by somebody who has a great idea for an iPhone app, and they will tell you the idea if you just do the programming, and then you will both share in the profits? As an aside, I wonder if this happens to book authors as well.”
• ‘Fractal’ mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot dies aged 85 – Ah, I remember all that time playing with Fractint on my 386SX… And I still don’t really understand the maths.

A few years ago I was very much “into” the whole open source movement. I read LWN (still do, actually). I bought a copy of The Cathedral and the Bazaar.

But one thing I never really did was contribute to open source projects. I never really had much need. They largely did what I wanted and when they didn’t, well, the modifications were too big to consider attempting in my spare time.

• Protest The Pope – My images from todays “Protest the Pope” march and rally in London.
• Introducing: Yummy 2.5 – New version of Yummy, my iOS Delicious.com client, is now available on the App Store. Now includes iPad support, works better on iOS4 and has experimental pinboard.in support.

• Catholics, it’s you this Pope has abused – Why even Catholics should Protest The Pope.
• There’s more to colour than meets the eye – Nice discussion of colours and what they “mean.”
• Compromising Twitter’s OAuth security system – " What it comes down to is that OAuth 1.0a is a horrible solution to a very difficult problem. It works acceptably well for server-to-server authentication, but there are far too many unresolved issues in the current specification for it to be used as-is on a widespread basis for desktop applications. It’s simply not mature enough yet." This is pretty much what I found implementing OAuth for Yahoo! in Yummy.

• Introducing iOS Beta Builder – Make distributing beta versions of iPhone software so much easier.

## The story so far

Last year Yahoo! announced, with no notice, a significant change that had far reaching consequences for all third party applications including my iPhone program, Yummy. This is the third in a series of posts that discusses how I dealt with it.

We’ve already talked about most of the work, starting with an overview, the announcement, the low level technical challenges and the implementation (technical and UI). All that remains it to launch it, and that’s what we’re going to talk about today.

## The story so far

Last year Yahoo! announced, with no notice, a significant change that had far reaching consequences for all third party applications including my iPhone program, Yummy. This is the third in a series of posts that discusses how I dealt with it.

On Monday I gave an overview of the problem, Tuesday I looked at how those changes were announced and why they were tricky, and yesterday I looked at how I actually implemented those technical details.

## The story so far

Last year Yahoo! announced, with no notice, a significant change that had far reaching consequences for all third party applications including my iPhone program, Yummy. This is the third in a series of posts that discusses how I dealt with it.

On Monday I gave an overview of the problem and yesterday I looked at how those changes were announced and why they were tricky. Today we’ll look at how I actually implemented those technical details — though not at the code level so don’t worry if you’re not a programmer!

## The story so far

Last year Yahoo! announced, with no notice, a significant change that had far reaching consequences for all third party applications including my iPhone program, Yummy. This is the second in a series of posts that discusses how I dealt with it.

Yesterday I spoke at a high level about my iPhone application and some changes that Yahoo! made to their side of the system. Today I’d like to talk in a little more detail about how those changes were announced and why they were tricky.