• 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.

• The Numbers Post (aka Brutal Honesty) – “I hope that this article might serve as a counter-point to the articles that seem to go around the web about devs making hundreds of thousands of dollars off an iPhone app. Everyone within the dev community understands that the odds of that happening are very slim, yet those are the stories that people like to hear.”
• Why we’ve reached the end of the camera megapixel race – I had many reasons for upgrading from my 300D, but the 6MP sensor wasn’t one of them.
• Bring bad design to justice – Do your part…

• Scientists Agree: It’s in His Kiss – “Over 90 percent of human society engages in what, if you get right down to it, seems like a very strange thing to do: putting faces together and trading spit.” Seems like a very appropriate thing to discuss on Valentine’s Day…
• Anti-Bootlegging Measures and the iPhone App Store – There’s a lot of talk about cracked iPhone apps at the moment and the measures that developers are taking. The interesting and surprising thing here is how effective a polite message is, at least in the case of a Mac app.
• 1234567890 Day – Finally, an event worth celebrating…

• Clive Thompson on How More Info Leads to Less Knowledge – “A historian of science at Stanford, Proctor points out that when it comes to many contentious subjects, our usual relationship to information is reversed: Ignorance increases.”
• The Palm Pre’s possible Achilles heel: battery life – All the glitz you see in the Pre demo and videos may come at a price.
• Tags: Database schemas – Interesting article on how sites like delicious might handle tagging. Yummy until v2.0 uses the “Scuttle” method. Subsequent versions modify this a little for performance reasons.

• 6 days to stop MPs concealing their expenses – I’m appalled that they’re trying to stop the public finding out how they’re spending our money! How about some accountability?
• Yummy 2.0 Quick Overview – New version of my iPhone delicious.com client. Lots of new features, including a web preview, integration with various Twitter clients, view by tag, improved search, streamlined bookmark editing… the list goes on!
• If you’ve nothing to hide… – Double standards from MPs. Who’d have thought?

This is probably the meanest article title I’ve ever written, as the “W” refers to a person, someone that I used to work with¹. The critical phrase went something like this:

“How hard can it be? It’s only a button!”

Those two, tiny sentences hide a lot. Let me explain.

I’m mainly technical. I have been in the industry for over ten years now, did a computer science degree and spent many hours when I should have been revising for my German GCSE programming my Sinclair Spectrum. This means that when someone says “It’s only a button” I instinctively cringe. I may not know the details but I’ve seen enough “simple” buttons with days worth of work behind them that I’ve learned to be cautious.

• Mike Ash on Private APIs – Nice discussion on the pros and cons of using private API’s in your applications. The only time I’ve consciously used them was years ago with a large PL/SQL program on an Oracle database. I got all the upside (quicker development) without any of the down (having to maintain it). Yuk yuk.
• Electric dreams for pop in 2009 – Apparently synth-pop is making a come-back for 2009. Yay! Less derivative guitar bands and more cheesy pop please!
• 2008 – The Year in Pictures – Some really beautiful images in here. Wish my photography was up to their standard!

What do Britney Spears and Yummy, my iPhone Delicious.com client, have in common? If you had asked me a few months ago I would have said nothing but I’d have been wrong. No, they both have had to grow up in public.

For a version 1.0 product, Yummy seemed solid to me. It was fast, coped will all my bookmarks and had the ability to add, edit and delete entries. I didn’t think that this would remain as a unique feature for as long as it has, but hey, that’s a bonus.

My iPhone application, Yummy, has been on sale in iTunes for a couple of months now and, as a number of other developers have noted, after the initial launch sales figures take a significant nose dive very quickly. I’ve been trying to think of ways to increase visibility without taking too much time away from actually making enhancements to the software.

As luck would have it, I got a “free trial” of Google AdWords and thought I would give that a try. Results have been… well, not exactly what I was expecting.