• Arab society’s crunch points – Interesting talk about the Middle East and how change might be made. Hint: it doesn’t involve “regime change.”
• iPhone-to-iPad development: How’s the timing going to work out? – “We have very little guidance on how iPad apps should behave, and if we want our apps to be in the store at its launch, we have to do the majority of development without ever running our code on a real iPad (or even having used one).”

• Who Can Do Something About Those Blue Boxes? – “Used to be you could argue that Flash, whatever its merits, delivered content to the entire audience you cared about. That’s no longer true, and Adobe’s Flash penetration is shrinking with each iPhone OS device Apple sells.”
• Penguins, Peaks and Penny-Farthings: Nat Geo Covers 1959-2000 – “The National Geographic Society celebrates its 122nd anniversary on Jan. 27 … Though the early issues had rather drab academic looking covers, by 1959 they were consistently adorned with eye-cathing art and photos.”
• Verified by Visa bitchslapped by Cambridge researchers – “Secondary credit card security systems for online transactions such as Verified by Visa are all about shifting blame rather then curtailing fraud, Cambridge University security researchers argue.” Or put another way: those annoying screens you get when you buy something online are not for your benefit.

• Google Android Personal Thoughts – “Uniformity is not a word you’ll find in Android’s dictionary. How about the fact that the application icons aren’t the same size. Uh, why? Since there’s no transparent padding around the icons … there’s no uniformity in the touch areas when you go to tap on an icon.” These things probably don’t seem important to Google but the attention to detail is what makes the iPhone (usually) a pleasure to use. I’ve not used an Android handset but these things would bug me pretty quickly.
• Japanese Photographer Bends Electricity to His Will – Beautiful.
• The Cost of Care – Nice graphic showing the relationship between the cost of healthcare and life-expectancy.

I just realised that there are two anniversaries this year. Neither would be worth grabbing a bottle of champagne for but they are vaguely connected and it does give me a chance to reminisce about some neat, old technology.

I forget the exact dates of both events but they were fifteen and ten years ago. Back in 1994 I first installed Linux on my 386SX-based PC. At this point in time my exposure to Unix had been only on “big” computers, the Sun (Solaris) and HP (HP-UX) machines in the Universities labs. It seemed incredible that you could even get something approaching a full version of Unix running on my little home computer.

• The November Plan – Post now updated with my recent trip to Austria.
• Apple’s Mistake – “How much of the goodwill Apple once had with programmers have they lost over the App Store? A third? Half? And that’s just so far. The App Store is an ongoing karma leak.”
• The Daily Shoot – A great idea to help people (myself included!) to take more pictures. I think a lot of us have the will, just not the time or inspiration. Time is hard but inspiration just got a little easier.

• Palm Pre smartphone – “So you’re after a smartphone, you’ve got money to burn and an obvious decision to make: this or the iPhone. No other touchscreen smartphone is even in the running. The Pre has some obvious advantages. It’s a bit smaller than the iPhone and ‘Synergy’ works well, which could prove useful if you’re more familiar with Facebook than the concept of Gmail or an Exchange server. But weigh it against the iPhone and it’s hard to recommend.”
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide Turns 30 – Still one of my favourite books.
• Cat registered as hypnotherapist – To be fair, cats do seem to convince people to pet them and feed them without any apparent pay-back. Maybe they do hypnotise them?

• A Sense of Entitlement: Tweetie 2 – I think Apple needs to do more here — to allow for paid upgrades — but I also congratulate the author of Tweetie for having the nerve to charge for a significant update. He’ll come across a lot of resistance but it’s absolutely the right thing to do and it, potentially, paves the way for smaller developers to do the same thing.
• Peep Show ‘won’t change’ for anyone – Looking forward to this. Slightly worried that it might overstay its welcome — how can you top eating a family pet in terms of gross out? — but then I thought that for the last couple of series too…
• Fail Yet Succeed? – Nice discussion of the kind of things that all software projects go through. Really this is about half of my job!

I try to keep ZX81.org.uk free of direct promotion of my iPhone applications but I think the launch of a new one warrants an exception to the rule.

www.cut is a utility that shortens URLs so that they can be mailed, Twittered or FaceBooked without worrying about character counts or line breaks.

Find out more at the above link or head straight to the App Store to download a copy. It’s free so you have nothing to lose!

• Apple Answers the FCC’s Questions – A few interesting tidbits, including the fact that two reviewers look at every update, but I’d say that there was little of real substance here.
• The brutal truth about America’s healthcare – “But the truth is that the rich, and the insurance firms, just don’t realise what we are going through, or simply don’t care. Look around this room and tell me that America’s healthcare don’t need fixing.” Still finding the whole debate quite bizarre.

• Senior City-zens: The World’s 10 Oldest Still-Inhabited Cities – “I grew up in Europe, where the history comes from.” Maybe Eddie Izzard should have gone with “I was born in the middle east, where the really old history comes from.”
• Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule – If you can’t actually avoid meetings, then at least try to schedule them so you can maximise your productivity. Rings true…
• There’s a pretty significant problem in the new… – I’m starting to expect Graham Chapman to burst in at any second and announce that this is getting far too silly. Apparently any iPhone app that allows “unfiltered internet access,” everything from web browsers to Twitter clients to, presumably, delicious.com clients, now requires a 17+ rating.