• Open Finder folder in Terminal – Ooh, neat. Almost worth upgrading to Lion for this alone. (Warning: not in the least bit true for most people.)
• Losing the HP Way – “In today’s world of MBA-managed companies, R&D is perceived as not being a good use of money.” And HP used to be a great engineering company. Sad.

• iCloud’s real purpose is to kill Windows – “What this requires from Apple is a bold move that Microsoft would never make: Jobs is going to sacrifice the Macintosh in order to kill Windows. He isn’t beating Windows, he’s making Windows inconsequential.”
• Microsoft joins pre-emptive patent protection program – Software patents are not really popular, even with companies that (in theory) should benefit from them…

• Nearing the end of an era… – Some great images of Endeavour.
• Apple drops secrecy, confirms iOS 5, iCloud on tap at WWDC 2011 – Looks like it’s going to be an interesting WWDC…

It was nothing like as dramatic as my iBook dying one evening, but there was no getting around the fact that my nearly five year old MacBook was no longer up to the tasks that I was trying to throw at it. Developing applications, even for resource limited devices such as the iPhone, needs a pretty substantial piece of Mac software called Xcode. My photography pushed me towards getting Aperture to manage all my pictures. It’s great, but it did have a tendency to grind to a halt when it was least convenient.

• The Mac App Store: It’s an honor thing – “Apple’s approach is simple. It’s an honor thing. The company believes that, given the choice, people will do the right thing. It also understands that anti-piracy techniques don’t stop pirates, but they do get in the way of honest users.”
• Nokia’s 15-year tango to avoid Microsoft – “[PC manufacturers] found it wasn’t worth the effort to differentiate their PCs from the competition, in what had become a commodity business.” The reason’s behind Nokia’s original decision not to licence code from Microsoft in the nineties hasn’t really changed, which makes today a sad day.
• Doctor Who Infographic – Everything you ever wanted to know about Dr Who but were too afraid to ask…

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.

It’s nearly four years old now, so I do expect the odd beach ball occasionally. When my MacBook is doing something hard or complex or just opening iTunes, it often shows its “I’m too busy to respond to you right now” indicator. But this time it was different. The beachball appeared and didn’t really go away again. Sure, it occasionally hid but as soon as I instructed the machine to do anything it would return.

• MacPaint and QuickDraw source code – This is awesome: the original source code to two of the most important pieces of software from the 1980’s.
• If I have two children, and one is a boy, what are the odds that – Where common sense makes no sense. Sometimes. Probably.
• June 23, 1912: Computer Pioneer Alan Turing Born – “He’s also a genuinely interesting figure, albeit a tragic one. An eccentric who liked to bicycle while wearing a gas mask and who occasionally wore pajama tops underneath suit jackets, he was also a prodigious and eclectic genius.”

• iPad App Pricing – Nice analysis of iPad and iPhone application pricing.
• The Value of Ideas – “Ideas are worthless. Execution is everything.” Or actions speak louder than words.
• The IBM Muppet Show – “IBM. The Muppets. Two venerable institutions-but not ones we tend to associate with each other. Yet in the late 1960s, before most people had ever seen a computer in person or could identify a Muppet on sight, the two teamed up when IBM contracted with Jim Henson for a series of short films designed to help its sales staff.”

• Mobile Multitasking – “The new way is to rethink the fundamental deal for processes. In the old model, processes that have already been launched get priority — once running, they stay running. In the new model, the user’s intentions get priority. You press the home button, you’re going to see the home screen in a moment, whether the app that was running was ready to be closed or not. If you want to open another app, it’s going to open immediately, even if the system has to pull the plug on an app in the background to free enough RAM.”
• Please Make the iPhone Weather Application Location Aware – As per subject line…
• iPhone OS 4 and Multitasking – What multitasking on the iPhone really means. It’s all kind of moot for me anyway since I can’t run OS4 on my first generation iPhone!