(via stevenf.)

Graham Lee with a great explanation of authentication and authorization with beer and WWDC.

Over the course of the last few years I have been fortunate enough to make friends with folks outside my industry and sphere of friends. Many of them happen to be in the developer community for Apple’s Mac and iPhone platforms. One of the people that I’ve been fortunate enough to meet in person is Daniel Pasco, CEO of Black Pixel Luminance. Daniel is an amazingly smart guy¹ and I look up to him. If I had been living in Seattle when I switched jobs last year I would have held out to work with him and the guys at BPL.

Today Daniel posted an open letter about Black Pixel²:

We’ve developed almost twenty applications in the last nine months, including those we developed for our contract customers. We’ve spent much of our time working on iPhone, but at the same time, our work with iPhone and Apple has changed us, too. The expectations and demands we make upon ourselves as designers have increased dramatically.

Great design and interaction are a huge part of the user experience for iPhone applications, and the more we experienced and learned what is possible, the more we desired to refine our work and take full advantage of what the platform has to offer. Creating our first iPhone apps was a very fulfilling experience, but like an artist looking back at early sketches, we soon began to spot the flaws and see the shortcomings of our initial efforts.

We’ve made some great applications, but for a variety of reasons, our own applications have largely kept the same user interfaces that we introduced them with when the app store opened, and we feel that we can do better. The cognitive dissonance resulting from this situation started to become intolerable late last year.

By the time we went to Macworld we had already decided that we were going to focus on raising the level of polish and focus on our applications as much as possible. The addition of Chris Clark to our team raised the bar for us even higher.

Black Pixel means good design. To us, that means quality, innovation, beauty, and fun. We are pushing ourselves hard to develop applications that adhere to these principles. Effective immediately, we have decided to pull all of our applications from iPhone App Store until they are up to our own standards.

Daniel Pasco, CEO
Black Pixel Luminance
March 18, 2009

I’m excited to see what BPL comes out with. Daniel has always been concerned about the company and the employees. The addition of Chris Clark is huge. I’m looking forward to all the guys up there driving to better things and beautiful software.

Sometimes the hardest thing to do is the right thing to do. In this case it’s hard to pull already released apps from being sold. That’s income and a public face for the company. I know that with a little bit of time the BPL team will come back stronger and better and more satisfied with their work than ever before.

Good luck guys. I’ll be here waiting to see what happens.

1. I mean, the dude has his work on another planet. So full of awesome.↩
2. The letter is quoted here in its entirety for posterity’s sake↩

I’ve talked before about my desire to do personal code work. One day I’d like to go indie and work for myself. Recently I was in a little bit of a funk for personal dev work. I think that’s cleared up now.

I just moved in with my fiancée and we’re getting married this summer. I feel more calm and sure about the future. I have had a lot of ideas kicking around in my noggin for a bit and now I’m going to start in on the long road to complete them.

Fun times ahead.

A new URL shortening scheme. Seems a bit like line noise. Whatever, I grabbed: http://➡.ws/☠☠

This weekend I sat down and I whipped up a little iPhone application to scratch a personal itch. In California it is illegal to operate your motor vehicle and talk on a cell phone without a hands-free device. The most popular hands-free devices use the Bluetooth wireless protocol. On the iPhone it requires a minimum of four touch screen taps to turn Bluetooth on or off.¹

Why would one care about the number of taps? When driving I do have my Bluetooth headset active and the iPhone paired with it. When I’m at work or home I have absolutely no need to use a hands-free device.² Since I have no need to use the Bluetooth radio when not using the hands-free device I want a quick toggle for it. Turning it off will save me on battery life a bit and that’s better in the long run. If I can turn the Bluetooth radio on and off with only one tap then I’m more likely to use it. And now a quick tour of the app I wrote: BlueTap.

In the home screen for the iPhone the user will see the icon for BlueTap (circled in red).³

With the Bluetooth off (notice there is no Bluetooth icon in the status bar of the above image) BlueTap will turn on the Bluetooth radio and present the following screen.

With Bluetooth already powered on BlueTap will turn off the Bluetooth radio and lets the user know this.

If you’re in BlueTap and want to change what you’ve done there is no need to quit and relaunch, a simple tap on the Bluetooth logo inside the application will also toggle the Bluetooth radio power.

Here is where things get a little tricky, the Bluetooth functionality is using a private and completely unpublished API and framework on the iPhone. This means three things for my simple little application:

1. I will never be able to distribute this application via the AppStore official channel;
2. There is a risk that with the next release of the iPhone OS BlueTap will break because the Bluetooth framework changes;
3. If I do give this application to friends and acquaintances I will have to stay very on top of changes to the iPhone OS, least it stop working for them.

This evening John Gruber of Daring Fireball published an article about just this subject called Private. I agree with everything John says. I would never distribute an application to the AppStore that used a private API and would have the potential to cause a negative user experience because the private API call went away or was changed. I agree whole-heartedly with Gruber when he says:

The point being that private APIs should be handled with extreme caution — they’re the programming equivalent of explosive material.

Oh yes, explosive indeed. I am fully aware of this and any user of BlueTap other than myself will be made aware of this too. Unlike Landon Fuller, who implemented a very impressive CoverFlow replacement since the CoverFlow API is private, I am unable to re-implement to get this feature, it’s hardware dependent.

Hopefully in the future this API will open up or Apple will make a quick settings application for powering on and off features quickly. Until then this private API using application will remain private, for me and my friends.

1. Those four taps are: Settings.app, General, Bluetooth, and ON/OFF switch.↩
2. That I hate the bluedouches that refuse to take them off is a large enough subject for another post.↩
3. The sharp-eyed readers probably see the icon to the far left of BlueTap, another private project that might possibly use a private API, but is not yet ready for prime time.↩

On a Mac running OS X it’s pretty easy to type glyphs and diacritics. On Windows and Linux it’s rather complicated. When I’m not on a Mac running OS X I have found Copy Paste Character to be invaluable.

Señor Taco out…

♪ ♫

This is very minor in the grand scheme of the universe, but today is a day when I loath computers.

I played Bioshock up until the last level. At that point the Xbox 360 had to be sent back for repairs. After over a month of not playing it I decided I’d try to finish it up this afternoon since I got very close to finishing last night. When I started the game I was informed there was an update, that’s not unusual so I let it go through.¹

The update loaded and the game restarted. As it got to the opening screen where it normally says ‘continue’, ‘new game’, etc. the Xbox rebooted completely. I thought that was strange but I just went back into the game. Oh if only it were that simple. There was no ‘continue’ option this time. When I went to ‘load game’ I had no saved games. Well, that certainly blows.

I then went to check and see if it was just me, but whatever happened wiped out all Bioshock game saves on the console. Mine, my house mate’s and the guest account. I won’t be trying the game again, I’ll just go find the ending on YouTube.

Damn computers, maybe I should go back to forestry.

1. Technically I had to otherwise the game wouldn’t play.↩

This idea of cheap wind generators is pretty damn cool. I love the simplicity of the device and it’s relatively cheap components.

I just bought MarsEdit and I’m using it to draft and post my blog entries now. I love this thing. I can’t believe I waited this long to start using it. The coolest feature is posting from NetNewsWire when I find something cool I just want to link to, not go in-depth on.