Stories of indie developers making a quarter million in 2 months are driving a surge of crappy shovelware in the iPhone App Store. Russell Beattie weighs in and compares it to the gold rush that mass sales of J2ME handsets produced.
Wil Shipley proposes a new model for the App Store, where all applications are accepted but only a select few are publicly listed in the store frontend. The rest are still searchable by name and linkable from external sites:
Everyone can get into the warehouse. Only the select few can get into the storefront.
TechRepublic interviews Ian Hickson on HTML 5:
We’ve raised the bar of what a spec has to do to be taken seriously; we’ve shown that it is entirely possible to develop Web technologies in a radically open manner; we’ve driven innovation and competition in the browser space; and we’ve shown that an open and vendor-neutral technology stack can compete seriously with single-vendor closed technologies.
Jack Moffitt explains the differences and caveats of built-in versus dedicated XMPP BOSH servers:
There are two kinds of BOSH connection managers - built in and stand-alone. What are the advantages of the built in ones, and when should you use a stand-alone connection manager?
Jabber guru Jack Moffitt on Twitter's failures:
Do not listen to those who equate a service failure like Twitter’s with a failure of the underlying technology. It is not Ruby or Rails’ fault that Twitter experiences downtime, and it is not XMPP’s fault that Identi.ca has not managed to keep the public facing XMPP feeds reliable.
Entrepreneur role model Mike Lee has been fired from Tapulous. I've admired the guy since I read about him on Will Shipley's blog. He is the perfect product guy. On his latest post he describes how he is going to move on by incorporating United Lemur as his own company.
Jack Moffitt writes about choosing an XMPP Server and going with ejabberd:
The last part of our decision was to test server latency with ejabberd. We ran the same test that we ran on jabberd2, and ejabberd didn’t flinch. The measured latency at idle was twice as fast in some cases with ejabberd, and there was very little change even as we pounded the database to levels that would have made jabberd2 cry.
John Resig blogs about the new Firebug release:
The Script panel (the JavaScript debugger), the Net panel (network monitoring), and Console panel have all seen considerable updates. They're all much more performant and have a huge number of bug fixes.
Firebug changes the way you develop for the web. You won't be able to go back to alert() and background-color: red after you spend some time with it.
Ars Technica reports on tracing, a new optimization added to SpiderMonkey:
They are "getting ready to take JavaScript performance into the next tier" with a radically innovative optimization tactic called tracing that has already produced performance improvements ranging between 20 and 40 times faster in some cases.
Andreas Gal is the researcher behind the new optimization and writes about it:
Traces represent a single iteration through a loop, and can span multiple methods and program modules. If a function is invoked from inside a loop, we follow the function call and inline the instructions executed inside the called method. Function calls themselves are never actually recorded. We merely verify at runtime that the same conditions that caused that function to be activated still hold.
Interesting discussion over at Russ' blog about reconciling the lack of openness on the iPhone with the reality of the current mobile industry.
Russ lists the many missing apps on the iPhone App Store. Many of which one can take for granted on other mobile platforms like Symbian or Windows Mobile.
The world's toughest programmer on the apps his company is shipping in time for the iPhone 3G lauch:
The back cover contains Handshake, the revolutionary way to exchange contact information. You simply place the phones together and make a handshaking gesture. The phones use the accelerometer data to find each other in the cloud and exchange cards.
Simply brilliant.
Russ is looking for a job.