CUPERTINO, California—March 14, 2008—Apple® today announced that more than 10,000 iPhone™ developers have received enigmatically-worded rejection letters for the beta iPhone Developer Program. The iPhone Developer Program provides developers with a complete and integrated process for developing, debugging, and distributing applications for iPhone and iPod touch, complete with real-world testing on iPhone.
“Developer reaction to our email has been incredible with more than 1,000 snarky posts and irate comments on high-profile Mac websites,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. “Also, over one hundred programmers, some real hotshots at big software companies, have been seen sobbing inconsolably at their Mac Pros, further demonstrating the incredible interest developers have in creating applications for the iPhone.”
“Apple gave us amazing tools that let us create a very functional demo in less than two weeks,” said Rand Race, hotshot programmer at big software company Prosolar Mechanix. “It was all lovey-dovey during our demo at the launch … but then they took away our magic developer key before we left the Apple campus, and since then we haven’t heard diddly-squat from them.” Race denied spending the days sitting next to the phone waiting for a call from Apple, but did admit to configuring a special Mail rule that would respond to email from iphonedev@apple.com by playing the Angels’ 1963 hit “My Boyfriend’s Back”.
Pricing & Availability
The free beta iPhone SDK is available immediately worldwide and can be downloaded at developer.apple.com/iphone/program. Too bad it only lets you run your apps in the cheesy simulator window, eh? The iPhone Developer Program will initially be available to a couple of developers that we like a lot better than you. Face it: they’re smarter, younger, and Steve doesn’t think their apps look horsey. Not like yours.
This is what happens when Steve Jobs announces that an iPhone SDK will be available for download within the hour: Read the rest of this entry »
CUPERTINO, California—February 26, 2008—Apple® today announced that iTunes® (www.itunes.com) is now the number two music retailer in the US, behind only Wal-Mart, based on the latest data from the NPD Group*. Apple also announced that there are now over 50 million iTunes Store customers. iTunes has sold over four billion songs, …
I really hope they thought ahead and used a 64-bit int for the number_of_songs_sold variable, otherwise some Bad Stuff might happen in the next few months.
(We already know they used an unsigned int, otherwise there would have been a crazy press release a few years ago like “Apple announces iTunes has sold over -2,147,483,648 songs”.)
I used to think it was the Big Time if I got a link from Daring Fireball, but now someone just pointed out to me that the Fake Steve Jobs has taken note of my post.
So … what does it mean for my post to be criticized by a fictional construct that embodies a parody of the CEO of the very same ex-employer my post criticizes? Especially when, more specifically, that fictional construct’s humor is largely based on an exaggerated inversion of Apple’s carefully-groomed non-blogging public image, and he calls out a quote of mine that decries exactly the situation that his (fictional) presence repudiates?
Someone call the Semiotic Crisis Hotline for me! This situation calls for the skills of a Jean Baudrillard — too many levels of irony for me to parse, man.
A bit of cryptography humor, from Peter Gutmann’s slideshow Everything you Never Wanted to Know about PKI but were Forced to Find Out …
(Warning: This won’t make any sense unless you know what things like “PKI”, “self-signed certificates” and “revocation” are)
Read the rest of this entry »
It’s a sure sign that wikis are going mainstream when one appears for a video-game console. “ZackAndWiki” has the requisite goofy name (like TikiWiki or WikkaWiki), but once you try it out, you’ll find it approaches its job very differently than you’re probably expecting. Read the rest of this entry »
37signals gripes about those annoying Bluetooth cellphone headsets with even-more-annoying blinky LEDs on them.
I once had the idea of a charity that would collect discarded headsets from yuppies and distribute them to mentally ill homeless people. Just by wearing the headsets, they would eliminate the social stigma attached to talking to themselves on the street; this would help re-integrate them into society.
I went on a free-font-downloading bender last weekend. I still love typography, and I’m glad to see the arcane art of type design isn’t dying out. Back in the old days of Desktop Publishing, you had a choice between high-quality but expensive fonts from reputable foundries, or a bunch of cheap but crappy knockoffs done in Fontographer.
But now, thanks to mass amateurization, there are people who actually know what they’re doing, who design new typefaces for the fun of it and give them away. (The cannier ones give a few away as teasers and charge for the rest.) Collecting these makes for a fun evening once in a while, at least it does if you share my predilections. There’s the surprise of discovery, the glee of downloading it for free, and then later the avaricious satisfaction of organizing the fonts on your computer, like Scrooge McDuck running coins through his fingers.
The problem is that these days I don’t actually have a whole lot of use for fonts. Desktop Publishing is passé, I hardly ever print anything, and when I design something for the web I can’t use obscure fonts that other people don’t have. It’s frustrating! It makes me want to start a zine.
Now everyone’s waiting for me to cough up the links to these beautiful fonts. Well, I did say it was a “bender”, and one of the aspects of a bender is that you’re not paying a lot of attention to how you got where you are … as when a friend of mine in college famously regained consciousness late one evening hanging from the dining room chandelier. So you can understand that I wasn’t carefully bookmarking everything. Still, from the leftover detritus I can piece together links to a few of the sites I crawled through:
I should show you at least one of these … my pick is COM4t’s gorgeous Spirequal Light, which would have been quite at home in the legendary American Type Founders 1923 catalog:
My friend Tanya asked her friends to write her a short bit of Slash fiction as a birthday present. Which is not something I’m accustomed to, but here goes…
>N
The Troll Room This is a small room with passages to the east and south and a forbidding hole leading west. Bloodstains and deep scratches (perhaps made by an axe) mar the walls. A nasty-looking troll, brandishing a bloody axe, blocks all passages out of the room.
Your sword has begun to glow very brightly. The troll swings his axe, but it misses.
>SWING SWORD Whoosh! The troll swings, you parry, but the force of his blow knocks your sword away.
>INVENTORY You are carrying a brass lantern, a key, an elongated brown sack smelling of hot peppers, a bottle, and a heart-shaped box of chocolates.
>GIVE BOX TO TROLL “For me?!” The troll grunts in disbelief as he eagerly pulls off the lid and eyes the Super-Deluxe Truffle Assortment of the Frobozz Magic Chocolate Company (By Royal Appointment To Lord Flathead). Unable to make up his mind, he stuffs all the chocolates into his maw at once and chews noisily. The troll has dropped his axe.
>GO EAST Too late—the magic chocolates have done their work, and the troll’s attentions now return to you, although in different form. You’re crushed in his hairy and odorous embrace as he bellows sweet nothings into your ear.
>FIGHT TROLL You can’t move a muscle. The troll has, surprisingly dextrously, removed your adventurers’ tunic and flung it into the corner.
>RUN You can’t move a muscle. The troll is struggling with the buttons of your Frobozz Magic Boxer Shorts. Your terror is beginning to dissipate, and the scuffle is not-unpleasantly reminiscent of scrimmage back at Great Underground University, not to mention some post-scrimmage locker-room hijinks you’d nearly forgotten about. (Perhaps you shouldn’t have been sampling those chocolates, earlier?) You attempt to reach toward the recalcitrant buttons…
“What’s all this commotion, then?” drawls an amused voice from the doorway. As the troll abruptly drops you, you turn your head and see a seedy looking gentleman carrying a large bag, into which he is depositing your sword.
>HIT THIEF WITH BOTTLE “Ooh, rough trade!” chortles the thief as he dodges your chocolate-smeared blow. “You boys mind if I join in?” He pulls from his bag a lava lamp, a silk scarf decorated with a scenic view of Flood Control Dam #3, and a set of rusty handcuffs.
>|
— Excerpt from Zork IV: Time Considered As A Helix Of Little Twisty Passages, by P. David Lebling and Samuel Delany, which Infocom refused to release in 1988.
(Here’s some context, for the perplexed.)
