One of the most promising open-source projects regarding the home-theatre/TV (at last!) that combines excellent æsthetics, killer media features and social networking is Boxee. Boxee is based on the XBMC project. Note that while this is alpha quality software, it’s impress

Yep, the iPhone SDK does not support dynamically linked libraries. And that’s truly fantastic news for all iPhone developers wishing to leverage existing code out there. You can, of course, use a statically linked library in your code, or — if you have the code for the thi

Hmmm, what was Mark thinking when he wrote this? The warrior rabbit is our talisman as we move into a year where we can reasonably expect Ubuntu to ship on several million devices, to consumers who can reasonably expect the software experience to be comparable to those of

The people behind the best HTML engine around (yep, that’s WebKit for those that don’t know it yet) just announced the next generation of their new Javascript engine, SquirrelFish Extreme, just a few months after SquirrelFish itself was announced and before it was even ado

Design, user experience and development at Canonical (Mark Shuttleworth)

Ars Technica writes of the recent controversy on Google’s commitment to an open source Android, the transparency of the development process and the availability of the SDK. Valid criticism for the most part, but no conclusive proof of Google’s bad intentions. Yet, it’d rea

The question serves as the subject of the eponymous thread on the ubuntu-devel mailing list. And it’s quite valid. I’m really saddened to see the flawed argument put forward by several Ubuntu developers that 8.04 was a right decision. Even today, more than two months since

GNOME, one of the two main linux desktop environments and platforms has become a very popular choice adopted by most major distributions as their desktop of choice, mostly due to its simplicity and minimalist design. While it does several things ‘right’, by generally provi

Justin Frankel lists a few reasons why Apple’s developer resources suck. While OS X has some of the most modern, most powerful APIs around, much of their functionality is undocumented, forcing developers to spend countless hours reading header files or even reverse enginee

Sure, AJAX, when viewed through the prism of the still world of HTML and CSS, can be beautifully dynamic. But, let’s face it, Google Earth — despite its resource-laden design and slow response on slower systems — is a much more natural, a friendlier way to view geographic

A reader of this blog sent me an email a couple of weeks ago, asking me to consider porting my Hellenic Reverse Directory Lookup widget (HRDL) for Apple’s Dashboard in Mac OS X to the Widsets service provided by Nokia. Over the past year or so I’ve been emailed another two

Those using Firefox 3.0 may have noticed that by default when someone scales the content of a page, the images are resized too, a behaviour long-pioneered by Opera. Those using Firefox 3.0 on linux will be sorry to find out that upscaled images are not resampled using anyt

Following on from my earlier post on the upcoming Ubuntu 8.04 ‘LTS’ release, I fear that my prediction, albeit harsh, was pretty accurate: Ubuntu 8.04 LTS should have never been branded as a Long Term Support (LTS) release. Despite the obvious shortcomings of having β-qual

C4[1] Videos, have been available on Viddler for about a month. For Mac Developers this is probably of some interest. [via daringfireball.net] Posted on 2008.03.30 at 16:22 UTC Trackback

The following image says it all really: These past few days there’s been a flurry of WebKit posts over at Surfin’ Safari about its ACID3 performance. I guess when dealing with bugs, and given the fact that Microsoft typically needs around 5 years before simple CSS1 bugs a

A first attempt at creating a visual UI designer for Android. While not exactly sophisticated compared to more mature visual UI design tools, it greatly simplifies the task for designers (cf. programmers). Worth a look for anyone interested in developing for Android. Post

Android is out and it seems pretty well designed. This is the first of what’s hopefully going to be a series of articles covering Android from cosmix.org. It’s also going to be the least technical in nature as I haven’t had much time to play around with it and also because

An excellent article about Java on Android, Sun’s licensing trickery, Google’s checkmate the slanted meaning of Openness. A must read. Also read this for a retrospective view of the open sourcing of Java one year ago.

Check this post by Fake Steve Jobs. It’s hilarious and not just because it nails what the real Steve Jobs probably thinks of Openness, but also because it highlights what was always wrong with his approach: whenever his companies were weak (NeXT in the late 80s and early 90

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A few completely unfounded (arguably bordering on stupid) excuses by salesman Steve. GBs of criticism on the web. A botched attempt at Reality Distortion. Numerous hacks. Dozens of semi-illegal third-party applications. Many bricked iPhones. And, now? Apple’s spectacular re

A common joke amongst Mac developers is the HIG, or more specifically the subject of how Apple manages to flout every single principle in user interface design and especially its own in successive revisions of OS X. I’ve written about this, in one way or another, several ti

In the latest issue of Phrack, you can find, among others, a very interesting ‘paper’ on shellcode and rootkit authoring for Mac OS X. While some of the techniques presented are not new, there are few — if any — publicly available texts that present them in such a concise m

Back in 2005 I needed VMWare to be able to test a piece of software on multiple separate installations so I went and bought VMWare Workstation 5.5.x for Linux. One of the annoying things with Workstation 5.5 was its complete lack of support for USB 2.0 and somewhat arcane c