NY Times has data about words their readers look up

That annoying “double click to define a word” thing? Apparently, people use it and the Times tracks who looks up what.

…last I checked, Sarah Palin’s not much of an expert on nuclear issues. If the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joints Chiefs of Staff are comfortable with it, I’m probably going to take my advice from them and not from Sarah Palin.

—

President Obama responding to Palin’s childish and utterly meaningless criticism of the president’s nuclear disarmament plan.

To be fair, Sarah Palin has seen a nuclear warhead before.

John Gruber broke the news 1 today that Apple made a subtle but significant change to their developer agreement, which forbids so-called “cross-compiling” apps for the iPhone OS that runs on the iPhone, iPod touch and iPad. The basic theory behind cross-compiling is that you could write an app in a language like C# or Actionscript and publish it as a native iPhone application that, at least on some level, worked like an app built in the Apple sanctioned XCode. This is now considered a violation of the SDK agreement and an almost certain way to have your app rejected from the App Store.

I must admit, on an academic level, I’ve been intrigued, if not necessarily impressed, by these attempts to backdoor the App Store. Foremost, it’s a non-trivial task to write a compiler that takes code meant for one platform and have it work on another. That projects like Adobe’s Flash Packager for iPhone or Novell’s Monotouch work at all is impressive. I’ve also been curious to see how the non-technical battles would play out between corporations and it’s now obvious that Apple is taking a scorched earth approach.

Beyond just geeky personal intrigue, though, I’ve got a fair amount of professional interest in this topic as someone who:

• Works for a media company 2
• Has a background in multimedia web development, including Flash
• Manages a team of talented developers with an great deal of Actionscript (2 and 3) experience
• Works with other smart developers who code in C# and .NET

Given all of that, you may be surprised to know that I’ve never liked any of the various cross compiling projects I’ve come across and I’ve seen just about every one of them. Projects that promise to compile JavaScript into iPhone apps, C# into iPad apps or convert your favorite Flash game into your new favorite iPod touch game. They all look terrible, are generally not performant and rely on a little too much hope and magic for my tastes.

The most promising of any of these appears to be Monotouch, from the unfairly bright and insanely talented Miguel de Icaza and his band of hackers, but they route around the biggest problem – ugly, non-native interfaces – by implementing native Cocoa interface elements. Which means you’d need to rewrite the interface code for non-iPhone OS platforms.

As much as I admire a clever hack, these cross compiling schemes have always struck me as, well, Doing It Wrong. I even tend to shy away from platforms like AIR and Java on my desktop because the reality of “write once run anywhere” has never lived up to the hype. Performance on mobile devices is vastly more important than it is on desktops that have power and cycles and memory to spare. The mobile interface metaphors are still being figured out underneath the aluminum and glass, consistency and expectation are vital to these still larval platforms.

Despite that, there’s still an undeniable attraction to being able to quickly recompile a Flash app to target the iPhone or get a full team of C# developers up to speed on iPad development in a day. Ultimately, though, I’m much more interested in a superior final product than a quick hack.

John not only broke the story but also wrote a smart follow-up about Apple’s motivation for the changes ↩︎

“Which media company did you say you worked for?” “A major one." ↩︎

FINGS WOT ARRIVED IN MY POST BOX TODAY

That’s right, the new Valpak!!!

And Sniffy’s book, which I will read as soon as it’s available for download.

Canned “Future-of-News” Speech

Doreen is so smart and spot on here:

My advice: Continue to find inspiration in the quieter, authentic voices around you — they are everywhere. That may mean listening more closely to your gut about who and what to tune out. It’s good practice for journalists anyway. Here on Tumblr, it hasn’t failed me yet.

XKCD in a nutshell

I chuckled

Camera for iPad uses the camera on you iPhone to take pictures

Connect to your iPhone via bluetooth and take pictures from your iPad. It’s pretty slow to transfer the photo and it struck me as odd that there’s no option to take the photo on the phone itself – you have to use the iPad.

The evidence illustrates that things are not always as partisan zealots portray them through highly selective editing of reality. Sometimes a fuller truth is found on the cutting room floor.

—California Attorney General Edmund G. Brown Jr. in a report that found a few ACORN members exhibited bad judgement but didn’t actually commit any crimes. The report goes on to say that the videotapes produced by “undercover” “videographer” and right wing hit-pimp James O’Keefe (currently under investigation for tampering with the phone lines of a US Senator) were highly edited and hardly what you’d call “reality based”.

Marco nails it

You’re not customers. You’re the product.

They really hate when you actually read their content. That’s what they’re communicating by distraction-oriented design: “We don’t respect you, and we’re trying to aggravate you as much as possible, but not quite enough that you’ll stop coming.”

As long as the government hid its illegal activities and never said who it spied on, it could spy on anyone illegally. No one could bring a lawsuit, since there was no proof that they had been impacted by the illegal spying.

Then the feds screwed up.

—A federal judge has ruled that the Bush administration violated wiretapping laws when it approved warrantless wiretaps in 2004.