jQTouch

A jQuery plugin for mobile web development on the iPhone, iPod Touch, and other forward-thinking devices.

I haven’t looked at the kind of code it makes you write but, hey, it’s jQuery — and, more importantly, the performance is impressive, even on my old iPhone 3G (i.e., the oldest generation of CPUs). I guess one can thank the 3D CSS transforms in WebKit.

via daringfireball.net

“My "private" APIs… aren’t”

I got an email from Apple’s App Review team saying the code in my iPhone app uses private APIs. They pointed to -setOrder, which is a method I created in code, and -setThumbnail, which was created automatically from a Core Data property.

In other words: yes, there are false positives with Apple’s new tool designed to keep developers from using private APIs, and it’s really lame that they programmed it so stupidly, because it’s gonna end up throwing red flags at developers who followed the platform’s best practices the most closely — using properties, and giving them clear, simple names.

“Picasa’s Scrollbars”

It looks pretty much like a regular scrollbar. But it isn’t. As with the Wave scrollbar, Google has split the thumb and the scroll position indicator into two different elements. A faint shadow acts as the scroll position indicator. The thumb, meanwhile, always sticks to the center of the scrollbar. Pulling it scrolls the view; the further up or down you pull, the faster the view scrolls.

In short: Google’s UI engineers are madmen.

“Motorola Droid camera autofocus fixed in secrecy? [Not]”

There’s a rounding-error bug in the camera driver’s autofocus routine (which uses a timestamp) that causes autofocus to behave poorly on a 24.5-day cycle. That is, it’ll work for 24.5 days, then have poor performance for 24.5 days, then work again.

That’s the most awesome WTF of a bug I’ve heard about in quite a while.

“Dropbox Votebox lets you decide what they work on next”

With Votebox (must be signed in to see the page), they are letting the user base vote on which features they work on next.

If you’re a Dropbox user on a Mac (and if you’re not both you shouldn’t really be here, should you?), log in and vote for resource fork support right now — that’s the thing that makes Dropbox fail to sync applications, URLs and clippings.

“New DROID ads released, actually show off a bit of Android”

I can’t believe how geeky they’re going with those — and the result is pretty cool, too. (Particularly for the GPS ad; I’m not sure it makes much sense in 2009 to point out that the phone allows you to surf the web with all its pixels… even though the screen’s resolution and quality seem to be actual, legitimate selling points of the device.)

OhGizmo reviews Wacom’s Bamboo Touch

Now don’t get me wrong, the ‘Touch’ aspect of the Pen & Touch works just fine, but there’s something about using it that just doesn’t feel as slick or as immediately responsive as Apple’s touchpad hardware.

Hrm. That’s what I mostly expected from a third-party solution, but still a disappointment. Part of me still wants to buy it as a little toy to give myself for a change, but not as much as I did yesterday. (And yes, I’m much more interested in the Bamboo Touch than Apple’s Magic Mouse — magic or not, I don’t use mice.)

Macworld reviews the new iMacs

You can press Command-F2 on your keyboard to switch between the computer and the external video source.

Ah, that’s cool.

You can use an adapter for a non-DisplayPort device, such as an HDMI-to-Mini DisplayPort video-in adapter. However, Apple said it has no plans to produce such adapters, leaving it up to third-party manufacturers.

What the hell?