After Random House finally agreed to a contract on Jan. 18, 2011, Eddy Cue, the Apple executive in charge of its e-books deals, sent an e-mail to Mr. Jobs attributing the publisher’s capitulation, in part, to “the fact that I prevented an app from Random House from going live in the app store,” the filing reads.

Dictionary of Numbers is an award-winning Google Chrome extension that tries to make sense of numbers you encounter on the web by giving you a description of that number in human terms. Because “8 million people” means nothing, but “population of New York City” means everything.

I assumed that the experience with the iPhone would make the setup on the iPad easy. It helped not at all. I still bought easily five or six apps for each one I settled on. I am happy with Apple overall, but the app evaluation process is severely broken.

After the app passes validation and Xcode uploads it successfully, the upload is ultimately rejected based on the incorrect assertion that sandboxing is not enabled for the nested executable.

A few month back, Apple quietly slipped a very nice Objective-C to Javascript bridge into WebKit. Since the first commit while we were busy celebrating New Year’s Eve, it has been fairly actively developed and improved. This new API supports straightforward embedding of the JavaScriptCore interpreter into native Objective-C projects, including reading and writing variables and object members with appropriate type coercion, calling methods on JavaScript objects, and directly binding Objective-C objects into JavaScript.

No, a signed ramdisk means the brute force is done on-device. The 10 attempt limit is enforced by iOS, ramdisk bypasses that.