Archive for February 5, 2014

Wednesday, February 5, 2014

Verizon Using Net Neutrality Victory to Wage War Against Netflix

David Raphael (via Dave Winer):

I’ve since tested this almost every day for the last couple of weeks. During the day – the bandwidth is normal to AWS. However, after 4pm or so – things get slow.

In my personal opinion, this is Verizon waging war against Netflix. Unfortunately, a lot of infrastructure is hosted on AWS. That means a lot of services are going to be impacted by this.

Replacing the Objective-C “Delegate Pattern” With ReactiveCocoa

Justin DeWind:

Instead of having to assign a delegate to the UISearchBar and implement searchBar:textDidChange:, let’s modify the UISearchBar so there is a signal representing changes to the text.

man’s Special Xcode Support

Wolf Rentzsch:

So Apple’s man calls xcselect_get_manpaths() to dynamically add Xcode-specific paths to man's search paths. Sneaky.

[…]

libxcselect.dylib is key to Apple’s technique of providing stubs binaries at standard locations that do little else but look up the actual tool locations inside /Applications/Xcode.app and execute them.

Begging for App Ratings

Wil Shipley:

The total number of users who’ve rated this particular version is only six. Never mind that 113 people have rated our app before—if you look at the “all versions” rating, our rating is a much more acceptable four stars. But the “all versions” rating is hidden below the “current version” one. The “all versions” rating isn’t the one shown in the results matrix when you search the App Store. Nobody is ever going to click through to an app that’s showing one and a half stars to discover that its real rating is four stars.

[…]

From four stars to one and a half stars because of five users whose problems we really want to fix (or have already fixed).

37signals Becomes Basecamp

Jason Fried:

Moving forward, we will be a one product company. That product will be Basecamp. Our entire company will rally around Basecamp. With our whole team - from design to development to customer service to ops - focused on one thing, Basecamp will continue to get better in every direction and on every dimension.

[…]

If we can't find the right partner or buyer, we are committed to continuing to run the [other] products for our existing customers forever. We won't sell the products to new customers, but existing customers can continue to use the products just as they always have. The products will shift into maintenance mode which means there will be no new development, only security updates or minor bug fixes. We did this successfully in 2012 with Ta-da List, Writeboard, and Backpack, so we know how to make it work.