&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/2008/pulpit_20081107_005502.html"&gt;Robert X. Cringely&amp;#8217;s latest column&lt;/a&gt; regards Apple&amp;#8217;s replacement of Tony Fadell with Mark Papermaster as head of iPod and iPhone engineering:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;So here’s what’s going on with Tony Fadell. First, he was vulnerable as a charismatic leader in his own right who has been talked about in the press as a possible heir to Jobs. That alone meant he had to die, but it wasn’t enough to mean that he had to die just now. That decision required an external variable in the form of former IBM executive Mark Papermaster.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;The first thing worth noting is that Papermaster was not hired to take the exact same job that Fadell held. Papermaster&amp;#8217;s job is a superset of Fadell&amp;#8217;s. It&amp;#8217;s right there in &lt;a href="http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2008/11/04papermaster.html"&gt;the press release Apple issued a week ago&lt;/a&gt; &amp;#8212; Fadell&amp;#8217;s title was &amp;#8220;senior vice president of the iPod Division&amp;#8221;, Papermaster&amp;#8217;s title is &amp;#8220;senior vice president of Devices Hardware Engineering&amp;#8221;. The PR describes Papermaster&amp;#8217;s responsibilities:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Apple today announced that Mark Papermaster is joining the Company as senior vice president of Devices Hardware Engineering, reporting to Apple CEO Steve Jobs. Papermaster, who comes to Apple from IBM, will lead Apple’s iPod and iPhone hardware engineering teams. &lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Tony Fadell only oversaw the iPod division, and had very little, if anything, to do with the iPhone. And, according to multiple sources familiar with Apple&amp;#8217;s engineering management, the iPod Touch has been produced by the iPhone team, not by Fadell&amp;#8217;s iPod division. The last new product that Fadell oversaw was the new iPod Nano.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;So Fadell was never in any way in charge of the iPhone or iPod Touch; Papermaster&amp;#8217;s job description indicates he will be directly responsible for all iPhone and iPod hardware engineering.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The iPhone&amp;#8217;s software is overseen by Scott Forstall (Senior Vice President, iPhone Software), and, at a technical level, Bertrand Serlet (Senior Vice President, Software Engineering). There is no such division between hardware and software with the traditional (pre-Touch) iPods. The story I&amp;#8217;ve heard is that at the outset of Apple&amp;#8217;s iPhone initiative, there was a heated debate within Apple as to what OS should be used. Forstall and Serlet pushed for using OS X. Fadell (and, according to one source, former Apple executive &lt;a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Sakoman"&gt;Steve Sakoman&lt;/a&gt;) pushed for using something else.&lt;sup id="fnr1-2008-11-12"&gt;&lt;a href="#fn1-2008-11-12"&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; Obviously, Forstall and Serlet won this debate, and, hyperbolic though it may sound, it may prove to be the single best early design decision in the entire history of the company. It seems hard to imagine the iPhone any other way now, but at the outset it was not a foregone conclusion that a stripped down and revamped version of OS X would work for a mobile phone.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;And so I think Cringely is right that the basic story line is that Steve Jobs wanted to hire Papermaster and so Fadell had to go, and &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; that Fadell first decided to leave and Papermaster was then picked to replace him.&lt;sup id="fnr2-2008-11-12"&gt;&lt;a href="#fn2-2008-11-12"&gt;2&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; But Fadell&amp;#8217;s ticket has probably been punched ever since the iPhone shipped and proved to be an enormous success.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Without question, Fadell&amp;#8217;s tenure at Apple has itself been an enormous success. &lt;a href="http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/news/2004/07/64286?currentPage=all"&gt;He came to Apple in early 2001&lt;/a&gt; with the idea for the iPod and an integrated online music store to complement it, and it turned into one of the biggest hits in consumer electronics history. The iPod and iTunes reshaped the music industry, and have made a mountain of cash for Apple. But the iPhone is the new thing, and Fadell was not involved in its development. The word on the street in Cupertino is not that Fadell was pushed out the door, but that he was never offered a role like Papermaster&amp;#8217;s, encompassing all of Apple&amp;#8217;s handheld hardware engineering. The iPhone has eclipsed the iPod as the A Team at Apple, and Tony Fadell does not sound like a B Team sort of guy.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Cringely&amp;#8217;s speculation about Jobs in any way feeling threatened by Fadell, or that &amp;#8220;Jobs ultimately betrays all of his direct reports in this manner&amp;#8221;, is just goofy. Steve Jobs is not insecure; if he were, he&amp;#8217;d have canned someone like Jonathan Ive long before putting the squeeze to Tony Fadell &amp;#8212; Ive is far better-known than Fadell outside the company, and is far more popular inside.&lt;sup id="fnr3-2008-11-12"&gt;&lt;a href="#fn3-2008-11-12"&gt;3&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; For a company of Apple&amp;#8217;s size and success, the relative stability of &lt;a href="http://www.apple.com/pr/bios/"&gt;its executive team&lt;/a&gt; is remarkable.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div class="footnotes"&gt; &lt;hr /&gt; &lt;ol&gt; &lt;li id="fn1-2008-11-12"&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Updated, 13 Nov. 2008:&lt;/strong&gt; The original text of this footnote read:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;None of the sources I spoke to knew what specifically Fadell had in mind. But the idea wasn&amp;#8217;t that they would use some other OS to build the iPhone as we know it, but rather to build what would have been a very different iPhone.&amp;#8221; The best guess is that Fadell was pushing for something more along the lines of an iPod that could make phone calls, and less along the lines of a new handheld computing platform.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;However, I now have a one-word answer from a knowledgeable source as to which OS Fadell wanted to use for the phone: Linux.&amp;nbsp;&lt;a href="#fnr1-2008-11-12" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text."&gt;&amp;#8617;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;li id="fn2-2008-11-12"&gt; &lt;p&gt;Cringely speculates that the &amp;#8220;Senior VP, Devices Hardware Engineering&amp;#8221; title is just a placeholder for Papermaster while Apple waits for his IBM non-compete to expire, at which point his true role at the company will be revealed to be leading the chip design team Apple acquired &lt;a href="http://www.eetimes.com/news/latest/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207401495"&gt;when they bought PA Semi&lt;/a&gt;. I have no doubt that Papermaster&amp;#8217;s expertise and experience in this field is a big part of why Apple wanted to hire him, but leading the hardware engineering division responsible for all iPods and iPhones is a far bigger and more prestigious gig than leading a chip design team. I don&amp;#8217;t think there&amp;#8217;s anything secret at all about Papermaster&amp;#8217;s intended role at Apple.&amp;nbsp;&lt;a href="#fnr2-2008-11-12" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 2 in the text."&gt;&amp;#8617;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;li id="fn3-2008-11-12"&gt; &lt;p&gt;One source put it to me this way: &amp;#8220;Steve Jobs is a good jerk, Tony Fadell is a bad jerk.&amp;#8221;&amp;nbsp;&lt;a href="#fnr3-2008-11-12" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 3 in the text."&gt;&amp;#8617;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ol&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Some thoughtful feedback from readers regarding my analysis of the UI design of the iPhone&amp;#8217;s built-in Notes app.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;Creation vs. Modification Date Sorting&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;Regarding my assertion that sorting notes by modification date was the right choice, Glen Raphael&lt;sup id="fnr1-2008-11-07"&gt;&lt;a href="#fn1-2008-11-07"&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; writes:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;That would be fine for me if it were sorted chronologically by note &lt;em&gt;creation&lt;/em&gt; time. That is what the Newton NotePad did and what the Palm notepad app did &amp;#8212; quite sensibly. However, what Apple chose to do here was sort by note &lt;em&gt;modification&lt;/em&gt; time. Which is insane.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;If I take notes in a variety of contexts over time, my notes are nicely sorted in historical order &amp;#8212; the older notes are further down the list and notes taken at a similar time are in proximity to one another. So I can use my temporal memory to find things. Paper notepads in the real world work like that too. But on the iPhone if I ever go back to review my old notes and &lt;em&gt;make any changes&lt;/em&gt;, those notes spontaneously jump to the top of the stack. That has two negative consequences:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;ol&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;After reviewing and revising old notes, my notes are in a random order. Given that the chronological ordering has been violated and there&amp;#8217;s no search feature, you simply can&amp;#8217;t find old notes in a large stack. It doesn&amp;#8217;t scale the way the Newton/Palm/everybody-else -in-the-known-universe approach does.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;If I scroll back to find an old note, revise it, and want to continue scrolling back to look at or revise the next note &lt;em&gt;before&lt;/em&gt; that one… I can&amp;#8217;t find it. Because the note I just changed has moved, it&amp;#8217;s no longer adjacent to the one taken before it. This means lots of extra scrolling if I want to try to find the next note in series.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ol&gt; &lt;p&gt;In notepad apps on other platforms, I could easily scroll to the 40th newest note, delete a couple parts of that note I no longer care about, click/tap/button press once to get to the 41st newest note, fix a typo there, click/tap/button press once to get to the 42nd note and read it to refresh my memory, and continue down the stack &amp;#8212; reading and revising as I go along. Try doing that with iPhone and you&amp;#8217;ll want to throw the thing against a wall.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;As a result of this &amp;#8220;feature&amp;#8221; I no longer use Notes. I&amp;#8217;ve switched to MagicPad and wish I could just delete Notes. Yeah, MagicPad has got copy/paste and font stuff, but for me the killer feature was simply that it allowed me via a settings preference to sort by note creation time, which is clearly the &lt;em&gt;correct&lt;/em&gt; default.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;These are strong points. I don&amp;#8217;t keep a ton of notes in my iPhone around at a time &amp;#8212; I carry a paper notebook with me wherever I go, and which is where I jot most transient thoughts/items. I use Notes on the iPhone mostly for reference material I&amp;#8217;ll want to come back to many times (which is to say, over a long enough period of time that I&amp;#8217;ll have gone through several paper notebooks over that period), and for very specific temporary material like my airline flight reservation number for a trip.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#8217;re the sort of person who uses Notes for everything &amp;#8212; say, if you&amp;#8217;ve got dozens of notes &amp;#8212; I can see how sorting by modification date might be maddening.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;It also occurs to me that sorting by creation date would fit better with Notes&amp;#8217;s &amp;#8220;looks like a paper tablet&amp;#8221; visual metaphor. With a paper notebook, it&amp;#8217;s easy to find something you know you jotted down &amp;#8220;about a month ago&amp;#8221; just by flipping back to the right spot in the notebook.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;In short, switching Notes to creation date sorting seems like a good idea. It would work better for people like Raphael, who keep a large number of active notes &amp;#8212; and it would work just about the same for people like me, with a small number of active notes. Light users of Notes almost certainly wouldn&amp;#8217;t even notice the change.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;h2&gt;Apple&amp;#8217;s Private &amp;#8216;default.png&amp;#8217; Cheat&lt;/h2&gt; &lt;p&gt;iPhone apps typically take at least a few seconds to launch, sometimes more. Developers can include an image to be loaded immediately after the app launches, named &amp;#8220;default.png&amp;#8221;. You can use this as a splash screen (more or less as a title card for the app), or, you can display the empty skeleton of the app&amp;#8217;s UI (making it look like the real UI is starting to load, when in fact it&amp;#8217;s just a &lt;em&gt;screenshot&lt;/em&gt; of an empty UI).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Apple&amp;#8217;s own apps &amp;#8212; which don&amp;#8217;t have the same restrictions as third-party apps &amp;#8212; have another option available, which I&amp;#8217;ll call &amp;#8220;dynamic default.png&amp;#8221;. What many Apple apps do is take a screenshot of the current display when you quit, and overwrite the default.png file inside the application bundle with that screenshot. Then when next you launch that app, you immediately see the entire contents of the screen from when you previously quit &amp;#8212; but it&amp;#8217;s still just a screenshot, a static image. It &lt;em&gt;looks&lt;/em&gt; like the app has launched instantly, but in fact you&amp;#8217;ve still got to wait a few seconds for the app to restore itself to the point where it&amp;#8217;s actually ready to use.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I&amp;#8217;ve seen third-party iPhone developers complaining that this trick is only available to Apple; they want to use it too. The technical reason why they can&amp;#8217;t is that because application bundles are cryptographically signed, you can&amp;#8217;t modify the contents of the application bundle (by, in this case, changing the default.png resource file) without breaking the digital signature. Apple could enable this feature for signed applications by providing for a way to specify a dynamic default.png that exists outside the application bundle, somewhere in the application&amp;#8217;s private &lt;em&gt;Library&lt;/em&gt; folder.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But I don&amp;#8217;t think these dynamic default.png files are a good idea in the first place. I fully realize that the user&amp;#8217;s &lt;em&gt;perception&lt;/em&gt; of performance is often more important than actual measured-by-a-stopwatch performance, but in the case of dynamic default.png files, I think it goes too far. It is frustrating to see a complete UI that looks usable but isn&amp;#8217;t. Dynamic default.png files make application launch times &lt;em&gt;look&lt;/em&gt; faster, but they don&amp;#8217;t make them &lt;em&gt;feel&lt;/em&gt; faster. I feel like a dolt every time I get tricked into uselessly tapping UI elements on a default.png screen.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Notes uses this dynamic default.png cheat, and there are only very subtle indications to tell when the actual UI has replaced the screenshot (and is therefore ready to use). Several readers wrote in to complain about their frustration at not being able to tell when Notes is actually ready to use. Keshuv Prasad writes:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;The splash/loading screen for the list view is identical to the loaded view and gives no indication when one becomes the other. In note view the background lines blink when the loading screen turns into a loaded screen, but the pre- and post-loaded screens are identical.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Photos, for example, displays a blank list as its splash screen and only shows the individual items (Camera Roll, Photo Library, etc.), after the app has loaded.  This makes it easy to tell whether the app is loading or has already loaded.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Applying this same design to Notes would reduce frustration with not knowing whether or not the screen is responsive or not upon loading the app (note view would show a blank note, with the appearance of text indicating that it has finished loading).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I too find the Photos model &amp;#8212; where you just see a more or less empty shell of the UI upon launch &amp;#8212; to be superior. That way, as soon as you see actual content, you know the app is ready to use.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Prasad has another good suggestion:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;My second issue is how the notes are displayed in list view. There are up to 8 notes listed and the bottom one&amp;#8217;s row fits exactly on the screen.  To use Photos as an example, it only displays 7 full rows, with the 8th row cut off.  Yes, the number of notes is in parentheses after Notes, but having the last row cut off (Contacts does this as well) would be a nice visual indicator that there is something below to scroll.  This is a minor quibble, though.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;In other words, because iPhone list views don&amp;#8217;t show persistent scroll bars (which, on the Mac, provide an indication when there is more content below what is visible), it&amp;#8217;s helpful if the row height is such that a whole number of rows don&amp;#8217;t fit exactly on screen. Good suggestion.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div class="footnotes"&gt; &lt;hr /&gt; &lt;ol&gt; &lt;li id="fn1-2008-11-07"&gt; &lt;p&gt;In a previous Apple handheld platform universe, Raphael was the developer of &lt;a href="http://www.scottsplace.net/newtonsource/html/newtpaint.html"&gt;NewtPaint&lt;/a&gt;.&amp;nbsp;&lt;a href="#fnr1-2008-11-07" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text."&gt;&amp;#8617;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ol&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Like most of you, I suspect, I&amp;#8217;ve wound up with an awful lot of white Apple earphones over the last seven years. There have been subtle changes to the earbud shape, and the iPhone introduced the wonderful clicker (click for play/pause, double-click for next track, triple-click for previous track), but one thing has remained a constant: the cords get terribly tangled when bunched up in a pocket or pouch.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;This has been a constant irritation for me ever since I first got an iPhone. In the back of my mind, I&amp;#8217;ve had the vague hope that the problem would eventually be solved by wireless earphones.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;When I got my iPhone 3G in August, I did notice that the cord of the included earphones felt different &amp;#8212; they had a distinctly more rubbery, less plasticky texture. I didn&amp;#8217;t give it much thought.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;On an airplane yesterday, as I took them out of their pouch on my carry-on bag, I suddenly realized that the difference was more than just texture. These new earphone cables are somehow very much tangle-resistant. Back here in my office, where I&amp;#8217;ve got a slew of older Apple earphone sets to compare them against, the difference is striking. You can just ball these new ones up into a glob, stuff them in a pocket, and then just shake them straight when you take them out.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Perhaps this new tangle-resistant cable is old news that I somehow missed, but now that I&amp;#8217;ve noticed it, I can&amp;#8217;t help but hold it up as a quintessential example of Apple sweating the details.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong id="tangled-update-1"&gt;Update, 7 Nov 2008&lt;/strong&gt;: A well-informed little birdie tells me that the primary reason behind the new earphone cord was environmental. Apple has switched from &lt;a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyvinyl_chloride"&gt;PVC&lt;/a&gt; to &lt;a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polytetrafluoroethylene"&gt;PTFE&lt;/a&gt; for all cables, and the increased tangle-resistance was a pleasant side-effect.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;On the heels of winning MacUser’s Business Software of the Year and a &lt;a href="http://www.macworld.com/article/131153-3/2007/12/eddyawards2007.html"&gt;Macworld Eddy for 2007&lt;/a&gt;, Marketcircle recently released Billings 3. Billings is a time tracking and invoicing application that produces some of the most professionally formatted invoices, helping you maintain your image when it counts the most &amp;#8212; asking for payment.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;On top of the great features such as the menu bar timer, Billings 3 brings approximately 50 new enhancements including: a new and simplified interface, 18 additional invoice templates for a total of 30, statements, recurring invoices and more. Try it free for 21 days and take advantage of the current “Give Main Street a Break&amp;#8221; sale.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;My email &amp;#8220;system&amp;#8221;, such that it is, is pretty simple. For each of my main accounts I use just two mailboxes: an inbox and an archive. The inbox is for new mail, and the archive is where all messages go when I&amp;#8217;m done with them. I can&amp;#8217;t say I follow &lt;a href="http://www.43folders.com/izero"&gt;Inbox Zero&lt;/a&gt;, Ringo, but I&amp;#8217;m trying. I&amp;#8217;m tryin&amp;#8217; real hard to be a shepherd.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;One habit I&amp;#8217;ve found to be harmful is using &amp;#8220;unread&amp;#8221; to mean anything other than &amp;#8220;new message&amp;#8221;. For years, I&amp;#8217;d let email I didn&amp;#8217;t want to deal with immediately sit &amp;#8220;unread&amp;#8221; in my inbox, and I&amp;#8217;d eventually wind up with hundreds of &amp;#8220;unread&amp;#8221; messages. I put quotes around &lt;em&gt;unread&lt;/em&gt; because most of those messages weren&amp;#8217;t literally unread &amp;#8212; I&amp;#8217;d looked at them, but then marked them unread because I didn&amp;#8217;t want to deal with them yet. Breaking myself of this habit significantly increased my email efficiency.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I have three main accounts, and at this moment, they have 2, 24, and 18 messages in their inboxes. Not zero, but not out of control. At one point about two years ago, I had over 4,000 unread messages in the inbox for my public contact address for Daring Fireball. I had actually read, or at least skimmed, most of those, but at that point there was no way to catch up, and no way to identify the older messages that I&amp;#8217;d truly never even looked at.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;What I do for messages I want to keep in my inbox after reading, for whatever reason, is mark them as flagged. In my system, all that flagging implies is that I want to keep the message in my inbox. Of those aforementioned 2, 24, and 18 messages in my inboxes at this moment, all of them are flagged, and &lt;em&gt;none&lt;/em&gt; of them are marked unread. So while I&amp;#8217;m not &amp;#8212; and to be honest, never am &amp;#8212; at &lt;em&gt;inbox&lt;/em&gt; zero, I am almost always, at the end of each day, at &lt;em&gt;unread&lt;/em&gt; zero.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;In one regard, the iPhone has been a tremendous boon to keeping my email manageable. Pre-iPhone, I&amp;#8217;d often fall woefully behind on email from DF readers while I was traveling. The iPhone makes it easy to read messages here and there, a few minutes at a time, throughout the day. Have a few minutes? Read a few messages.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But the iPhone Mail app&amp;#8217;s lack of support for flagging has been a constant irritation. The primary thing I want to do with email on the iPhone is &lt;em&gt;triage&lt;/em&gt; &amp;#8212; most messages I can read once and forget. I&amp;#8217;ve written before about &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/2007/07/simple_inbox_sweeper"&gt;the AppleScript I wrote that moves read, unflagged messages&lt;/a&gt; from my inboxes to their corresponding archive mailboxes. I don&amp;#8217;t bother moving messages from the inbox to the archive folder one at a time, either on my Mac or on my iPhone. I just let that script move them all at once a few times a day.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The problem with the iPhone&amp;#8217;s lack of support for flagging is what to do with messages I read on the iPhone, but which I want to deal with later. Most times it&amp;#8217;s simply a case of a message which demands a response that would be too long to peck out on the iPhone keyboard. Without flagging, I took to marking such messages unread. But that never sat right with me &amp;#8212; both because I&amp;#8217;d already broken the habit of using &amp;#8220;unread&amp;#8221; in this way on the desktop, and because it completely throws off the utility of the unread message count in Mail&amp;#8217;s icon badge. I really want the number in that badge to represent &lt;em&gt;new&lt;/em&gt; messages, not &lt;em&gt;new messages and all the old ones marked unread because you didn&amp;#8217;t want to deal with them on the iPhone&lt;/em&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;What I really want is to be able to mark messages as flagged using the iPhone. But, absent that, I&amp;#8217;ve come up with a simple workaround that&amp;#8217;s worked well for me. Here&amp;#8217;s how it works:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;ol&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;In each IMAP account I access from my iPhone, I&amp;#8217;ve created a new top-level mailbox named &amp;#8220;[Flag]&amp;#8221; &amp;#8212; one mailbox with the same name in each account. The name isn&amp;#8217;t special &amp;#8212; I added the brackets because most of my accounts are hosted at Gmail, and &amp;#8220;[Flag]&amp;#8221; sorts alphabetically before the magic server-side &amp;#8220;[Gmail]&amp;#8221; folder.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;From the iPhone, whenever I read a message I want to flag, I move it to that account&amp;#8217;s &amp;#8220;[Flag]&amp;#8221; mailbox. It takes just two quick taps.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;When next I read email on my Mac, I run the AppleScript shown below. The script is very simple &amp;#8212; it looks through every IMAP account looking for mailboxes named &amp;#8220;[Flag]&amp;#8221;. When it finds one, it sets the flag status for every message therein and moves them back to that account&amp;#8217;s inbox.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ol&gt; &lt;p&gt;Here&amp;#8217;s the source to the AppleScript. If you want to use a mailbox name other than &amp;#8220;[Flag]&amp;#8221;, just change the string on line 6.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;pre&gt;&lt;code&gt;tell application "Mail" set _imap_accts to every imap account set _count to 0 repeat with _acct in _imap_accts try set _flagbox to mailbox "[Flag]" of _acct set _count to _count + (count messages of _flagbox) set flagged status of every message of _flagbox to true move every message of _flagbox to mailbox "INBOX" of _acct end try end repeat if _count is 1 then set _msg_string to " message." else set _msg_string to " messages." end if display alert "Flagged and moved " &amp;amp; _count &amp;amp; _msg_string end tell &lt;/code&gt;&lt;/pre&gt; &lt;p&gt;To use it, copy the source, paste it into Script Editor, and save the script in your &lt;em&gt;~/Library/Scripts/Applications/Mail/&lt;/em&gt; folder.&lt;/p&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Trailer of the day: J.J. Abrams&amp;#8217;s upcoming &lt;em&gt;Star Trek&lt;/em&gt; prequel.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘New &amp;#8216;Star Trek&amp;#8217; Trailer’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/17/star-trek"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;A clever idea from George Brocklehurst &amp;#8212; Choosy is a sort of meta web browser for Mac OS X, for people who use multiple web browsers. You set your &amp;#8220;default&amp;#8221; web browser to Choosy, and then when you open web URLs in other applications, Choosy will either prompt you for which browser you want to open the link in, or it will choose for you automatically based on rules you define.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Choosy’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/17/choosy"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;New £10.00 (about $15 USD) desktop SQLite tool from Menial:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Base is an application for creating, designing, editing and browsing SQLite 3 database files. It&amp;#8217;s a proper Mac OS X application. Fast to launch, quick to get in to and get the data you need.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Base 1.0’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/17/base-10"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;€39 Subversion client from Pico and Sofa, featuring a slick UI that is intended to make version control usable for developers and non-developers alike. Has been in public beta &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/06/04/versions"&gt;since June&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Versions 1.0’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/17/versions-10"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;The classic Atari 2600 game &amp;#8220;Adventure&amp;#8221;, as a free iPhone game by Peter Hirschberg. (&lt;a href="http://waxy.org/links/archive/2008/11/"&gt;Via Andy Baio&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘&amp;#8216;Adventure&amp;#8217; for iPhone’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/17/adventure"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;The update to the Google Mobile iPhone app with voice-driven search is now available, and while I think it&amp;#8217;s more gimmicky than useful overall, it&amp;#8217;s certainly interesting. If you don&amp;#8217;t have an iPhone, at least watch the demo video &amp;#8212; my favorite part of the app are the sound effects it makes when it&amp;#8217;s ready for you to dictate a voice query and finished processing your query. These sounds are just perfect.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Accuracy seems inconsistent. When I asked for local restaurant names here in Philly, it did well. When I asked for &amp;#8220;&lt;a href="http://youlooknicetoday.com/"&gt;You Look Nice Today&lt;/a&gt;&amp;#8221;, Google nailed it. But when I said &amp;#8220;Beat up Martin&amp;#8221;, well, &lt;a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/gruber/3041223652/"&gt;the result&lt;/a&gt; was &lt;a href="http://www.tuaw.com/2006/02/16/eat-up-martha/"&gt;Newton-esque&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Voice Search in Google Mobile App for iPhone’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/18/google-mobile-voice"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Seemed inevitable given Yahoo&amp;#8217;s &lt;a href="http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=YHOO#chart4:symbol=yhoo;range=6m;indicator=volume;charttype=line;crosshair=on;ohlcvalues=0;logscale=on;source=undefined"&gt;recent stock-price plunge&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Jerry Yang Steps Down as Yahoo CEO’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/17/jerry-yang"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;On the desktop version of Safari, when you use the built-in Google search field, you get pretty much the same results page as when you go to google.com and enter your query the old-fashioned way. The toolbar search field is just a more convenient way to get the same results.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But that&amp;#8217;s not the case on the iPhone. On the iPhone, when you use the toolbar search field (the one you get by tapping the magnifying glass button next to the location field), you get Google search results that look pretty much exactly like Google&amp;#8217;s default web presentation, shrunk down to fit on the iPhone screen:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="/misc/2008/11/google-iphone/google-safari.png"&gt;&lt;img src="/misc/2008/11/google-iphone/google-safari-thumb.png" alt="Google web search results on the iPhone, after a query initiated through the MobileSafari toolbar." /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;In this initial state, the results are effectively illegible. But if you start your search by loading the google.com home page, you get a results presentation that is specifically optimized for MobileSafari:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="/misc/2008/11/google-iphone/google-web.png"&gt;&lt;img src="/misc/2008/11/google-iphone/google-web-thumb.png" alt="Google web search results on the iPhone, after a query initiated on www.google.com." /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The text is perfectly sized, and the entire page layout is optimized for the iPhone display. &lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Admittedly, the un-optimized presentation you get via the toolbar button isn&amp;#8217;t a big deal, because you can double-tap on the results column to zoom in:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="/misc/2008/11/google-iphone/google-safari-zoomed.png"&gt;&lt;img src="/misc/2008/11/google-iphone/google-safari-zoomed-thumb.png" alt="Zoomed-in version of Google web search results on the iPhone, after a query initiated through the MobileSafari toolbar." /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But even then it&amp;#8217;s still not as nice as the version you get through the web site interface. I don&amp;#8217;t understand why, if Google has an iPhone-optimized search results mode, this mode isn&amp;#8217;t used for queries initiated via the iPhone&amp;#8217;s built-in Google search field.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;It&amp;#8217;s not clear to me whether Apple should change MobileSafari to send a different query string to Google to trigger these iPhone-optimized results, or whether Google should just handle it on their end, the same way they already serve an iPhone-optimized version of their home page to iPhone users.&lt;sup id="fnr1-2008-11-17"&gt;&lt;a href="#fn1-2008-11-17"&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 1:&lt;/strong&gt; Looks like Google engineers Steve Kanefsky and Rob Stacey wrote about this last week &lt;a href="http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2008/11/new-google-search-results-pages-for.html"&gt;for the Google Mobile Blog&lt;/a&gt;:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Over time, we intend to make the newly formatted results pages available through other search entry points on the iPhone, on additional devices, and in more language and country combinations.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update 2:&lt;/strong&gt; I neglected to mention that if you change your default MobileSafari search engine from Google to Yahoo, the search results from Yahoo are iPhone optimized:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="/misc/2008/11/google-iphone/yahoo-safari.png"&gt;&lt;img src="/misc/2008/11/google-iphone/yahoo-safari-thumb.png" alt="Yahoo web search results on the iPhone, after a query initiated through the MobileSafari toolbar." /&gt;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Right idea, but I don&amp;#8217;t care for Yahoo&amp;#8217;s presentation. Each result is too big &amp;#8212; you can only see the first two without scrolling, whereas with Google&amp;#8217;s iPhone display you can see four.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div class="footnotes"&gt; &lt;hr /&gt; &lt;ol&gt; &lt;li id="fn1-2008-11-17"&gt; &lt;p&gt;In addition to sizing and positioning the form fields on the Google home page in a way that&amp;#8217;s optimized for the iPhone, there&amp;#8217;s also a very nice as-you-type menu of suggested search terms. Google, company-wide, has made some of the best iPhone-optimized web sites I&amp;#8217;ve seen.&amp;nbsp;&lt;a href="#fnr1-2008-11-17" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text."&gt;&amp;#8617;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ol&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Google translation of Mikael Markander&amp;#8217;s report in the Swedish MacWorld:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;One of the most common complaints of iPhone is that you have to hack it to send and receive multimedia messages. But soon, those who dislike Apple&amp;#8217;s mobile need to look for new arguments. For in an interview with MacWorld confirms a spokesman for Telia that it will shortly launch an application for MMS. &lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Not sure if this means Telia is writing their own MMS iPhone app, or if they&amp;#8217;re suggesting that Apple is adding MMS support to the system software. I haven&amp;#8217;t seen any reports of MMS support in the iPhone OS 2.2 betas. &lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; Several Swedish DF readers have confirmed that the original article makes clear that it is Telia that plans to offer this app, not Apple.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;And, yes, the Swedish publication spells &amp;#8220;MacWorld&amp;#8221; with a capital &amp;#8220;W&amp;#8221;. The U.S. version &lt;a href="http://macworld.com/"&gt;does not&lt;/a&gt;. (&lt;a href="http://waffle.wootest.net/2008/11/18/iphone-mms-coming/"&gt;Via Waffle&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Swedish MacWorld Reports MMS Coming Soon to iPhone’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/18/swedish-macworld-mms"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Google:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Most were never published and are now available for the first time through the joint work of LIFE and Google.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;This is Google at its best. Beware &amp;#8212; you could lose the rest of your day searching this archive for gems like &lt;a href="http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=c9ac643a967edcad&amp;amp;q=disneyland+source:life&amp;amp;usg=__ADH5Qx75DxdZawwe0wlu6f00xZk=&amp;amp;prev=/images%3Fq%3Ddisneyland%2Bsource:life%26start%3D21%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN"&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href="http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=d19890dcbcb5cfd4&amp;amp;q=1940s+Hawaii+source:life&amp;amp;usg=__RiMTmFnfTjmkVK6y9Yi2WwxFsAM=&amp;amp;prev=/images%3Fq%3D1940s%2BHawaii%2Bsource:life%26start%3D60%26ndsp%3D20%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DN"&gt;this&lt;/a&gt; and &lt;a href="http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=c9d9de927f6b0758&amp;amp;q=1970s+boxer+source:life&amp;amp;usg=__QmACVBCGFwX-39m4h-DqGW2yJnM=&amp;amp;prev=/images%3Fq%3D1970s%2Bboxer%2Bsource:life%26hl%3Den"&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;. And most certainly &lt;a href="http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=658f9cfcdbe3d595&amp;amp;q=kubrick+source:life&amp;amp;usg=__xqt7RJpwswfY-8jB7VZAq6MtMXQ=&amp;amp;prev=/images%3Fq%3Dkubrick%2Bsource:life%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG"&gt;this&lt;/a&gt;. (&lt;a href="http://waxy.org/links/archive/2008/11/"&gt;Via Andy Baio&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; More gold &lt;a href="http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=934717d66418f000&amp;amp;q=source:life+Apple&amp;amp;usg=__AJ8ZL_avxenahklDpDjw5svSmW8=&amp;amp;prev=/images%3Fq%3Dsource:life%2BApple%26gbv%3D2%26hl%3Den"&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href="http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=7828f064d20ebe07&amp;amp;q=kennedy+source:life&amp;amp;usg=__UmboXXThT2AFsGBt2ZPsOGgdE2Y%3D&amp;amp;prev=/images%3Fq%3Dkennedy%2Bsource:life%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG"&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;, and &lt;a href="http://images.google.com/hosted/life/l?imgurl=a8042089dd186763&amp;amp;q=carson+source:life&amp;amp;usg=__7by93C7rJB5gdQZm00kvYzK1r1c=&amp;amp;prev=/images%3Fq%3Dcarson%2Bsource:life%26hl%3Den%26sa%3DG"&gt;here&lt;/a&gt;. Just wonderful.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Life Magazine Photo Archive Hosted by Google’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/18/life-google"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Andy Baio is trying to reverse-engineer how the Google Mobile app&amp;#8217;s voice search works. (That the audio files being sent from the iPhone to Google&amp;#8217;s servers are only 100-300 &lt;em&gt;bytes&lt;/em&gt; helps explain why it&amp;#8217;s so much faster than I expected it to be.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Deconstructing Google Mobile&amp;#8217;s Voice Search’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/18/baio-google-voice"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Mena Trott skewers Valleywag&amp;#8217;s Owen Thomas. The perfect response to a jackass post.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘&amp;#8216;The Definition of a Slow News Day&amp;#8217;’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/18/slow-news-day"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Definitely suggests that it&amp;#8217;s Telia that will be providing the app, but no word as to how they plan to distribute it. The only way would be through the App Store, and the App Store requires Apple&amp;#8217;s blessing. Are there any carrier-specific apps in the store now? I&amp;#8217;m not aware of any from AT&amp;amp;T here in the U.S., at least.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Jesper: &amp;#8216;Translation From P… Uh, Swedish to English of Selected Portions of Swedish MacWorld’s Report About iPhone MMS Availability in Telia’s Swedish Network&amp;#8217;’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/18/jesper-translation"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;New from Flying Meat: VoodooPad 4.0. Lots of new stuff, but the big new feature is syncing via WebDAV (including to MobileMe).&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘VoodooPad 4.0’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/18/vp4"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;$2 app turns your iPhone or iPod Touch into a numeric keypad for your MacBook. I have no need for this personally, but I can&amp;#8217;t help but link to it given that one of the themes matches the Apple IIgs ADB keyboard.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘NumberKey’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/19/numberkey"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Jason Fried:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;To clarify, my definition of design goes beyond aesthetic qualities and into areas of maintenance, cost, profitability, speed, and purpose. However, I still think that the Drudge Report is an aesthetic masterpiece even though I also consider it ugly. Can good design also be ugly? I think Drudge proves it can.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I agree completely.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Jason Fried: &amp;#8216;Why the Drudge Report Is One of the Best Designed Sites on the Web&amp;#8217;’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/19/fried-drudge"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;I have a feeling that &lt;a href="http://www.editorsweblog.org/analysis/2008/11/christian_science_monitor_interview_part.php"&gt;print publications turning into online-only publications&lt;/a&gt; is going to be a recurring theme during this recession.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘PC Magazine Ceases Print’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/19/pc-mag"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Chuck Klosterman:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Reviewing &lt;em&gt;Chinese Democracy&lt;/em&gt; is not like reviewing music. It&amp;#8217;s more like reviewing a unicorn. Should I primarily be blown away that it exists at all? Am I supposed to compare it to conventional horses? To a rhinoceros? Does its pre-existing mythology impact its actual value, or must it be examined inside a cultural vacuum, as if this creature is no more (or less) special than the remainder of the animal kingdom? I&amp;#8217;ve been thinking about this record for 15 years; during that span, I&amp;#8217;ve thought about this record more than I&amp;#8217;ve thought about China, and maybe as much as I&amp;#8217;ve thought about the principles of democracy.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Chuck Klosterman Reviews &amp;#8216;Chinese Democracy&amp;#8217;’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/19/klosterman"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Exquisite book cover designs by Coralie Bickford-Smith for Penguin&amp;#8217;s new range of hardback classics. See more images &lt;a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/26408069@N05/"&gt;in Penguin&amp;#8217;s Flickr account&lt;/a&gt;. (And how cool is it that Penguin &lt;em&gt;has&lt;/em&gt; a Flickr account?) (&lt;a href="http://nytimesbooks.blogspot.com/2008/11/penguin-waterstones-hardback-classics.html"&gt;Via The Book Design Review&lt;/a&gt;.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘The Penguin Blog: Designing Classics’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/19/penguin-design"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;She makes an interesting distinction between the venial sin of using undocumented methods in a public framework (which is what Google has done with the proximity sensor), and the mortal sin of linking to a completely private framework. Sadun &amp;#8212; who&amp;#8217;s the author of the very good &lt;a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/asin/0321555457/ref=nosim/daringfirebal-20"&gt;&lt;em&gt;iPhone Developer&amp;#8217;s Cookbook&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/a&gt; &amp;#8212; even shows source code for an example app that catches proximity sensor events.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Based on some of the email I&amp;#8217;ve gotten this morning, I think the occasional use of undocumented methods in public iPhone frameworks is actually pretty common in third-party iPhone apps. But that doesn&amp;#8217;t make it safe, and I think Sadun is stretching the innocuousness of this practice when she writes:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Using unpublished APIs means that your applications can break at any firmware upgrade; Apple does not guarantee that routines will not change the way they stand behind the published APIs. However, developers use these routines for all sorts of good reasons both for items in App Store as well as out. And, often, the routines don&amp;#8217;t break and have been stable for a long long time.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Undocumented routines are undocumented for &lt;em&gt;some&lt;/em&gt; reason.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Erica Sadun on Using Undocumented iPhone APIs’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/20/erica-sadun"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Google&amp;#8217;s just-released and much-publicized update to their Google Mobile iPhone app features some very clever interaction design for the voice search feature. There is an on-screen button you can tap to initiate a voice search manually, but, as illustrated in their &lt;a href="http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2008/11/google-mobile-app-for-iphone-now-with.html"&gt;example video&lt;/a&gt;, you can initiate a voice search just by lifting your iPhone to your ear.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;In order to trigger this automatic voice prompt, you must:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;ol&gt; &lt;li&gt;Move the iPhone.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;Trigger the proximity sensor next to the speaker at the top of the iPhone.&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ol&gt; &lt;p&gt;You need to do both, in that order.&lt;sup id="fnr1-2008-11-19"&gt;&lt;a href="#fn1-2008-11-19"&gt;1&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/sup&gt; The voice prompt is never triggered by motion alone, nor by covering the proximity sensor without first having moved the phone. The only way it is triggered is by moving the phone and then triggering the proximity sensor. It&amp;#8217;s very clever, and the resulting user experience is very nice.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;But here&amp;#8217;s the intrigue: There is no public API in the iPhone SDK for using the proximity sensor in this way.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;As you might imagine considering the number of accelerometer-driven games in the App Store, there are plenty of public API calls to access data from the iPhone&amp;#8217;s accelerometer. But the only thing apps can do with the proximity sensor is turn it on and off. When the proximity sensor is on, the screen turns off and stops accepting touch input when you cover the sensor (typically with your head, when holding the phone to your ear to, say, make a phone call, but you can just as easily trigger it by covering the sensor with your finger). By default, the proximity sensor is turned off, and the overwhelming majority of apps leave it that way.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;If you&amp;#8217;re a registered iPhone developer, you can read the relevant documentation &lt;a href="https://developer.apple.com/iphone/library/documentation/UIKit/Reference/UIApplication_Class/Reference/Reference.html#//apple_ref/doc/uid/TP40006728-CH3-DontLinkElementID_15"&gt;for the &lt;code&gt;proximitySensingEnabled&lt;/code&gt; property&lt;/a&gt; in the UIApplication Class Reference. An app can check the status of this property (is it on or off?), and can toggle it, but that&amp;#8217;s it. After an app has turned the proximity sensor on, the app never finds out when or if it has actually been engaged. There is no way for an app to be notified when the proximity sensor has been triggered.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;No way, that is, via the public APIs.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;If you use something like the command-line &lt;code&gt;strings&lt;/code&gt; utility to examine the UIKit framework, you can see that there&amp;#8217;s an undocumented (and therefore private to Apple) method named &lt;code&gt;proximityStateChanged&lt;/code&gt;. And if one were to strip the FairPlay DRM from the current Google Mobile application binary &amp;#8212; which, of course, you wouldn&amp;#8217;t do, because you&amp;#8217;re not supposed to strip FairPlay DRM, but I&amp;#8217;m just saying &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; one were to do this &amp;#8212; a class dump of the application binary would show that Google Mobile does in fact implement &lt;code&gt;proximityStateChanged&lt;/code&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;So, (a) Google Mobile is using an undocumented API, and (b) to my knowledge, there is no way to duplicate the behavior of Google Mobile&amp;#8217;s &amp;#8220;just lift the phone to your ear to trigger the voice prompt&amp;#8221; feature using only the public APIs in the iPhone SDK. Needless to say, using undocumented APIs violates the iPhone SDK Guidelines. A developer that plays by the rules cannot do what Google is doing.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;hr /&gt; &lt;p&gt;I can think of three explanations for how Google got away with this:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;ol&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Whoever at Apple approved this Google Mobile update did not realize that it was using the private &lt;code&gt;proximityStateChanged&lt;/code&gt; method.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Whoever at Apple approved it knew that it used a private API, but approved it anyway.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;li&gt;&lt;p&gt;Google sought and obtained permission from Apple to use this method.&lt;/p&gt;&lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ol&gt; &lt;p&gt;I do not believe #3 is the case. I&amp;#8217;m pretty sure that the App Store approval process is as much of a black box for Google as it is for everyone else.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;That leaves #1 and #2, either of which suggests that the Google Mobile team followed the adage that it&amp;#8217;s easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission. If this is the case &amp;#8212; &lt;em&gt;if&lt;/em&gt; &amp;#8212; it might explain why Google started publicizing the voice search feature &lt;a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/14/technology/internet/14voice.html?partner=rss&amp;amp;emc=rss&amp;amp;pagewanted=all"&gt;several days before&lt;/a&gt; it actually appeared in the App Store. The publicity from John Markoff&amp;#8217;s feature in The New York Times put &lt;a href="http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/11/15/more-apple-iphone-search-weirdness-and-embarrassment-for-google/"&gt;pressure&lt;/a&gt; on Apple to accept the app. If there was any internal debate within Apple about whether to allow this, it might explain why the app took several days longer to appear in the store than Markoff&amp;#8217;s story indicated Google expected.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;#1 is possible. There is no technical barrier that prevents a third-party iPhone app from making calls to undocumented APIs, and I have heard that several apps that do so have slipped past the App Store approval process. But I would presume the Apple employees who examine App Store submissions are well-versed regarding which hardware features are exposed through the official public APIs.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;If it&amp;#8217;s #2, though, this stinks. Third-party iPhone development is purportedly a level playing field. If regular developers are forced to play by the rules, but Google is allowed to use private APIs just because they&amp;#8217;re Google, the system is rigged.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;So here&amp;#8217;s to hoping that it&amp;#8217;s #1. Even in that case, the situation just highlights the problem that a lot of cool features are behind the iPhone&amp;#8217;s private APIs &amp;#8212; private APIs which Apple&amp;#8217;s own apps make full use of. I understand the reason why the developers of Google Mobile used this method &amp;#8212; without it, the feature isn&amp;#8217;t possible (and, frankly, the proximity sensor isn&amp;#8217;t of much use). The downside to third-party use of any undocumented APIs, however, is that undocumented APIs can change or vanish in future iPhone OS updates, which situations inevitably lead some users to be outraged that Apple doesn&amp;#8217;t &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/2007/10/un_in_unsupported"&gt;support the unsupported&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;hr /&gt; &lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;My thanks to &lt;a href="http://hiddengalaxy.net/"&gt;Robert Marini&lt;/a&gt; for assistance researching certain of the technical aspects of this article, including going so far as to build an iPhone app to test whether any documented application delegates are triggered when the proximity sensor is engaged. (The answer is no.)&lt;/em&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div class="footnotes"&gt; &lt;hr /&gt; &lt;ol&gt; &lt;li id="fn1-2008-11-19"&gt; &lt;p&gt;This explains why, if you turn on Google Mobile&amp;#8217;s off-by-default setting to allow the UI to rotate, the automatic voice search prompt is disabled. By default Google Mobile tracks motion to see if you&amp;#8217;ve moved the phone to your ear; turning the UI rotation option on means it instead tracks motion to see if the display orientation should be changed. I suspect the two uses conflict, in that when you rotate the iPhone, your thumb is likely to cover the proximity sensor.&amp;nbsp;&lt;a href="#fnr1-2008-11-19" class="footnoteBackLink" title="Jump back to footnote 1 in the text."&gt;&amp;#8617;&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/li&gt; &lt;/ol&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#8217;ve played a bunch of iPhone games that, while fun on the computer, just don&amp;#8217;t translate well to the iPhone. Games that are best suited to control using a keyboard, joystick, or mouse often just aren&amp;#8217;t fun when using the accelerometer or touch screen for input.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Frenzic, a joint production of The Iconfactory and ARTIS Software, is the other way around. When Frenzic came out for the Mac &lt;a href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2007/02/20/frenzic"&gt;in February 2007&lt;/a&gt;, I thought it was a neat concept, but it required far too much precise mousing for me to find it fun. It&amp;#8217;s so perfectly suited to touch screen controls that it&amp;#8217;s hard to believe it wasn&amp;#8217;t designed for the iPhone all along. $5 &lt;a href="http://www.itunes.com/app/Frenzic"&gt;at the App Store&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Frenzic for iPhone’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/19/frenzic"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Some of these photographs in Google&amp;#8217;s new Life archive make me insatiably curious about the articles that accompanied them in the magazine. Like, say, this series from 1959 featuring a two-year-old cigarette smoker.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘A Two-Year-Old Smoking’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/19/two-year-old-smoker"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Tweetie, a brand-new $3 iPhone Twitter client by Loren Brichter, is now available from the App Store. I&amp;#8217;ve been using beta versions for a few weeks, and it is currently my favorite iPhone Twitter client by far. Tweetie shares a few conceptual similarities with &lt;a href="http://www.tweetsville.com/"&gt;Tweetsville&lt;/a&gt;, another very good new iPhone Twitter client &amp;#8212; both take a very different approach than the king of the hill, &lt;a href="http://iconfactory.com/software/twitterrific"&gt;Twitterrific&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;The biggest difference is that both Tweetie and Tweetsville support loading additional tweets from further back in your timeline when you get to the end of the list. This makes it possible to &amp;#8220;catch up&amp;#8221; with older tweets in a way that just isn&amp;#8217;t possible with Twitterrific. Tweetie also makes it possible to view individual users&amp;#8217; timelines within the app, using a left-to-right &amp;#8220;drilling down&amp;#8221; metaphor that allows you to go back to where you were. Tweetie wins out over Tweetsville by being faster, more stable (Tweetsville seems to more frequently run into low-memory situations when showing inline web views), and offering a more carefully thought out interface. The only thing I dislike about Tweetie is the SMS/iChat-style tweet list.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Tweetie 1.0’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/20/tweetie-10"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Note2Self is a $3 audio recording app for the iPhone, and, I believe, the first iPhone app with a &amp;#8220;just lift it to your ear to record&amp;#8221; feature. (It shipped with the feature in July.) However, unlike Google Mobile, Note2Self doesn&amp;#8217;t use the proximity sensor, only the accelerometer.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;I bought it last night to try it out. It works better than I&amp;#8217;d have thought, but it&amp;#8217;s far more finicky than Google Mobile&amp;#8217;s implementation. With Note2Self you can trigger the &amp;#8220;lift to record&amp;#8221; feature just by moving the iPhone and holding it at the right angle &amp;#8212; without putting it near your head. And sometimes when you do move it to your ear it doesn&amp;#8217;t trigger. I think it&amp;#8217;s about as good as it could be by sticking to the published APIs, but now that the proximity sensor cat is out of the bag, I expect to see an update that uses it soon.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Note2Self (iTunes Store)’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/20/note2self"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;This is the app that the Swedish carrier Telia will be providing to Swedish iPhone users.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Mobispine MMS App for iPhone’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/20/mobispine"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Jonathan Hoefler has an example of pixel-based typography from 1567.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘On the Death and 441-Year Life of the Pixel’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/20/hoefler-pixels"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;With actual, albeit sparse, release notes:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Third-party Remote Controls &amp;#8212; Apple TV can now learn other remote controls and use them in addition to the Apple Remote.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#8217;t find any developer documentation for this yet. &lt;strong&gt;Update:&lt;/strong&gt; Ah, I see, it&amp;#8217;s a feature that allows the Apple TV to pair with existing universal remotes.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Apple TV Software Update 2.3’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/20/apple-tv-23"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Andy Baio:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;Last week, I started a new Turk experiment to answer two questions: what do these people look like, and how much does it cost for someone to reveal their face?&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘The Faces of Mechanical Turk’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/20/turk"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Ryan Singer on Ffffound&amp;#8217;s excellent keyboard shortcuts. Design isn&amp;#8217;t just how things look &amp;#8212; it&amp;#8217;s about the experience of using them. (The Boston Globe&amp;#8217;s &lt;a href="http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/"&gt;Big Picture&lt;/a&gt; uses similar shortcuts.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Ffffound&amp;#8217;s Clever Keyboard-Based Navigation’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/20/ffffound-navigation"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;DF reader Mark Handel, via email:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;I can&amp;#8217;t remember &amp;#8212; does the iPod Touch have a proximity sensor? If it does not, that&amp;#8217;s probably the reason that the proximity sensor is undocumented: Apple is trying to keep a very common &amp;#8220;reference&amp;#8221; hardware platform in the API. I think it was you who mentioned the problem with Android being that there was not a common hardware model: some have only touch screens, some have keyboards, etc.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;The iPod Touch does &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; have a proximity sensor. The primary &amp;#8212; and perhaps only &amp;#8212; reason the iPhone does is so the screen can turn off and stop accepting touch input when you&amp;#8217;re holding it to your ear for a call. I&amp;#8217;m not sure this explains why the more useful proximity sensor APIs are undocumented, but it&amp;#8217;s an interesting theory. And, clearly, some of the iPhone-only hardware features &amp;#8212; the camera and microphone come to mind &amp;#8212; are very much documented in the public APIs.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘The iPod Touch Doesn&amp;#8217;t Have a Proximity Sensor’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/20/ipod-touch-proximity"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;New section on Apple&amp;#8217;s iPhone web site promoting third-party apps. Interesting for at least two reasons: (1) I&amp;#8217;ve already found a couple of interesting apps I&amp;#8217;d never heard of before, and (2) it shows you which iPhone apps Apple considers worth showing off.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Apple: &amp;#8216;iPhone Your Life&amp;#8217;’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/20/iphone-your-life"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;John Paczkowski on the Mozilla Foundation&amp;#8217;s finances:&lt;/p&gt; &lt;blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;[&amp;#8230;] its revenue for 2007 totaled $75.1 million, up 13 percent from 2006’s $66.8 million. And 88 percent of that came directly from Google, which pays Mozilla to be the default search engine in it Firefox browser.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;/blockquote&gt; &lt;p&gt;So Mozilla is utterly dependent on Google for its revenue, but competing directly against them with Firefox vs. Chrome. That&amp;#8217;s a weird relationship.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Mozilla&amp;#8217;s Dependence on Google’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/21/mozilla-google"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;My thanks to Marketcircle for sponsoring this week&amp;#8217;s DF RSS feed to promote Billings 3. Billings is a time-tracking and invoicing app with a simple, clear, and very stylish interface. It also produces gorgeous invoices. I would have killed for this app back in my freelancing days.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;p&gt;Billings 3 normally sells for $59, but is currently on sale for $40. (Upgrades are on sale too.)&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Billings 3’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/21/billings-3"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http://www.iphonehellas.gr/3454/iphone-os-v22-to-be-released-on-21-november/#more-3454"&gt;iPhoneHellas.gr was right&lt;/a&gt; &amp;#8212; iPhone OS 2.2 was released today. Here are Apple&amp;#8217;s security-related release notes.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘About the Security Content of iPhone OS 2.2 ’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/21/iphone-os-22-security"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Fabulous collection of &amp;#8220;The End&amp;#8221; movie title cards. Needless to say, &lt;a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/djll/2985378853/in/set-72157608369709836/"&gt;this one&lt;/a&gt; is my favorite.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘The End’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/21/the-end"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Technical information regarding the formats Netflix uses for video streaming.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘The Official Netflix Blog: Encoding for Streaming’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/21/netflix-encoding"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Safari now supports EV SSL certificates, and is using a blacklist of known phishing domains &lt;a href="http://code.google.com/apis/safebrowsing/developers_guide.html"&gt;supplied by Google&lt;/a&gt;.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Rich Mogull on Safari 3.2&amp;#8217;s Anti-Phishing Features’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/21/mogull-safari-32"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Steven Heller interviews Sol Sender, the designer of the Obama campaign&amp;#8217;s &amp;#8220;O&amp;#8221; logo.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘The &amp;#8216;O&amp;#8217; in Obama’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/21/the-o-in-obama"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;A thoroughly researched epic typographic saga, by Paul Shaw.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘The (Mostly) True Story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/21/helvetica-nyc-subway"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;Comprehensive coverage from Jesse David Hollington for iLounge, describing and showing what&amp;#8217;s new in today&amp;#8217;s iPhone OS 2.2 update.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘What&amp;#8217;s New in iPhone OS 2.2’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/21/hollington"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

&lt;p&gt;When you save a picture to your photo roll from email or the web, if the picture is larger than the iPhone display (480&amp;#8201;&amp;#215;&amp;#8201;320 pixels), the iPhone displays a scaled-up thumbnail rather than a scaled-down version of the large image. Here&amp;#8217;s &lt;a href="http://full-speed.org/archives/2008/11/21/iphone_22_update_image_issue.php"&gt;another description of the problem&lt;/a&gt;, with more examples, from Scott Johnson.&lt;/p&gt; &lt;div&gt; &lt;a title="Permanent link to ‘Photo-Resizing Bug in iPhone OS 2.2’" href="http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/11/21/photo-resizing-bug"&gt;&amp;nbsp;★&amp;nbsp;&lt;/a&gt; &lt;/div&gt; </content>

Palm is responding to its recent losses by trimming its workforce of 1050 employees, in an effort to remain competitive against the iPhone 3G and the various BlackBerry models. Reuters reports that the move comes as Palm focuses on its Linux-based "Nova" operating system, as well as a device on which the platform will run. Palm spokeswoman Lynn Fox declined to say how many jobs will be cut, but sa...

The latest development in the Apple-Psystar case may potentially see Apple stumbling over potential fines, as a recent filing shows that the company does not practice common document and email archiving etiquette. The Industry Standard reports that Apple maintains no company standard for email and document retention, a practice that can lead to millions of dollars in fines when adequate documentat...

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Enterprise, Software, Education, Reviews, Developer, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch

Last month TUAW pointed you to a video of a relational database application for iPhone and iPod touch: HanDBase. DDH Software, developers of HandDBase, announced immediate availability of the program in the iTunes App Store.

At US$9.99, HanDBase (click opens iTunes) isn't cheap, but when you consider that it can be used to create custom iPhone database applications to track just about anything in your life, it begins to look like a bargain. HanDBase has been a popular product in the mobile computing space for years, and HanDBase aficionados have uploaded over 2,000 applets (database templates) to the HanDBase applet gallery for free download by other users.

Over the past three weeks, I've been test driving HanDBase for iPhone / iPod touch.

Read on for a full review of the app.

Continue reading TUAW Review: HanDBase for iPhone

TUAWTUAW Review: HanDBase for iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 21 Nov 2008 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: iPhone 101

If you're like me, then you have around 7 home screens. It's annoying to flip back and forth between them to find the Apple apps, which are normally stored on the first home screen.

With the introduction of the new iPhone/iPod touch 2.2 firmware, you now have the ability to jump to the first home screen with one click. No matter which screen you're on, just click the home button again. You will instantly be shuttled back to the first screen. Now you'll never have to flip again.

Want more tips and tricks like this? Visit TUAW's iPhone 101 section.

TUAWiPhone 101: The home screen shortcut in 2.2 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Fri, 21 Nov 2008 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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