The iPhone SDK

It’s been months since I was insulted by Apple fanboys for saying that the iPhone needed an SDK and now Apple has officially released a beta version of the iPhone/iPod Touch SDK.

I can’t access developer.apple.com at the moment but Levi Figueira was kind enough to upload both screenshots of the pages and the PDFs of agreements involved during a twitter discussion with me and David Rodrigues (also read his post on the iPhone SDK in Portuguese).

The good news is apple provides the App Store to distribute your applications with the iPhone Developer Program and all you have to do is pay them $99 and 30% of what your customers pay for your app.

The bad news is that, from what I understood, there’s no other way to get apps on an iPhone, even if it’s your own apps on your own iPhone or if they’re Open Source apps.

The other good news is that if they’re free apps, they don’t charge the 30% (30% of 0 is 0 so…). So as long as someone paid $99 to be part of the Developer Program, they can put free apps on the Store at no additional charges.

The other bad news is there won’t be porn games on the iPhone I wonder if they consider hentai (Japanese eroge visual novel) games “porn”.

I think the iPhone Developer Program is a really Great Thing (TM), think Steam for the iPhone/iPod Touch but more open. I just wish it were “optional”.

Sapo Codebits AKA Free Food

Sapo Codebits (blog, wiki) starts tomorrow. I wonder how many people will show up and how many teams will enter in the contest… doesn’t really matter as long as I win nah seriously, the more the better of course. There are quite a few people going from prt.sc so I won’t be alone

I’m not going to be doing any live blogging (or at least I don’t plan to) but I do plan to keep my twitter updated – “going to talk X”, “talk Y was cool”, “doing this/that” style updates and at the end of the day, if I’m not too tired I’ll provide a summary. Chances are lots of other bloggers will be blogging live/end of day summaries so if you’re not going because you can’t, at least you’ll get a pretty good idea of what you missed.

I’ll also try to take some photos and keep my flickr updated too.

Security

Just went over the small checklist I blogged about previously. Told the firewall to block all incoming connections and started using OpenDNS again -I first used it in Norway as a way to fix Fon’s DNS problems at the time (screwy youtube).

As for the VPN, I really haven’t tested my own VPN – I’m counting on FEUP’s VPN to work, which admittedly is far from a sure thing. Not that I expect anything below WPA2-Enterprise (TLS) from the APs available.

My emails/IMs sometimes have one of my ultra secret recipes for CAKE so I’m usually careful with them.

Need to not forget to backup everything on my macbook later tonight (via Time Machine).

Camera

I’m still wondering if I should take my camera’s cables with me. 144 pictures (the capacity of my 512MB Memory Sick – need to buy a new one) should be more than enough for just 3 days. So I guess that’s a no.

Ipod/Portable HD

Borrowing my mother’s Ipod again after taking it to Norway I became a huge fan. I was going to download stuff earlier today but Miro crashed (possibly leopard related). I updated and it’s working now so I’m currently downloading a few talks from Google Tech Talks, TED talks and Channel 9.

I loaded a bunch of movies and episodes into my portable HD but I don’t think I’ll have the dead time to watch any of them except maybe on the trips (via Alfa Pendular Porto->Lisbon in approximately 2h30-3h) but that’s when I plan to watch the talks. Then again I’ll probably sleep on the train tomorrow.

Some Things Never Change – The Distortion Field

Good to see Jobs infamous distortion field is still intact – I was afraid it was no longer active now that Apple is treated as a serious company as opposed to the industry joke it had been up until the ipod and the move to intel processors.

To boldly claim what no one in his right mind has claimed before: Safari – The Most Innovative Browser. I’ve been told Jobs managed to remain serious while this phrase was on the background, I would’ve cracked myself up rolling on the floor laughing if I tried to make this insane claim. This one should get an award of some kind.

Everybody needs a nap

“Everybody needs a nap” is the beautiful conclusion to this article on the most recent Apple QA fuckup. Instead of admitting this was entirely their fault, Apple decided to also blame MS for it’s mistakes,

As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it.

It’s kinda silly though that so many reacted so violently (for lack of a better word) to Apple’s latest cheesy dissimulated propaganda… Almost everyone with a brain laughed at their lame remark. The ones that didn’t have already converted to the Apple Church so they don’t really matter. As for the ones without a (complete) brain, well… they have bigger problems don’t they?

Apple to pay MS for ipod

AH AH AH AH
Relax MSNed me this story from MSFN:

Computer firm Apple may have to pay Microsoft £6 for each iPod it sells after a huge licensing lapse. Lawyers at Bill Gates’ firm filed a patent for technology behind the hugely successful digital music player two months before Apple.
The US Patent Office has ruled that Microsoft has the right to charge competitors a licence fee for each iPod sold. A furious Apple has said it will appeal the decision, but at the moment it looks as though the firm will be paying a high price for the success of its product.
The iPod was launched in November 2001 but Apple waited until July 2002 to file for a patent; Microsoft snuck in to license some of the technology the previous May. David Kaefer, Microsoft’s director of intellectual property licensing, said it was open to letting other firms patent its innovations.