For some, this has to be the best news of the month so far¹: “within a week or so”, Apple will send iPhone developers a new version of the SDK agreement that will no longer put API usage under NDA. From open discussion (and exchange of code) to books being published to open source software being put out of legal limbo, this should resolve many entirely unnecessary (from the developers’ perspective) hindrances.

What I find interesting is how Apple describes this as a change of mind, rather than something they had intended all along:

We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others.

However, the NDA has created too much of a burden on developers, authors and others interested in helping further the iPhone’s success, so we are dropping it for released software.

And:

Thanks to everyone who provided us constructive feedback on this matter.

Whether individual developers had a stake in this decision, or whether is was rather influenced by higher-profile companies (or perhaps largely by recent cancellations of books) will perhaps never be clear. Nonetheless, it confirms Matt Gemmell: “Apple is listening”. Perhaps they sometimes do so too late, but at least they do at all.

Now let’s hope some progress can be made on the arbitrary rejection front.

1. Especially considering the month just started today. ↩

Monoculture is bad. I love to see so many different version control systems pop up lately. While Subversion is an excellent and popular choice that will get most tasks done, darcs, git, Mercurial and all work to provide new approaches — primarily when it comes to distributed versioning rather than a fixed client-server architecture. While they all steer in a similar direction, they’re different in the details. You might agree with one design decision here and another there. And perhaps in the long run, the VCS market at large will evolve into one where DVCS comes standard and is implemented well.

Until then, we have a problem. Because we haven’t quite settled yet on the “right” implementation — and, in particular, the one right interface, aforementioned ones such as git all go for their own little ways, and end up being incompatible.

Via David: “the new portability nightmare”.

echo 1 > foo
$vcs add foo
echo 2 > foo
$vcs commit

What was committed, “1″ or “2″? Depends on which $vcs you use.

That says it all.

I must admit I’ve only followed the OASIS OpenDocument vs. Office OpenXML debate from a distance, but the little I did hear left me with the hard-to-believe impression that OOXML proponents largely either work for Microsoft, are paid/bribed by Microsoft or are just plain clueless, and that a general aura of evil hovers over the spec.

Put another way, it’s been very polarizing with little middle ground. There are certainly valid criticisms (particularly jarring are the bizarre, hardly-documented legacy compatibility attribute such as lineWrapLikeWord6) worth discussing, but what I’ve generally found to be missing is a voice of reason.

A voice that actually has a bit of an insight on the process. A voice that can say this:

What Was Good · The people. With a very few exceptions, everyone really tried hard to work together and make the document better. Everyone freely acknowledged that the job was way too big, but there we were for a week to take a run at it anyhow. I include the nations’ representatives and the ISO people and the Microsoft people when I say this; they were, by and large, a pleasure to work with.

This idea that Microsoft is a giant Mordor-like work camp of mindless, soulless ones is far too common, and I’m thankful for different perspectives, like the above one by Tim Bray. And yet, he points out, most of the commentary on the recent ballot resolution meeting is once more “spin”-filled.

It’s not hard to imagine that Microsoft tries as hard as they can for Office’s dominance to prevail. It will, however, be hard to have constructive, productive, useful results when you spend much of your time bickering. There’s a Microsoft-funded BSD-licensed ODF add-in project, there’s ODF and OOXML support in any OS X 10.5 NSAttributeString, and there’s plenty of other examples of how developers can just get to the point, work together, and accomplish something where the user wins.

I see no chance in OOXML going away, and I don’t want OpenDocument gone either. As ideal as a world with one document format to rule them all would be, it strikes me as unrealistic. Instead, let’s get pragmatic, and work to improve both, as well as interaction between the two.

It would be an interoperability win (which is what we really want, right?), and a lock-in loss.

Jens (Stickies, iChat, Safari RSS, etc.) ponders using Core Animation subclasses to integrate a physics engine.

In the comments, Gus suggests Chipmunk in Box2D’s stead.

Even if that’s all too technical to you, you can’t tell me you don’t enjoy this demo (though it gets a tad repetitive towards the end)!

While working on the MYSTlore MediaWiki installation, I went through various extensions that might prove useful sooner or later. Here’s one that sounds neat. Says the author:

[The manual approach of adding categories] clearly has some disadvantages[,] including[:]

• lower usage of categories because users don’t know the syntax
• duplication of similar sounding categories because users don’t know that a category already exists

‘fraid I can’t try it out – or install it, for that matter – on MYSTlore yet, because CategorySuggest requires MediaWiki 1.10, and we’re still on the 1.8 branch (I’ll get around to it… eventually). Can’t find a third-party wiki that has it to try it out on either, though. But I can certainly think of several occasions where I had to manually look up what exactly an existing category on MYSTlore was named, or whether one of the kind I was about to create already exists.

As to how much this extension helps in practice, connection lag plays a big role. As with all such live fetches of results: the longer it takes for suggestions to be fetched, the more aggravating the experience becomes, and the less of a benefit the extension actually offers. But I’m intrigued, and I would like to try it on an actual installation.