For a mess of reasons too boring to get into, I wanted to get a Bluetooth keyboard for my iPad Mini. After poking around for a bit I found some good candidates, but holy hell is the market for BT keyboards crap right now.

The Apple Wireless Keyboard is pretty much a desk keyboard. While I really hate wires, I hate replacing batteries for needlessly portable devices more, so I always go wired at desks when I can (my love for the Magic Touchpad is an exception to the rule). There are a dozen clones of that keyboard out there (whose manufacturers are both named and unnamed) but the design is very much for the desktop.

I Can Text You A Pile of Poo, But I Can’t Write My Name by Aditya Mukerjee | Model View Culture:

We have an unambiguous, cross-platform way to represent “PILE OF POO” (💩), while we’re still debating which of the 1.2 billion native Chinese speakers deserve to spell their own names correctly.

If you’re having trouble getting Doxygen to parse NS_ENUM statements, here’s the config file magic:

ENABLE_PREPROCESSING = YES
MACRO_EXPANSION = YES
PREDEFINED = "NS_ENUM(_type, _name)=enum _name : _type"

You may or may not want to enable EXPAND_ONLY_PREDEF to only expand that one macro.

The Design Philosophy of the DARPA Internet Protocols | the morning paper:

Understanding the underlying principles behind something can turn what might on the surface seem to be simply a collection of facts into a chain of causes and consequences that makes it much easier to see how those parts fit together. Clark provides us with some of those insights for the design of the Internet Protocols, working from the goals towards the implementation consequences.

Hacker Mythologies and Mismanagement by Betsy Haibel | Model View Culture:

But these beliefs about who we are are actually about what makes us feel special.

In other words, software engineers are humans.

As humans, we lie to ourselves. We lie to ourselves about who we are. (We’re smarter than you.) We lie to ourselves about what we do. (We are changing the world, one photo-sharing app at a time.) We lie to ourselves about how best to do it. (In caves.)

Swift & the Objective-C Runtime:

Even when written without a single line of Objective-C code, every Swift app executes inside the Objective-C runtime, opening up a world of dynamic dispatch and associated runtime manipulation

With an opener like that, how can you not read (and be both slightly horrified and optimistic)?

High Caffeine Content — MPW, Carbon and building Classic Mac OS apps in OS...:

What interested me the most is how so much of the API remained identical - I was still using only functions that existed on System 1.0 in my app, but they were working just the same as ever in a Carbonized version. The single built binary ran on OS 8.1 all the way to 10.6 (care of Rosetta).

Developing iOS 8 Apps with Swift - Download Free Content from Stanford on iTunes:

Updated for iOS 8 and Swift. Tools and APIs required to build applications for the iPhone and iPad platforms using the iOS SDK. User interface design for mobile devices and unique user interactions using multi-touch technologies. Object-oriented design using model-view-controller paradigm, memory management, Swift programming language. Other topics include: animation, mobile device power management, multi-threading, networking and performance considerations.

Think Retro: Who else kinda misses their Zip disks?:

The humble Zip disk, then, was a kind of de facto successor to the ubiquitous high-density 3.5-inch floppy. You had to buy a special drive to mount it in, because although they had about the same footprint as a regular floppy disk, they were much thicker. In fact, Zip disks had a lovely chunky, seemingly hugely robust quality compared to normal floppies.

By the numbers: Apple's ludicrous fourth quarter:

Apple could fund the entire Apollo program using cash on hand, with enough left over to buy 5 nuclear aircraft carriers.