Wahey! April 1st comes early!

Only an idiot doesn't keep backups. Likewise, only an idiot doesn't sync his iPod/iPhone/iPad to a computer and blames Apple when he loses everything.

"the majority for instance, aren't happy with Apple's App Store approval process" The majority? Really? "Forty-one percent think it’s a minor issue" and 43% don't think it's an issue at all. So 84% barely care or don't. Chances are the 16% who think it's a major/unacceptable problem are irate developers or people who just hate any kind of controlling authority. And actually it looks like they can't count since about 2-3% had no opinion: 84 + 16 + 3 = 103% What I read into this is consumers really don't care about the approval process. Why would they? They have 200,000+ apps and more flooding in every day.

If they intend to bring FireFox to the iPhone, they've got to get a handle on it's memory gobbling first. It has gotten better over the last while, but leave FF open for any length of time and you suddenly have several hundred megabytes of RAM chewed up, especially on OS X where it stays resident even if you close all tabs.

And paying $5 dollars to try out five games is just way too much money, but you'd probably pay that in a heartbeat for a Starbucks frap or whatever. Not to mention that most games have a lite version (or as of this week a free trial version that can be upgraded) and besides that even 10 minutes of research will find you reviews including gameplay videos from which you can make an educated decision. Don't be ridiculous. Most games on the app store are played for very short periods of time. Many are even designed for that. A trial period on all games would kill the app store, or at least force prices to go up dramatically to compensate.

So... as an iPhone game developer the six months of development I spend on a title and then sell for $1 is purely motivated by greed... and the $1 I ask the customer to pay for playing the results of my hard work is asking them to be selfless? Tell you what. Why don't you go to your boss tomorrow and tell him you decided to stop being greedy and you'd like to work for free from now on. Oh, and when you go to Walmart to get your groceries just walk out of the store with them without paying. If someone tries to stop you simply explain that you decided not to be completely selfless today.

Microsoft is not a risk we would recommend our friends and families take.

Then again, maybe Google users have become better at tuning out ads over time. I hardly notice them anymore.

While I certainly would welcome anything that could help me find code, the reason I'd want it is to find reference code, not reusable code. I've been programming for, oh, two decades now and one thing I find myself doing constantly is finding a bunch of libraries or bits of code and coming to the conclusion that I should just write it myself because of one of the following:

1. The library/code is good, but doesn't quite work the way I want it to
2. The library/code is close, but getting it to work the way I want is painful
3. The library/code is bad
4. The documentation is bad/nonexistent
5. The license is prohibitive or annoying (i.e. it's not LGPL or BSD or the like)
6. I enjoy writing code and sometimes I feel I could do it more elegantly, or efficiently (I might just want a very specific and optimized part of it)

More often than than not though I just enjoy coding and I love learning to code by writing new code. The black box thing... eh... I like to tinker under the hood and find out how things work.

But my point is that finding code is not that hard. It's finding code that fits *exactly* what we want. Code is usually just not quite as modular as we'd like to believe and, if we're honest, as programmers we have a certain vanity about writing code so it does things My Way. :)