I’ve been a Cocoa developer for ten years. (Less than some, but more than most.) And whenever I see new in someone’s code, I assume they’re new to Objective-C, that they’ve just gotten here from Java or C++.

But now, because of ARC, I’ve started using new as a replacement for alloc/init, just because it’s more compact.

In other words, I’ll type [NSCache new] instead of [[NSCache alloc] init].

Total surprise to me.

Matt Mullenweg:

As John Borthwick put beautifully today, “A tablet is an incredible device that you can put in front of babies or 95-year-olds and they know how to use it.” How we democratize publishing on that sort of platform will not and should not work like WordPress’ current dashboard does. It’s not a matter of a responsive stylesheet or incremental UX improvements, it’s re-imagining and radically simplifying what we currently do, thinking outside the box of wp-admin.

I wrote about a thing that bugged me — and Daniel Jalkut wrote an AppleScript that solved the problem for me.

I put the script into FastScripts (Daniel’s product, which I use every day) and gave the script a cmd-H keystroke — and it works. Problem solved!

Nick Bradbury:

Android’s “fragmentation” problem is miniscule. It’s overstated in the tech press because it generates traffic.

Have I linked to Nick enough recently? You should subscribe to his feed.

A long time ago — in the system 7 or 8 days, I’m sure — you could do this sequence in app…

1. Hide Others.

2. Do some things in that app.

3. Hide [app-name].

…and end up in the Finder, with all other apps hidden.

It hasn’t worked this way for ten years or so. But I still hit cmd-H many times a day expecting to end up in the Finder. Instead nothing happens. (The Hide command is disabled in this situation.)

It made sense to me because the Finder feels like it’s behind everything else. It feels like it’s the computer itself.

So now I get frustrated — many times a day — and option-click on the desktop. (I’m not a frequent cmd-tabber, though I realize that would get me out of using the mouse in this situation.)

Let’s Sing! and Let’s Sing! Free are like karaoke Draw Something. The apps are by Lex Friedman and Marco Tabini.

Found in my closet. (Click thumbnail for full version.)

Here’s the explanation:

In 1995 I went indie. My company was called World Wide Power & Light. (Another company already had a similar name, so we renamed the company to Ranchero Software later in 1996. In those days all the cool domain names ended with a vowel: Tango, Marimba, etc.)

Our first main product was a search engine CGI for Macs running WebSTAR (originally MacHTTP). It glued together Frontier and Filemaker Pro to index files on the hard drive and make them searchable.

The price was $99 and we sold 9 copies.

The plaque is from Apple and signed by Heidi Roizen (formerly of T/Maker; then VP of Apple Developer Relations). I’ve never seen any other plaques like this, so I don’t know how many they gave out.

But I was brand-new to all this, and I loved it.

(It looks like our product page is still on the Wayback Machine.)

Update 4:05 pm: Yes, our search engine was called Spotlight. This was long before there was a Spotlight feature on Macs.

Earlier today I downloaded the Mule Radio Syndicate iPhone app. Good podcasts. Made by Black Pixel. All good.

How to deal with them.

Dustin Curtis writes about how Twitter is tracking you on the web. (Via Daring Fireball.)

This shit makes me terrifically angry. I recently quit Facebook — deleted my account. I don’t want to quit Twitter too, but it’s on my mind now.