Were I a Twitter client developer, I would get in touch with other client developers and start talking about a way to do what Twitter does but that doesn’t require Twitter itself (or any specific company or service).

[…]

Under the hood, following somebody is really just subscribing to a feed of their statuses. Posting is really just updating a feed of your own statuses.¹

Brent Simmons writes about Twitter’s changes to its API rules and threats to third party developer. He brings up an interesting idea, that developers could create their own decentralized Twitter-like experience.²

Sure it would likely be just for geeks, but I think third party clients are almost exclusively used by more or less geeky people and Twitter itself was once used solely by geeks.

In the early days, the third-party ecosystem was a playground, in which developers could, and did, come up with uses for the service that were never intended or dreamed of by Twitter itself. You like the word ‘tweet’? The bird icon? The character counter? The replies and conversations features? A nice native client on the iPhone? All done first by third-party developer Iconfactory with its Twitterrific app.¹

To me, this is still the very thing that makes Twitter appealing. I’m a happy Twitterrific user, not a happy Twitter user. If third party clients would disappear, it’s very possible that I might stop using Twitter.

In other words, Facebook silently inserted themselves into the path of formerly-direct unencrypted communications from people who want to email me. In other contexts, this is known as a Man In The Middle (MITM) attack. What on earth do they think they are playing at?¹

Customer or cattle?

Including the built-in Retina display, the new 2012 MacBook Pro 15″ can run four displays at their native resolution.¹

Simply amazing!²

Forget Your Past – Timothy Allen | Photography | Film.

Fabulous photos of a really evocative building. Check it out!

From MacWorlds ”Hands on with the Retina MacBook Pro:

(Keep in mind, the original MacBook Air was another $2000-plus product that arrived a bit early, but within a few years the Air had become the lowest-cost, most mainstream Apple laptop. This is the path this new MacBook Pro is now on.)¹

I agree! Competitors to Apple should definitely start their copiers and start churning out Retina MacBook Pro knock-offs, because it’s likely the direction the computer world will head in pretty soon.

In Episode #54 of Developing Perspective David Smith talks about why he thinks Apple more or less confirmed that the new iPhone will have a bigger screen.

Developing Perspective is a podcast discussing news of note in iOS Development, Apple and the like. Never longer than 15 minutes.¹

If you’re interested in mobile development in general, or iOS development and/or Apple in particular you should definitely check out Developing Perspective. It’s short, focused and states a clear opinion.

Tim Kadlec has compiled the result of his research into Media Queries and assets handling. My only question is, why doesn’t he use the ”Mobile First” approach that seems to be the preferred way these days?

Coincidentally, Macworld published two screencasts titled ”Be More Productive with LaunchBar” while I was writing my post on what Alfred is and why you should use it. So if my post got your attention, but you want to check out alternatives to Alfred. you should definitely spend a couple of minutes watching these.

Unlock the power of Ruby for iOS

RubyMotion is a revolutionary toolchain for iOS. It lets you quickly develop and test native iOS applications for iPhone or iPad, all using the awesome Ruby language you know and love.¹

This seems really interesting. The idea of learning Ruby suddenly became a whole lot more appealing.²