I can’t believe that Apple actually has in its iPhone SDK agreement a part that stipulates that you can’t distribute “frameworks”. I can’t possibly see the point of this at all. If I came up with what I thought was a really good framework that helps you to build applications much more stable and faster, wouldn’t this be a good thing to share? Wouldn’t it benefit the entire community? It makes sense now why I haven’t seen any frameworks for the iPhone – I always thought this was a little strange because usually there are ones out within days for other platforms. I just can’t believe how many draconian rules have have stipulated for their SDK, it just goes to show that there really is no better alternative at the moment, because otherwise I can’t fathom why developers would stick around.

I have found out though that it is Ok to share sample code, so you can show people an example app that includes your framework and then let them use it from there. This technically means you are not actually distributing the framework but merely sharing code. This is another example of how dumb the rules are, if you can get away with doing it by calling it something else why not just let people do it properly?

Now I have to mention something about Apple’s app review process. The link provided above is from Joe Hewitts blog – he is a facebook employee who develops their app for the iPhone. It is pretty much agreed that the facebook application is probably the best and most useful free app available on the iPhone (Perhaps best of all apps – who knows). They have just finalised their version 3 application and released it to the store for review – now being an important app you would think that it would have been green lighted pretty fast wouldn’t you? Well nearly two weeks have passed and still nothing. I mean how messed up is that? He has a little rant about the process and I agree with him that the process should be scrapped altogether – go and read the post for the full story. Even techcrunch have been getting angry emails about it all.

It would appear that Twitter might be considering giving away their crown jewels to Google for what I gather to be nothing. By crown jewels I mean their full stream of live tweets. Google would most definitely pay for this I have no doubt (which is why it may seem like a good option to twitter’s investors to claw back some cash) but in the long run its worth every penny to Google. Instead of people going to twitter.com to search for current stuff, they can (and will) just head to Google for everything. During this time Google could pull their finger out and replace it with a system of their own (fairly easily), further relegating twitter into the dustbin of yesteryear.

Twitter has the opportunity to find a nice solution of placing ads within streams. Damn, this could be killer for advertisers – the ability to get a presence within what is happening right now. Nothing has really offered this to advertisers before (well nothing that comes to mind anyway). Twitter’s problem is that they have left the gates wide open to competitors like facebook who have managed to put their entire service around a twittified “live feed” and will no doubt find a way pretty quickly to cash in on it. What has twitter been doing? They could have been experimenting more with monetisation ideas trying to find one that works really well – plus they could (and should) be pushing the boat out and taking a few risks of finding a great solution. You don’t get anywhere by copying the other guy (although I am sure that there are times where it works well). They could come up with something neat, unobtrusive, engaging and most of all lucrative. At the end of the day no one yet has found the perfect solution for this kind of “real time” search and there will no doubt be a better solution than keyword advertising in traditional search.

Google managed to dominate their arena – is everyone else going to let them do the same to theirs? Don’t let yourself just twitter away!

I recently tried installing the glasshfish using the recommended method of choosing other adapters from within the server config panel. Using this method I continously got the following exception:

It turns out that it is just one of those things that are broke within the standard distribution. You can still install it using the update site at http://ajax.dev.java.net/eclipse, but hopefully this will be fixed in the next update of eclipse.

Check out the ulimate shots suffered by Seb on his stag day. You have to laugh and cringe at the same time. It was as funny as hell at the time but I did feel a little sorry for him afterwards

Note. I do not pertain copyright to this image. It was passed to me unknowingly with no trace of the original owner so I cannot credit them correctly.

Well integration is now complete using a very helpful plugin from facebook. You can now login to this site using your facebook credentials over facebook connect. This means not having to enter your details a million times and considering that almost everyone online has a facebook account it makes sense to integrate.

If you want to leave a comment or create an account all you have to do is click on the connect button that will show up at the bottom of the form.

A new page will then popup allowing you to enter your details securely on facebook. Once done your logged in and can comment all you like.