WebM is now BSD-licensed. Good. (via @timbray)

Hawt. (via @rands)

Belgium’s first baby snow leopard. Sure, but does it run Safari? (Ba-dum-dish. via Denis.)

The new trend: tweaking your PC from your iPhone. Asus shows off BIOS settings; Galaxy overclocking. (German article)

Puntastic. (via @uliwitness)

If you e-mail Steve Jobs, he may give you terse, blunt, yet useful answers, even the second time. If you e-mail AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson twice, you get threatened with a cease and desist. What about Valve’s Gabe Newell? You’re good.

Apple has made a HTML5 marketing page, including a showcase of various technology demos, and I never knew they had sample code like that. Good, right?

Yet for some inexplicable and likely stupid reason, they decided to not just recommend you look at the demos in Safari; they require it. That the “You’ll need to download Safari to view this demo.” error message can be worked around is besides the point. Not only does this still break cases where CSS vendor prefixes are relied upon; Apple makes little effort to support Mozilla’s and Opera’s respective prefixes. It also appears to disagree with the message of their marketing copy, which promotes “web standards” which are “open”.

Requiring one particular browser doesn’t sound very standard or open to me. These are all very cool demos, and counter the idea that Apple wants to lock everyone into Cocoa Touch — but the browser lock-out leaves a bad aftertaste. (also via @timbray)

Having said all that, there’s a sarcastic image going around showing Google Chrome doing significantly better at a HTML5 test site than Safari (142 vs. 70 points). However, I’m getting 120 points with the current Safari release 4.0.5, and 144 with the current nightly build. Since I find it unlikely that Safari on Windows fares that much worse, the screenshot must be of a significantly out-of-date version (yet, curiously, a not-so-out-of-date Chrome). Counting Apple’s unfair play with yet more distorted comparisons doesn’t benefit anyone.

Google Android open source and compatibility program manager Dan Morrill:

Because [fragmentation] means everything, it actually means nothing, so the term is useless. Stories on “fragmentation” are dramatic and they drive traffic to pundits’ blogs, but they have little to do with reality. “Fragmentation” is a bogeyman, a red herring, a story you tell to frighten junior developers. Yawn.

I can think of multiple meanings of “fragmentation” as it applies to Android, including differences in:

• hardware configuration, e.g. GPU capabilities,
• hardware properties, e.g. native screen resolution and hardware buttons, and
• minimum and maximum supported operating system version

— so the point that it means a lot (though far from “everything”) is well-taken, but this only makes matters worse: every possible meaning I can come up with gets the very point of pundits across: it’s bad, and to a point, it’s unnecessarily bad.

I’d be the first to support advances in technology and ditching legacy components¹, and that will inevitably lead to some users getting left behind. But as an Android user, you can’t even be sure that a handset you buy right now will offer the best possible hardware prerequisites, and run the latest version of the OS.

Call it a frightening story all you like. It’s also very real. We’ve seen this before with Windows Mobile, and if Google doesn’t step up to require hardware manufacturers and carriers to make the experience less awful, we’ll see it again. (via proggit)

More on this by a Slashdot user. (also via proggit)

It may be a bug, but double-/triple-pressing the lock button apparently invokes a flashlight in iPhone OS 4.0 beta 4. (via fscklog)

This appears to be the year of Star Trek stuff getting real. First, the PADD gets released by Apple; now, Pantec Biosolutions gives us hyposprays called P.L.E.A.S.E. (via @alahmnat)

This guy must be the Poe’s Law stand-in for libertarians: “Why Not Feel Sorry for BP?” (also via @alahmnat) Ooh! Ooooh! I know a reason. (via DFLL)

Wikipedia has a List of youngest birth mothers (and grandmothers). I for one was not expecting those ages.

A Services Menu for iPhone. Great (and, evidently, Apple-esque) approach, but doesn’t that require a way to compile bundles (that aren’t apps) on the iPhone, and ship them through the App Store, perhaps alongside apps? After all, you wouldn’t want the whole application to launch… (also via DFLL)

Some suggestions for Xcode UI Improvements. Very cool UI design, and looks like a bunch of huge time-savers, but would probably take a ton of effort, or be very inconsistent / cursory (especially, say, Brandon’s in-API-doc example screenshots of enum values). (via @sophiestication)

Adobe Announces iPad-Focused “Digital Publishing Platform”. Generating HTML from Word? Pshaw. Let’s generate entire iPad apps from InDesign.

David Baron on Hidden complexity in specifications.

Kaleidoscope, a new file comparison utility for the Mac. Looks gorgeous, and image comparison is a useful addition — but with “it doesn’t support editing or even applying changes” and “it doesn’t do folder comparisons”, Michael Tsai points out two jarring weaknesses.

Because, really, why would you expect Photoshop CS5 to handle something that 1.0 could?

Onkyo showed off a notebook with two displays; one optionally sliding out from beneath the other. Ten inches and 1366×768 pixels each. The displays aren’t flush next to each other, and the (German) article doesn’t speak highly of the build quality. Puzzling that so few companies (such as Apple) ‘get’ seamless hardware design.

A quote about engineering. I’d argue that, compared to building bridges, software development is much fuller of unknowns, but this may merely present my ignorance in architecture.

Just one question. Also, how many cubic inches is an ounce?

Is this Guid HOT or NOT? (via @codinghorror)

“Will Apple Embrace the Web? No.” No indeed, because they already have, long ago, being a WHATWG founding member and openly leading the development of what is widely regarded as the most impressive layout engine du jour, WebKit.

Camen likening Safari to IE6 might make some sense if Apple had a controlling market position for cellphones (2.7%), or at least the smartphones segment (15.4%). They’re not even in the first or second place, and chances are Android will soon surpass them. Apple may control the mindshare (and has been leading in profits), but they’re far away from leading the market, and don’t seem intent to change that.

Do you remember when Internet Explorer 6 was released? It was hands-down the best, most standards compliant browser at the time.

In some bizarro universe, that may be true, but Internet Explorer 6 was released more than a year after Internet Explorer 5 for Mac (yes, by the same company), based on the Tasman engine, which offered much better support for CSS, PNG and various other aspects.

Can you see where I’m going with this?

No.

Well, actually, thanks to your mention of John Gruber and claim chowder, my money is on ‘linkbait’. I fell for it. Good job. (via proggit, where this kind of drivel does not belong)

I really want to do something nifty with CSS3 media queries, like the example(s) laid out in Responsive Web Design (via Jon Hicks), or the for-IE9 demo by Microsoft.

Between parody Twitter accounts (with some tweets turned into billboards), Despair t-shirts (via reddit), and Spongebob (via @chartier), BP has a bit of a public relations problem. Allegedly restricting photographer access (via DFLL) and shipping in workers (also via @chartier) isn’t exactly helping. I had a hard time figuring out what kind of animal this once was, too (via reddit).

iPad + Velcro. (via fscklog)

John Mayer’s blog reminded me of the Droste Effect, so I created a subreddit dedicated to it.

HelTweetica, a Twitter client in a familiar typeface. I ultimately found the Mac version a bit too limiting. Echofon continues to be my client of choice.

Flojuggler — “Track the periods of girls you know. Seriously.” Glad they added that latter sentence to the tagline. (via reddit)

CSS3 Memory. I won’t spoil what happens when you finish. (via WebKitBits)

The ultimate evidence iPads are selling like hotcakes:

“I can now say ‘we have no f***ing iPads’ in five languages.”

Music Notation with HTML5 Canvas (via WebKitBits)

Q&A: Why was it Entourage:Mac and not Outlook in the first place?

After the release of Entourage, the Exchange team decided to stop development of Outlook for Mac. This left the MacBU with a dilemma: there were two separate code bases, neither of which did everything that was needed.

Uh, I have a question: how messed up is a corporate structure that this happens in the first place? How did communication fail such that Outlook and Entourage were first developed independently (surely somebody said “uh, guys, we’re also developing a mail client for the Mac!”), then one of them abandoned, then the other destined to (insufficiently) replace the former (surely somebody said “we kind of do want to have an Exchange client on the Mac, though!”)?

Two thirds of 2009’s phishing attacks were from a single group. (German article) Phishing strikes me as something where a little education could go a long way. Still haven’t heard of any case among friends and family of mine, non-computer enthusiasts included.

Now this is some nice iPad artwork. More such skins. (via @chartier)

Saving state is a rather common behavior in iPhone OS, and will become default (rather than implemented per-application) in 4.0, but what if you left the app hours or days ago? You may not even remember, much less care, what you had previously been doing in it. (via @danielpunkass)

Palm webOS, on a PC. Uh, sure. (via @chartier)

Wild Fox, a Firefox fork seeking to add H.264 support, may be more attention seeking than substance, but more important than my skepticism is the recognition that pragmatic people still exist. (Even Microsoft, who used to try to compete against MPEG with their Windows Media / VC-1 silliness — submitted as an SMPTE standard and all — now will ship IE 9 with exclusive H.264 support. Why does Mozilla think they can win this?)

More worth reading than the barebones website is the reddit commentary.

Ask a C# question on Stack Overflow, and get detailed information from someone on Microsoft’s C# compiler team. Awesome. (via reddit)

Speaking of pragmatic people, Bruce Schneier wants you to write your passwords down. More of this, please. (also via reddit)

I’m typing this in WriteRoom for iPhone. It’s fast to launch, gets right back to where you left off without any nagging, syncs with a Google App Engine-based site and comes with more editing-suitable typeface and appearance options than Notes. Nothing to help with markup, but still a good start. Did I mention how fast it launches?

Windows Server is coming to ARM. (article in German)

Between that and some other development you may have heard of, Intel has quite some work ahead with Atom. (via DFLL)

Twitter account @SergeGraystone continues to amuse me.

So Steam for Mac launched, and comes with a time-limited offer for a free Portal. I’d check it out if I had a Mac.

That the games are “real” ports — OpenGL instead of Direct3D; no Cider or similar translation layers, that Valve is providing Mac targeting as a free update for their Source engine SDK, that with many games, you get to reuse the same license you already have, and that game state syncs through Steam cross-platform are undeniably terrific.

UI issues include misuse of typefaces as well as of designated file system areas — Microsoft, too, likes to pollute ~/Documents with non-user-supplied data, but it’s wrong; no excuses. It also apparently makes itself launch on login (under certain unclear conditions). Those should be worked on, but don’t make the news any less exciting for me. I’ll have to reserve judgment on whether this makes for a great case against cross-platform applications and thus plays straight into Steve Jobs’s hands; some seem to think so. So far, I’d say I’ve seen far worse.

Speaking of far worse, Adobe is back with its stunning incompetence at writing installers. This time: silently install Growl whether you like it or not, and only use it for one single, user-hostile purpose. Perhaps they should focus less on loving Apple, and more on trying to use their apps without hair loss. (via @boredzo)

Alahmnat provides a good FAQ of sorts on why open sourcing Uru isn’t quite as easy as it sounds. Solid, but I disagree that the Myst community has had it particularly bad with abusive outsiders; I’d argue on the contrary that we’ve been rather lucky. I’d also be less harsh on Cyan had their initial claims not been as bold. (Via @alahmnat)

Has bike marketing completely missed out on the obvious, pragmatic “it gets you from A to B, fast” answer? (Via @chartier)

John Mayer’s Tumblr account. (Also via @chartier)

“Fun With Secret Questions & Answers”. Some of my favorites come from the comments on Schneier’s post:

Q: If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?

A: Sorry, you’re not my type.

Q: I’d like to take a moment to tell you about our long distance plan.

A: [customer hangs up]

(via Uli Kusterer)

A great look at how Apple got the privacy aspect of one major iPhone API right, and of another wrong, including historic context and suggestions for how to improve the latter.

dot-net-transitions: animated transitions for .NET Windows Forms UI element property changes.

The Watir-inspired WatiN, and its offspring WatiN Test Recorder, look very interesting.

WolframAlpha for iPad has the last word on virtual keyboards. (via @tristan)

Whether you find yourself wanting to use your phone’s accelerometer on a fictional space station or merely on Venus, Android has you covered. (via proggit)

The VCR did not kill Hollywood, and file sharing has yet to kill everything. But did you know that the same concern — libraries killing booksellers — was raised (and proven wrong) over two centuries ago? (via reddit)

The above is also interesting for its relevant discussion of the long s (ſ) character (which was likely invented to avoid discrimination of lispers), eventually devolving into abusing math alphanumeric symbols.

And that, in turn, reminded me of how spectacularly well font activation works in Mac OS X: install a font that implements missing characters, and without rebooting, relogging-in, relaunching, reloading, resizing or even bringing to front an already-open Safari window with previously-missing characters will suddenly display them crisply. Stunning technology.

I’d love to be proven wrong, but let me be the first to say bullshit on Forklift 2’s marketing claim

3x-33x faster than any other file transfer app in existence.

Maybe they never tried rsync. (via AI Forums)

Speaking of file transfer and speed, Transmit 4 is nice. I haven’t made any measurements, but it feels much faster at directory browsing than ExpanDrive 2. Sadly, this is then diminished by TextMate being so slow with files on high-latency volumes.¹

I could have sworn to have read something about making TextMate 2’s UI largely non-blocking, but can’t find it now. There ought to be a Transmit 4 + TextMate 2 upgrade bundle (I have the previous versions of both) whenever the latter comes out.²

If there’s something lacking in Transmit 4, though, it’s release notes. (via Daniel Jalkut)

This kid has his clothing priorities straight. (via reddit)

“He’s an idiot. That’s probably why he’s missing.” (via reddit)

First look at George Bush’s memoirs

I couldn’t afford to be distracted by wondering how the story ended. I had to find out what happened to that goat.

Actually wouldn’t mind a candid perspective of his on why he made some of his decisions, but not holding my breath. (via reddit)

Apple Finally Has To Worry About The HP Slate. I realize the headline says quite the opposite, but HP buying Palm and scrapping their ill-conceived desktop-OS-on-tablet project, thereby hopefully bringing webOS to other form factors, is a great thing to happen to customers, namely: meaningful competition for the iPad.

I realize a Windows 7-based HP Slate could have shipped much sooner, but I’m also convinced it would have stood no chance and died much earlier, too. (apparently via Echofon’s ads, which are quite contextual/useful/non-obnoxious)

Related: Thoughts on Windows (via Tim Bray)

32x32 icons are so 2009. (There’s a whole set of these.) Sadly, these are JPEG-compressed (i.e. lossy). Still gorgeous, though. Considering the final icon size as it appears in iPhone OS’s Springboard is 45x4557x57³, 944x944 is quite a lot of precision to work with that most will never get to appreciate, so kudos to the designer for their attention to detail.

At the same time, having icon designs in a patent application makes me shudder. (via Rafael)

Steve Jobs Email Reply Generator: “Sent straight to the Trash.” Funny stuff.

Why does every sale have to lower the price? When babies are involved, you instead double it. (via John Gruber)

Glims has quite a few useful features, but nothing quite as great as Undo “Close Tab”. Life saver.

“Using [Verizon CEO Ivan] Seidenberg’s logic, Americans also have universal access to health care”: Slate on the deception of broadband access in the US. (via Capella)

Codeorgan. I don’t even know where to begin. (via Melissa)

It would appear Steve Jobs only tweets in Spanish.

Steve Jobs says to “Get Rid of the Crappy Stuff”. Far too many companies don’t get this. (via DFLL)

Sony will cease production of 3.5-inch floppy disks in March 2011. At first, I thought the year was a typo. They’re still making those? (via heise)

Behold VHEMT, The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement.

Among these cool <canvas> demos is Torus, a circular Tetris clone. There goes my productivity. (via reddit)

We probably can’t appreciate these never-to-be-syndicated Dilbert cartoons about the iPhone prototype the same way the intended audience can, most of which doesn’t follow Apple every single day, and has merely heard of the drama. They’re a bit too ‘obvious’ to me. (via John Siracusa)

Since Denis asked me earlier, I thought it’d be worth linking the OS X theme I’m using. It’s only a bunch of subtle, mostly iTunes-inspired adjustments, hence the name iTunesque. Apologies in advance for the terrible page navigation. The variant I use is SPL 9 + RecPil for Snow Leopard, which adjusts scrollbars, progress bars and list view headers to look like iTunes’s, and changes Mail’s and Preview’s bizarre pill-shaped toolbar icons to be rectangular and more button-like.

I usually abhor the idea of theming, but I’ve been using this one for months and it just feels right, probably in part because its elements are largely Apple-inspired. Some of OS X’s UI elements, especially its scrollbars, are starting to feel out of date. As Aqua has matured to be more subtle, it hasn’t taken everything with it.

In case you haven’t seen it: Daniel Jalkut’s “Elements Of Twitter Style” has a healthy mix of common sense and good thoughts. Not sure I agree with everything, but I fully agree with the premise that Twitter has evolved into much more than trite answers to What Are You Doing?.

A stop light. With a progress bar. (via reddit)

Seems a bit basic (no assertions?), but could be of use to me: TSQLUnit, a Transact-SQL testing framework. Found through an idle-curiosity search for, uh, pretty much exactly that.

The Starry Expanse, a project to rebuild Riven (and the related ages Moiety and Age 233), keeps making good progress.

Best iPhone case, ever. (via Denis)

Behold the inevitable: the first iPad laser etching I’ve seen in the wild. (via @tristan)

At what point do we just burn modern journalism to the ground and start all over?, The Macalope wonders this week — after all, we now have NY Times journalists judging billion-dollar companies based on Facebook comments.

Clearly, staring at boobs makes men lose at poker. Seriously, though, I’m impressed. (via reddit)

Google Maps finds everything, even Jesus. (via reddit)

Call it trolling, but I find Shatner’s performance in this video more interesting than that kid’s. (via, you guessed it, reddit)

.NET’s String.Format is good, but pales compared to mechanisms such as Ruby’s #{}. For starters, parameters are based on position (i.e. {0}, {1}, etc.), rather than naming. Idle wondering has produced quick results thanks to Stack Overflow, such as Phil Haack’s HaackFormat. You lose IntelliSense this way, but avoid quite a few other issues. Worth a shot.

The iPad Camera Connection Kit’s USB port not only allows audio, as has been found out two weeks ago, but also HID for keyboards. Sounds like Microsoft would have named an equivalent device the ‘iPad® Legacy Connectivity Kit Home Edition’, or somesuch thing. Given that the OS clearly does ship so many USB drivers, it is rather odd that they didn’t simply include a USB port. I’m more inclined to buy ‘excessive desire for thinness and simplicity’ than ‘means to cost people another $29′ as the reason, though.

Doesn’t work in WebKit so I feel left out, but pretty cool: perspective texture in SVG. The demo page is one of the rare actual XHTML pages, correct content-type and all. The thing is supposed to demo Mario Kart, but I was more thinking Wacky Wheels. (via reddit)

Maybe Firefly was a cool series, but fireflies? Bioluminescence is so cool.

An Apple support document for “Keynote for iPad: Best practices for creating a presentation on a Mac for use on an iPad”.

When it comes to managing files between multiple devices, I got some best practices for Apple, and the current iWork for iPad certainly is not it. When you’ve got a Mac desktop app, a (primarily for reading / reviewing / commenting) web app and an iPad mobile app, and it doesn’t occur to you that users should simply be able to transparently edit one and the same document that’s “in the cloud”, you’ve got much to learn before you can take iWork.com out of beta.

I sure hope this is merely meant as a temporary collection of workarounds, and that it is not actually Apple’s opinion that the user should have to take good care to make his documents compatible like this.

David Kernell, the guy who broke into Sarah Palin’s e-mail account two years ago, “faces up to 50 years in federal prison if convicted of identity theft, mail fraud and two other felony charges”.

There’s arguably two stories here — one is being able to access her e-mail account simply by a combination of basic research and guesswork of rather superficial information about her; there is clearly plenty of potential for improvement in computer security. The other is actually breaking in and publishing private information of hers. There is no defending some 4chan members’ rather strange, perhaps entirely lacking, perception of ethics and decency. (via reddit)

Regarding my complaint that YouTube is far too happy to oblige takedown requests, the granular settings of Content ID deserve a mention:

Over 1,000 content owners use Content ID, and we’ve built it in a way that lets them account for fair uses of their content: they can easily create policies depending on the proportion of a claimed video that contains their work, or the absolute length of the clip used. For example, a record label might decide to block videos that contain over one minute of a given song, but leave up videos that contain less than one minute.

Clearly, YouTube is putting some effort into making this fairer for everyone. Between random videos being gone and others being available only in certain countries, all of which could have interested watchers in more content from the same artist, I find status quo distinctly unpleasant, however.

1. Query Google for site:blippy.com +"from card".
2. Find credit card numbers.
3. Apply palm directly to forehead.

(via Tay)

One of the best Questionable Content strips in a while. Goes without saying that I’m that guy. Thanks to vaaht for introducing me to that excellence.

Here’s a story I’m conflicted about. Guy’s been walking to an Apple Store to buy two iPads each time — the per-purchase limit — and resell them to people overseas, allegedly only covering costs and not making a profit. Apple decides he’s exceeded the lifetime limit on iPad purchases.

If this were purely about Apple being evil, wouldn’t they let him buy as many as he wishes, thus maximizing their revenues? It’s probably rather about giving people a fair chance while the product is still in its infancy and in high demand and, therefore, undergoing supply constraints. (That’s also, after all, the whole official reason international sales have been delayed even further.) So, in essence, this person was ignoring why he was only supposed to get two, and arguably ‘gaming’ that ’system’.

On the other hand, as a junkie for all things latest and greatest, and as someone who knows people from outside the US (especially developers, for very obvious reasons) who have ordered iPads through ‘channels’, it not being available in large quantities in the first place is an unfortunate situation that needs fixing sooner rather than later. But does anyone seriously think Apple would disagree on that count?

Speaking of credit cards, is yours stolen? Apparently, Google has already blacklisted the site, strangely highlighting the sad reality that people might actually ‘use’ this. (via¹ Cyan veteran and site contributor Paul Querna)

Female college student wishes to scientifically evaluate the merits of an Iranian cleric’s assertion that scantily-clad women cause earthquakes. Bonus brownie points for wearing an xkcd shirt. (via reddit)

In an astounding display of not getting it, Downfall film production company Constantin Film has asked YouTube to take down parody videos thereof. Via reddit comes the only valid form of response: another parody. From mashable’s article:

Downfall director Oliver Hirschbiegel told New York Magazine that he laughs at the parodies. “You couldn’t get a better compliment as a director,” he said. Unfortunately, Constantin Film’s legal team isn’t as easygoing about it.

It’s not even about easygoing, though. Nor is it about fair use laws with regard to parodies.² Imitation is flattery; the video is so frequently used because of Hirschbiegel’s and Ganz’s impeccable directing and acting, respectively. Moreover, it can lead others to discover (and want to watch) the movie, which is in Constantin’s best interests. Taking the video clips down, on the other hand, only hurts their reputation.

Everybody loses. And YouTube, time and again, is all too happy to comply. (via Capella)

I’ve been playing with Sweet Justice, a piece of JavaScript for hyphenated, justified text. (via Denis)

It was only a matter of time. Classic iPod OS¹ had iPodLinux, and now iPhone OS has, well, Google Android: Android running on iPhone! (via Tim Bray)

Some unexpected and hilarious input on the iPhone prototype story: Lufthansa USA offers the Apple employee a flight to Munich. (via sophiestication)

The “we can’t optimize H.264 video playback because Apple won’t let us access their hardware decoding” excuse for Adobe Flash? Gone. As of 10.6.3, it’s a public API. Apparently, this document went up March 29, so I’m surprised to only find out about it now. (via Michael Tsai)

My commentary on the “lost” iPhone prototype / Gizmodo story shall consist of pointing to “Schiller Describes Wild Weekend”, quoting «Bill Gates tried leaving his new Microsoft “Kin” phone at a bar… It’s still there.» and remarking that I find this whole melodrama rather trite. I sure hope the actual product comes with fewer seams, though.

Does this count as getting ✪df-rolled?

The “Right To Use”¹ license for Sun’s err Oracle’s MS Office ODF plug-in is $90, with a minimum order quantity of 100, and another $19.80 per license for “First Year Support”.² The astute meme connaisseur will be unable to resist. It seems safe to say that Oracle’s approach to end user licensing is remarkably different from Sun’s. Shocking.

iSendr is sadly Flash, and took a moment to get started when I tried it, but is otherwise a very smooth send-file-from-A-to-B solution. We need more it-just-works solutions like this. (via proggit)

Jesper wants to build a browser for people on crack: Rouse. As a recent convert to “Breaking Bad”¹, I approve. I still miss OmniWeb’s flexibility, but keep going back to Safari, because I can’t help but love the livingontheedge WebKit nightly builds. OmniWeb, on the other hand, was always forked and thus lagged behind.

Thanks to “A real person, a lot like you”, I finally understand xkcd #438.

I hacked together a Core Location test app for Mac OS X (intro’d with Snow Leopard). Very simple, nice API. The thing is a public framework, works mostly the same as on iPhone OS (except for missing features due to hardware limitations: Wi-Fi-only due to lack of A-GPS; no heading due to lack of digital compass), and could be useful.

I mention this because I expected to find some good reason this isn’t commonly offered as an option in Twitter clients. Recent WebKit builds appear to partially implement it, but always claim that the user denied access.