frankschmitt.org:

Apple released the beta version of their iPhone SDK yesterday, and the response from the developer community was an unintentional DDoS of the entire developer.apple.com domain. But there are a few caveats to the otherwise Christmas-morning-like announcement.

Among them is that to get an app into the hands of users, a developer must sign up for a $99 app-signing license, and then sell the app through Apple’s iTunes-esque store, with Apple taking a 30% cut. This is really convenient (if a bit expensive) for the developers, but runs up against the established business model of the vast majority of indie Mac OS X developers: try-before-you-buy shareware. In this model, the software is distributed free-of-charge, often with limitations or nagging that can be turned off (or extra features that can be turned on) only by entering a license code purchased from the developer. It’s not completely clear how this would work under Apple’s model.

But another thing Apple released yesterday was a Mac-OS-based iPhone simulator. Right now it’s Mac-only, and it may or may not be a major PITA for Apple to port this functionality to run under Windows, but it represents an ideal solution to most instances of the try-before-you-buy conundrum: Apple would merely need to allow developers to link their app against the simulator and to distribute the resulting bundle as a trial version of their app. If by playing around with it on your (non- or less-mobile) desktop or laptop you decide that you like it, you would pay to download it from Apple’s store.

Now it’s true that a linked-against-the-simulator app could lead to piracy, but realistically the App Store will do little more than to keep honest people honest; dishonest people will most likely just copy the app from a hacked iPhone. It’s also true that people might use the simulator-widgets on their computer in lieu of paying to use it on their iPhone. But typically anything that can be done on an iPhone can be done better on a PC, albeit in a less pocket-sized fashion.

So I believe that represents another category of people who wouldn’t have purchased the app anyway.

Dictionary.app in Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) reliably hangs when first launched. Even with a very high-bandwidth and low-latency connection to the Internet.

Apparently this is due to the new Wikipedia functionality built into it. Until Apple fixes this, the easiest way to put teh snappy back into your Dictionary is to open the preferences and uncheck Wikipedia as a source.

In anticipation of getting an iPhone for Christmas, I moved my personal email account from my hosting company to GMail, using Google Apps for my domain. GMail gives me IMAP, first-rate spam filtering, and more storage than I can shake a stick at. I couldn’t be happier with my arrangement, in particular how well it works with my iPhone.

However, there is a project I’m involved with that would benefit from subscribing to a couple of high-traffic mailing lists. While I’d like to be able to peruse and participate in these lists, I don’t want them clogging up my iPhone’s inbox.

It turns out this is pretty easy to accomplish. First, sign into the web interface for your GMail and add a label (click “Edit Labels” in the left sidebar) for the mailing list. Since I followed the advice on the GMail link above and added the [Gmail] IMAP prefix to the account in Mail.app, I will also need to prefix the friendly name of my label with [Gmail]/ (e.g. [Gmail]/List). On my Mac this will show up as an additional IMAP folder at the bottom of the sidebar.

Now you just have to create a filter (click the “Filters” tab under your GMail settings) that will automatically apply the label if the email in question is involved in the mailing list. Choose the appropriate criteria (the “Has the words” setting might be best, since often times “to” address isn’t what you’d expect). After clicking “Next Step” to continue, select the label, and — to keep it from showing up in your inbox — check the “Skip the Inbox” setting as well.

I can now receive email from the mailing list and it goes directly to my archive folder, receives the proper label, does not pass go, and does not collect $200.

One last thing: to get the label/folder to show up, I had to right-click the account in Mail.app and select Synchronize. YMMV.

These steps will let you follow one or more high-traffic mailing lists without them interrupting you every time a message is sent, but also without the latency of receiving digests instead of individual messages. It turns the mailing list “workflow”, if you will, into something closer to that of an RSS feed.

Update: Here’s an easier way.

In anticipation of getting an iPhone for Christmas, I moved my personal email account from my hosting company to GMail, using Google Apps for my domain. GMail gives me IMAP, first-rate spam filtering, and more storage than I can shake a stick at. I couldn’t be happier with my arrangement, in particular how well it works with my iPhone.

However, there is a project I’m involved with that would benefit from subscribing to a couple of high-traffic mailing lists. While I’d like to be able to peruse and participate in these lists, I don’t want them clogging up my iPhone’s inbox.

By combining a few esoteric features of GMail and Mail.app, I have come up with an arrangement that works superbly.

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For those of you used to running lookupd -flushcache to clear out stale entries from your DNS cache in Mac OS X, the new version (10.5) has replaced the old NetInfo suite with a bunch of new, more compatible utilities. The new way to do this is dscacheutil -flushcache.