In his latest Daring Fireball blog entry, So Dan Lyons Called, John Gruber does a great job giving Dan “Fake Steve Jobs” Lyons a much-deserved pimp-slapping. It’s a fun-to-read response to Lyon’s article on the Fake Steve Jobs blog titled Dear Gruber: You’ve Been Pwned, in which Lyons, writing as a fictionalized Steve Jobs, takes great glee in the fact that Gruber got the story wrong – he wrote that AT&T killed the Google Voice app for the iPhone, after which it was revealed that it was Apple all along.

While Gruber got the story wrong, he did something very admirable and honourable: he very clearly and plainly admitted it, without weasel-words, and even went to the trouble of analyzing where we went wrong – openly, on his blog. It’s going to happen to all of us who blog about technology news, and especially when it’s news about an organization that’s as notoriously tight-lipped as Apple: sooner or later, you’re going to report something that’s not true, and the best policy, as mom always said, is honesty.

Even when Gruber makes seat-of-the-pants predictions, as he often does before big “Stevenotes” when it seems that Apple is about to announce something new, he tends to be more right than wrong, and that’s one of the reasons I read Daring Fireball.

In the article, Gruber does a good job of reminding us of where Dan Lyons is coming from – remember, he writes for Newsweek, which is a pretty sad substitute for Time, where the preferred style of reportage was described to me by a friend of mine who wrote for them as “sustained obviousness”. Yes, it’s all ad hominem-y. but it’s entertaining and filled with lots of truth. Besides, I’ve made my feelings clear about Mr. “Fake Steve Jobs” in my article titled Fake Steve Jobs is a Dick.

I come away from reading Daring Fireball articles knowing more than before, even when Gruber is operating in Smug Apple Fanboy mode. He’s great at “reading the tea leaves” where Apple is concerned, and there’s plenty of food for thought. The ideas, analysis and pointers in Daring Fireball make it a worthwhile read for me, even though I work for The Empire and he cheers for the Rebel Scum. On the other hand, the Fake Steve Jobs blog is just Dan Lyons doing a Steve Jobs impression with the dials turned up to eleven. There’s the occasional tidbit that’s amusing, but for the most part, there isn’t much meat there. If Daring Fireball is The Daily Show, Fake Steve Jobs bounces between being Saturday Night Live’s “Weekend Update” segment and the Royal Canadian Air Farce.

(For those of you who haven’t seen the Royal Canadian Air Farce, consider yourself very, very lucky.)

The Windows Mobile Blog points to an MSDN article covering how Amplitude, an application for the iPhone, was ported to Windows Mobile.

Here’s a quick description of Amplitude, which is developed by Gripwire, a mobile and social app company based in Seattle, courtesy of the Windows Mobile Blog:

Amplitude picks up any sound in a user’s surroundings through the microphone and then amplifies the sound, rendering it into a rich graphical representation on the device. Amplitude can be used to amplify any sounds, such as human or animal heartbeats, that usually wouldn’t be picked up by the human ear. Amplitude provides a cool user interface featuring an oscilloscope that allows users to view and visually quantify, signal voltages, as you can see the volume of the sound that you are listening to.

The MSDN article on the Amplitude porting project covers a lot of ground, including:

• A brief overview of Amplitude, Gripwire and Luke Thompson, the developer who ported Amplitude to Windows Mobile
• A run-down of developer resources, such as the Windows Mobile software development environment, MSDN Virtual Labs, Windows Mobile for Developers site, Getting Started with Windows Mobile Application Development, Windows Mobile Developer Center and the documentation for Windows Mobile 6.
• Graphics and asset layout
• Connecting to the mobile device
• Audio and sound manipulation
• Animation and visualization
• Polishing the app

Whether you’re thinking of expanding your iPhone application to other platforms or starting a new Windows Mobile app project, you’ll find this case study packed with useful information and links. I’m going to expand on some of the topics covered in the article in future posts on this blog.

And don’t forget – there’s the Race to Market Challenge, in which you’re automatically entered whenever you submit a mobile app to Windows Marketplace for Mobile. Here’s a quick reminder of what Race to Market is all about:

This article also appears in Canadian Developer Connection.

I caught the afternoon sessions of MeshU, the day of workshops that precedes the Mesh Conference. MeshU had three tracks – Design, Development and Management – and I chose to attend the sessions in the Development track.

Leigh Honeywell on Writing Secure Software

First up was HackLabTO cofounder Leigh Honeywell, (pictured on the right) whose presentation was titled Break It to Make It: Writing (More) Secure Software. She works at the MessageLabs subsidiary of Symantec, which makes security products for email systems, and before that, she worked as an independent security consultant. Simply put, security is both her job and her hobby.

Leigh provided an informative and entertaining summary of the most common security vulnerabilities in applications and the recommended best practices for writing secure apps. Here’s a photo of her slide showing OWASP’s ten principles that you should follow in order to write secure applications:

The ten principles are:

1. Minimize attack surface area
2. Establish secure defaults
3. Least privilege
4. Defense in depth
5. Fail securely
6. Don’t trust services
7. Separation of duties
8. Avoid security through obscurity
9. Keep security simple
10. Fix security issues correctly

She also covered what OWASP considers to be the current top ten vulnerabilities:

1. Cross-site scripting
2. Injection flaws
3. Malicious file execution
4. Insecure direct object references
5. Cross-site request forgeries
6. Information leakage / improper error handling
7. Broken authentication and improper error handling
8. Insecure cryptographic storage
9. Insecure communciations
10. Failure to restrict URL access

At the end of her presentation, Leigh listed a couple of books that she considered to be valuable security references. One of them was Writing Secure Code, Second Edition, written by Michael Howard and Steve Lipner and published by Microsoft Press.

This was a surprise to many people in the audience, the majority of whom were not building apps on Microsoft technologies and generally (and often mistakenly) think of the term “Microsoft” being synonymous with “insecure”. A number of people chatted with me after the presentation and it seemed like this was one of many things from Microsoft that caught them by surprise, along with other unexpected things including the MS-PL license, CodePlex and the Open Source Lab, the new emphasis on standards and interoperability…and hey, even taking on “unlikely” evangelists such as David Crow and me.

Here’s her slide deck:

Pete Forde Does the iPhone Dance

Next was Pete Forde, one of people behind the development shop Unspace and the RubyFringe and FutureRuby conferences. He started his presentation, Is That an iPhone in Your Pocket, or are You Just Happy to See Me?, with a Napoleon Dynamite-esque dance number set to the tune of Start the Riot by Atari Teenage Riot. Here’s the video of the dance that Leigh Honeywell shot:

And here’s the video that I shot:

Pete’s presentation covered the options that developers have when building iPhone apps. For the curious, here’s the deck he used:

The one thing that he wanted you to take away from his presentation is, in his own words:

Consider iPhone web applications and side-stepping the iTunes Application Store (and their 30% gross cut) completely.

The one thing that I took away from the presentation (in addition to the one above) was that it’s not all smiles and sunshine in iPhone development land. Yes, the iPhone provides an excellent user experience and the App Store has been a hit with the customers and many developers. However, a good chunk of Pete’s presentation was about how some of the biggest obstacles for iPhone developers come from Apple itself; I’ve heard that there were similar grumblings at an iPhone developer meetup that took place later in the week. I think that there are some things that Windows Mobile developers (and the Windows Mobile team at Microsoft) can learn from these obstacles, and I’m going to write about them in a later article.

Chris Wanstrath and the Story of GitHub

The final presentation of the afternoon, Building a Business with Open Source, was given by Chris Wanstrath of GitHub, a hosting service for software repositories created with the Git distributed version control system. There are a number of open source projects hosted on GitHub, including one you might not expect: Microsoft’s very own IronRuby.

Chris explained that GitHub was an answer to a problem that he and his friends had: they were working on a number of open source projects, so many that managing them was “beginning to wear them down”. GitHub was created as a solution to that problem: it took care of the tedious parts of source code management so that they could focus on their code.

Although GitHub hosts a number of open source projects and uses Git, which is open source, it is not open source. Chris explained that managing an open source project takes up more time that he or the others on the team have. “Ironically,” he said, “starting GitHub has given me less time to work on open source.” After hinting at his dissatisfaction with the GNU General Public License, an audience member asked "Does the GPL cause you nightmares?"

“Yes,” he replied, after which he endorsed his preferred open source license. “MIT license all the way,” he said.

To promote GitHub, they took an approach that was closer in spirit to evangelism than standard marketing. “Companies still believe in old-school advertising, and they also think that what works offline works online,” he said. So they rely on the standard offline methods of promoting their wares: advertisements and marketing campaigns. In the online world, people trust their peers, so they opted for an approach that he called “guerilla marketing”: instead of spending money on ads, they spent money to hang out with developers, buy them beer and pizza and provide “a human face” to GitHub. He summed up the approach with a good one-liner: “Who knew that actually spending time with your customers would be good for business?" A great point, especially in today’s word-of-mouth-y, interconnected world.

This is short notice and I apologize, but if you’re going to be near Toronto’s “Annex” neighbourhood, you might want to catch David Janes’ Coffee and iPhone event today between 1 and 3 p.m. at the Lettieri Cafe at the corner of Bloor and Bathurst streets.

Image from Wikimedia Commons.

On the off-chance you hadn’t yet heard, Apple has finally dropped its much-reviled NDA for iPhone developers for released software. It was so restrictive that developers were forbidden from discussing or writing documentation on iPhone development, even with or for other iPhone developers.

In the announcement on Apple Developer Connection, they explain why they put developers under the excessively-restrictive NDA:

We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don’t steal our work. It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others.

This sort of behaviour harkens back to the 1990s, when Apple behaved as if all third-party developers who weren’t Adobe existed on a spectrum ranging from “unwanted houseguest” to “the enemy”. Speaking as a guy with a strong technical evangelist background (note to employers: hint, hint!), this is not the way you foster developer love nor build a developer community.

Expect iPhone development tutorials and tips to start popping up all over the web and for the Pragmatic Programmers’ book iPhone SDK Development to finally see the light of day.

It’s official: Rogers will be offering the iPhone in Canada. No word on whether they’re going to lower their ridiculous mobile data rates to reasonable levels.