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Year: 2010

Economic Analysis & The App Store

I read two articles – the app bubble and bad news about iphone economics – which surprised me a bit. Their analysis, which doesn’t account for gain in human capital and the value of lock-in (or alternatively the cost of switching), seems to posit that the App Store is bad for everyone. I could be completely misevaluating the arguments presented, but I believe that if you dig into the arguments presented significant benefits are not being accounted for. Apple is Paid to Advertise Apps aren’t very profitable for Apple either…

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HTML For Email Newsletters & Image Links

Recently I’ve made some minor adjustments on newsletter bound HTML documents. One particular document was made in the iContact WYSIWYG editor and as you can expect the HTML markup was horrendous. Even worse than the markup was the various ways the email displayed in different email viewing environments. Hotmail, Outlook, and Gmail all displayed this same email differently. The main issue I was experiencing was a mysterious 3px bottom ‘padding’ given to all img elements wrapped in an anchor tag and lined up horizontally using tds (apparently tables are still the norm for email marketing). No actual CSS padding or margin was being applied to the img or any of its container elements…

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Compiling PHP 5.2.11 on OS X 10.5.8

I’ve detailed this problem before but yet again I’ve encountered the infamous iconv compile error. This bug is not new yet it still has not been fixed in the latest PHP release. When compiling a custom version of PHP with libraries such as libxml and iconv the make process results in a linking error relating to the iconv library. The problem arises because I have two versions of iconv installed – the macports version in addition to the standard installation. A linking conflict arises and to eliminate the error a linking search order change (which is detailed in my previous blog post) must be made…

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NetSuite PHPToolkit & Uncaught Empty Search Results Error

So far my experience with NetSuite has been less than favorable. Their developer resources aren’t bad, but they aren’t terribly good either. I’m working on a project that involves searching through contacts & selectively modifying contact data based on search results. In some cases the search will return an empty result set – just like any normal search should. I would have thought that the PHP developer kit was mature enough to handle an empty search set, but apparently not…

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Create TGZ Automator Service

With Snow Leopard came some nice refinements to automator actions. However, all existing automator actions had to be recreated as services in order to be accessed through the Finder’s contextual menu. One automator action which I used fairly often was the create tgz workflow. I always found that action to be fairly useful so I recreated it as an action. Another unfortunate change with Snow Leopard was the elimination of input managers. This eliminated the convenient F-Script injection functionality that was present in F-Script anywhere. Luckily this functionality has been recreated using an automator service. Nice work!

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PyObjc & Seemingly Incorrect Return Value Mismatch

I’ve come to love developing in PyObjc. Sure, it has its quirks, isn’t the fastest, and isn’t the easiest to debug when something goes really wrong (aka imperfect integration with the xcode IDE); but it is fast to develop in. Almost every seemingly complex task that has come my way has been 50% completed by some open source python module that I can include in a commercial app without any licensing trouble. However, the other day I came across a bug (at least, what I thought was a bug) that seemed very blaringly obvious and for a production version of a scripting bridge…

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