When the iPhone development kit was announced, developers were rightly upset that only Apple’s native apps could run in the background. The solution offered was a push notification system that would pop up an alert, like when you get a text message, any time the app wants to get the user’s attention. This seems to be a reasonable compromise. Music apps can’t play in the background, run tracking apps can’t do their deal in the background, but that’s OK. For 80% of apps, this would be awesome. If we had it.
Dan Moren over at MacWorld has a piece on why it may still be a ways off, if we ever see push at all. His take is that it is very hard to do right (especially with launching MobileMe and the new-at-the-time iPhone 3G), and there is no great cry from the users to have push notification, even though it was promised to us five months ago.
My take is that yes, Apple committed to more than they could do, but the app store was so much more of a success than they planned for they couldn’t scale the push system to match it. Push notification is a victim of the app store’s success. If the app store was a moderate success it still probably would have been delayed, but we would have seen it by now. I for one couldn’t be happier.
I am totally obsessed with switching themes in anything I use. Take Mac OS X for instance. Even though there are only two possible themes (Graphite and Blue), I switch between them every few months. I know what they both are like. I’ve used them both for years. However, I can’t stay still for long.
Now I’m inviting you to share my obsession. I’ve added a Theme Swither widget to the sidebar on the right. If it is too horribly broken, I will remove it (in which case please mock me mercilessly for this post), but I love it. It allows me to go right from one theme to another and eventually find what my flavor of the month.
What will happen when I change the default theme again? Will you see it, or will you have already changed your theme? If you are anything like me, this theme will last for all of a week before you’ve tried out every possible other option, hacked in a couple options that don’t exist, then finally settle on right one. Enjoy.
I said I’d update when there’s something interesting, and now there’s something interesting. The Consumerist reports on a new study by the University of Rochester shows that:
bisphenol-A (BPA), a potentially toxic chemical found in many plastics, can enter the body via non-food sources and lingers in the body longer than previously thought.
What is BPA? Since I have no clue either, let’s discover together. Reading the article(s), it turns out that BPA is in plastic everywhere, and more importantly can enter into tap water and household dust. Which means that you don’t even have to consume foods contaminated by BPA to be effected.
The good news is that there is an FDA ruling that BPA won’t kill you; however it doesn’t say that BPA won’t cause cancer, which is the primary concern of pretty much everyone. From what I can gather, this study will probably cause the FDA to reconsider their ruling.