You may or may not have heard about the drama relating to the Podcaster app and the iPhone. Simply put, Apple reviews every application made available for the iPhone. An application was developed by a company that allowed users to download podcasts directly to their iPhone, and Apple refused to let the application be distributed because they said it duplicated existing iPhone functionality.

There are several articles about it, but one of the more insightful ones was The App Store's Exclusionary Policies , written by John Gruber of Daring Fireball. In the article, John talks about the fact that the policy to exclude applications that compete with Apple applications on the iPhone limits the phone's potential by scaring developers from trying to write applications for the phone because those applications that they've invested time and money into may be rejected.

I'm in a bit of a conundrum with Log for Life because of this. We want to write a native iPhone application to make logging to Log for Life dead simple, but it's an investment in this flawed system to do so. I can't imagine that a Log for Life application would get rejected, and even if it were, we would probably help our product overall by the press we would receive, but what about the next application. I have about 20 iPhone application ideas hidden in the back of my brain, and I don't want to invest in a mobile platform that is so locked down that I have to review my application ideas thoroughly to ensure that they won't collide with the phone manufacturer's interests.

I'll conclude with a quote from John Gruber's article, because I think it's spot on:

The App Store concept has trade-offs. There are pros and cons to this model versus the wide-open nature of Mac OS X. There are reasonable arguments to be made on both sides. But blatantly anti-competitive exclusion of apps that compete with Apple’s own? There is no trade-off here. No one benefits from such a policy, not even Apple. If this is truly Apple’s policy, it’s a disaster for the platform. And if it’s not Apple’s policy, then Podcaster’s exclusion is proof that the approval process is completely broken.

I just noticed a really cool detail in Safari. If you come across a URL that isn't a link for some reason, and you highlight it, the right-click menu will add an entry that says "Go to Address." That came in really handy just a second ago.

On a side note, though, why would anyone have a URL on a web page that isn't a link? That's just annoying.

We're all witnessing a meltdown of epic proportions in the Republican Vice Presidential Nominee area. Here's a great quote by Palin about the Pledge of Allegiance: (read the full transcript here)

Question: Are you offended by the phrase "Under God" in the Pledge of Allegiance? Why or why not?

Palin: Not on your life. If it was good enough for the founding fathers, its good enough for me and I'll fight in defense of our Pledge of Allegiance.

Our founding fathers had nothing to do with the Pledge of Allegiance. It was written by a socialist Baptist in 1892. Mix that fact in with her abstinence only education policy, her running of Ted Stevens' 529, and her total lack of experience, and this could lead to John McCain pulling a "Did I say Palin? I meant Mittens Romney."

There seem to be rumors flying around that Google will be releasing a browser, based on WebKit, called Google Chrome in the near future. It's odd to me, though, that Google is sending comics to the press before they have a web page up.

Read more at Google Blogoscoped

There's been a trend of late for everything to get crammed into our cell phones. My iPhone has a camera built in, I can of course make calls with it, I can email with it, and applications open up a full realm of possibilities. Other, more capable phones include the ability to capture video. But, in the background, there has also been a growing demand for simple, single purpose devices that delight their users with great experience and low prices.

There has been a lot of buzz today about the new Peek email device. It's a $100 device that lets users send email. That's all it does. Service costs $15 per month. There's one big problem with the device - you have to carry a phone around along with it if you want to make calls - but for a lot of people, I feel pretty certain that having email while out and about is more critical than having a phone. I never use my desk phone at work, and seldom use my cell phone (maybe 3 or 4 times a day), but I use my email all day long.

I bought another really simple device earlier this year when I bought a Flip video camera. It's dirt cheap (I got mine from Amazon for $150), and it's about as simple a camera as you can find. You hit the record button to start recording, and then you hit it again to stop. You can zoom, but that's about it as far as features. Simply plug the built in USB connector into your computer and the Flip shows up as a USB storage device so you can pull files off of it. Simplicity and low price have meant great success for the Flip. It held 13% of the camcorder market as of March 2008.

A local Greenville company, Aeronix, is in the mix of simple single purpose devices with their ZipIt Messenger. The device allows their target audience, teens and tweens, to chat on various instant messaging computers. That's all it does. It frees up family computers, and I know it would have reduced stress around my house when I was a teenager. It's a really cool device that does something that cell phones can already do, but at a fraction of the price - $49.95 for the device and $9.95/mo. for the service.

Overall, I'm not sure if these devices could really be classified as the way of the future, simply because we can buy cell phones that combine all of their features. But, these devices are all developed to provide a terrific user experience for their single task, whereas cell phones tend to do everything, but do nothing well. These single purpose devices are also all extremely inexpensive, which is a critical need for many gadget lovers. Low prices and great experience probably mean that these simple devices will continue to perform terrificly in their markets.

I was reading an article on Wired about Thomas Friedman's new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded

, and came across this interesting tidbit of information.

"According to the book, US pet food companies spent more on R&D last year than US utilities did."

If that's true, it says a lot about why we're getting nowhere on the energy issue. I'd like to read the book, but I'm hoping it's a little less long and a lot less boring than The World Is Flat was.

Adair and I have been totally addicted to Dexter, the Showtime series, lately. Addicted to the point of watching 4 hours of the show last night and staying up until 1:45 AM when I knew I had to get up at 5:45 AM the next morning. The show is really intriguing because it has a serial killer as it's main character, but you love the guy. I think the reason you love the guy is because you see a few critical things about him

1. He's totally loyal to his friends and family
2. His thoughts (which they make you privy to on the show) are pretty humorous
3. He has a background that makes you feel a little bit sorry for him

It's interesting to me because you can almost line those traits up to some of the companies that we all love to hate, like Apple or Google. Take Apple:

1. Apple creates products that their customers love, so customers forgive them for things like DRM and cost
2. Apple has a sense of humor in their advertising and in the keynotes that Steve Jobs gives
3. You want Apple to do well because they're the underdog... they're taking on Windows and the PC

Google has some similar traits:

1. Google may add ads to your email, but they create an awesome experience. They add ads to their search, but they keep the home page simple and clean.
2. Google treats their employees amazingly well and has young billionaire founders that are out to index every bit of content ever created and redirect the computing platform argument from various operating systems to the web
3. Google has employees that are total nerds and is experimenting (beta forever), so you forgive the occasional mistake

At Gnoso, we're growing fast. We've gone from 3 full time employees last July when I started to 8 full time employees. We wrote NCover last summer, and this summer Log for Life, our online diabetes logbook went into beta. With all of this growth, we've started feeling some strain. Our offices are feeling a bit smaller than they were this time last year. People are having to work across applications, and we're in a crunch to get the full release of Log for Life out and the next version of NCover out.

Today, though, Peter brought some sanity to the office by bringing up the fact that we need to embrace and work inside of our constraints instead of getting rid of them. We have to find ways to work with the team we have. We have to find ways to write applications more efficiently, and to focus on the user and the features they need and want, not the ones that we think would be cool but have questionable benefit to our users.

I'm hoping that these constraints stick around for the foreseeable future. I hate the idea of us growing at an out of control pace, but would instead prefer to see us have a firm grip on who we become and the culture at Gnoso. It's been amazing how much I've learned at Gnoso since I started last year, and I can't wait to see where this ride takes us all.

You can't just create a new canvas element in html with the DOM, because the new element will get a default size, and then any size you set after the fact will cause the canvas to be scaled.

Inserting the canvas using a string with innerHTML and the likes, though, works great.

It seems like the most lasting side effect of the Olympics, besides the new anger that Shawn Johnson feels every time she sees a tiny Chinese girl and the discomfort we all feel when thinking about lifting weights after seeing that one guy blow his elbow out, will be the $45 that is now automatically drafted from my bank account every month because of my new gym membership.

I wasn't the first one in our family to get Olympic fever. Adair, my wife, was bitten first. She had been talking about getting a gym membership for quite some time, but once the Olympics started, she decided to take the plunge, inspired by all of the ultra fit athletes and their ultra small garments. My daughter, Lucy, started asking to run laps around the house before she went to bed. And then, one night, watching Phelps get a gold and the womens' marathon of all things, I was bitten. "I think I want to run a marathon," I told Adair after the womens' marathon finished. Where the heck did that come from? I want to run a marathon? I usually don't even want to walk downstairs at work to get myself another Diet Dr. Pepper, but now, all of the sudden, I want to run a marathon?

It's not just at my house that people are being inspired to become olympians. Several people at work have started running, or have at least said that they want to start running. A lot of us are saying that in 6 months when our new office opens downtown we'll start exercising, which is awesome because it avoids  the short term pain of actually starting to exercise, while still holding the promise of fitness. People everywhere have seen these young people and thought, "That could be me." And, for a few short weeks, they'll think (and some will even try just a bit) to follow the examples given to us by NBC on 12 hour taped delay.

I haven't started actually exercising yet, but I have a physical evaluation at my new gym tomorrow night. I'm hoping the bug will stick around for a while, because I stay pretty tired these days and people say that exherting yourself by working out somehow makes you less exhausted. It would be wonderful if it does, and who knows, maybe in four years I'll be fit enough to compete in the womens' marathon. I'm pretty sure I'll never be fit enough to run in the mens.