Noel Rappin Writes Here

Top Story

For a while, it looked like the top story was going to be Apple’s new developer Rule 3.3.1, described here by John Gruber. More on that in a second.

But the real top story is the news that Twitter has bought Tweetie, intending to rebrand it as Twitter for iPhone, and dropping the price to a low, low, free. Eventually, it will be the core of Twitter for iPad. Wow.

Tweetie is probably the only case where I actually prefer the iPhone experience to the desktop experience, but I’d also be very sad if Tweetie for Mac was orphaned. (Not least because I just bought the MacHeist bundle in part as a way to get the Tweetie Mac beta sooner…). Later update: Tweetie developer Loren Brichter said on the MacHeist forum that the next Tweetie/Mac beta will come out.

I actually suspect that at least some of the existing iPhone Twitter clients will be able to continue – there’s clearly room in the ecosystem for apps that have much different opinions than Tweetie. It depends on how aggressive Twitter is planning to be. Dropping Tweetie’s price to free strikes me as agressive, although it may just be that the Twitter team is averse to direct ways of making money.

As for the Apple story, it’s a familiar space. Apple does something – in this case, blocking apps not originally written in C, C++, or Objective-C – that might have a reasonable user or branding component (keeping the iPhone platform free of least-common-denominator cross-platform apps) and taking it just too far for users or developers to be comfortable with it. That’s, of course, an understatement, as a lot of developers are really angry. Gruber’s point about the Kindle apps is good (and was later cited by Steve Jobs), but on the whole, I think this is a bit to far for Apple, or maybe I’m just upset that that the door seems to have been slammed on MacRuby apps for iPhone ever being feasible.

Book Update

Still working on the Webrat/Capybara chapter. Describing two tools that are so similar is really challenging for me – when there’s a difference, keeping it clear which tool is under discussion.

Also I’ve got the probability that I’ll have an article in an upcoming issue of the Pragmatic Magazine. This will probably be based on material from the book, but edited to fit the magazine article format. Probably either factory tools or mocks. Or maybe Ajax testing. Haven’t decided yet.

Tab Dump

Don’t think I’ve mentioned this yet, but here is a cool presentation of RSpec tricks. Some of these don’t work in RSpec 2, though.

While we’re on the presentation kick, here’s a nice intro to Git from James Edward Gray.

If you’ve ever tried to deploy Agile in a hostile environment, then the recent This American Life episode about the General Motors/Toyota NUMMI plant will resonate for you.

And Finally

A comparison of a boatload of Ruby test frameworks, being used in Iron Ruby to test some .NET code. I admit that I was not familiar with all the frameworks used here.