February 2009


Read the Diffs

Peter McCurdy, 17 February 2009

While I’m linking to Eric Sink, he also recently suggested that if you’re a developer, you should read the diffs. I’ve found this to be very helpful advice personally – often, you see stuff you didn’t know about, so learn more, or you see stuff that’s wrong, so can catch a bug before it becomes a big problem. Even if the diffs are boring and correct, you still become more widely familiar with the code and its current state, which can be tremendously useful down the road.

I guess I’d just never quite appreciated that not everybody does it.

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Git is the next Unix, reinterpreted.

Peter McCurdy, 17 February 2009

Eric Sink proposes that Git is like C.  Given that Avery proposed last year that Git is the next Unix, and that Unix and C were both written for each other, I think we can call that corroboration.  Of course, as is pointed out by the article, C (and Unix) has certain usability issues which may hinder things. I’m certainly looking forward to Git’s user interface maturing a bit.

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Maps URLs on mobile Safari

William Lachance, 2 February 2009

I’ve been experimenting a little bit with maps urls on the iphone. If you’ve read Apple’s web developer guidelines, you’ll know that URLs of this form will automatically redirect to the maps application:

Halifax, Nova Scotia
<a href=”http://maps.google.com/maps?geocode=&q=Halifax,Nova Scotia”>Halifax, Nova Scotia</a>

This is fine if you just want to highlight one particular location (with no custom metadata), but what if you want to do something more interesting, like display a KML file? You can load these easily from the maps application, so why can’t you link to them from a web browser? The URL guidelines explicitly say that the KML part of a query string will be discarded, and indeed it is. What is a web developer to do? Resort to undocumented behaviour, of course! At least in version 2.2 of the iphone software, URLs which request a “maps” resource with the appropriate parameters will automatically load the appropriate KML file in the maps application:

Map link
<a href=”maps://?geocode=&q=http://code.google.com/apis/kml/documentation/KML_Samples.kml”>Map link</a>

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