The backlash is starting to show. The most recent change in Apple's iPhone developer agreement isn't going down well. The change is clearly aimed at increasing lock-in, and seems to have little to nothing to do with anything else. While individual developers are hit hard, Adobe as a whole has been hit pretty hard too, giving rise to sentiments on the web that Adobe should abandon Mac development. I have the sneaking suspicion this is exactly what Apple is aiming for.

"Apple's current - and in our opinion, objectionable - position is now close to the complete opposite of its initial stance. From promoting openness and standards, the company is now pushing for an ever more locked-down and restricted platform. It's bad for competition, it's bad for developers, and it's bad for consumers. I hope that there will be enough of a backlash that the company is forced to reconsider, but with the draw of all those millions of iPhone (and now, iPad) customers, I fear that Apple's developers will, perhaps with some reluctance, just accept the restriction and do whatever Cupertino demands."

Well, I have to admit I didn't see this one coming. Not too long ago, QNX Software Systems was acquired by Harman International (Harman/Kardon and JBL), and now, six years later, the embedded software specialist has been bought by BlackBerry maker Research In Motion. Interesting acquisition.

It almost got lost in all the iPhone OS 4.0 stuff, but Apple made a major contribution to the WebKit project yesterday. It's called WebKit 2, and it adds multiprocess browsing to the WebKit API; it may look similar to what Chromium does, but the difference is that Chromium's process boundary is not actually part of WebKit.

Now this is interesting. Microsoft developer Garrett Serack has acknowledged that it is generally easier to roll out a, for instance, complex stack of open source server software on Linux than it is on Windows. He also offers a solution - he's working on a project to bring package management to Windows. This project will be community-driven, and Serack has the full blessing from Microsoft.

John Gruber has found out that cross-compilers are no longer allowed in iPhone OS 4.0. "My reading of this new language is that cross-compilers, such as the Flash-to-iPhone compiler in Adobe's upcoming Flash Professional CS5 release, are prohibited. This also bans apps compiled using MonoTouch - a tool that compiles C# and .NET apps to the iPhone. It's unclear what this means for tools like Titanium and PhoneGap, which let developers write JavaScript code that runs in WebKit inside a native iPhone app wrapper. They might be OK."

According to an Nvidia executive, smartphones with the company's low-power Tegra 2 chips will become available in the fourth quarter this year. Tegra 2 chips put an Arm-based processor core, a GeForce graphics core and other components on a single chip.

Today, Apple held a special press event at its campus in Cupertino during which it revealed and demonstrated the new features that are going into the fourth version of the iPhone operating system. The company focussed on 7 'tentpole' features, the most prominent of which is... Multitasking.

Car analogies are quite popular on internet discussion forums, and ours is no exception. The problem with these analogies, however, is that they are usually quite flimsy, and a recent popular one is no exception. A number of people are now arguing that computer makers' move towards closed platforms (Apple, Sony, and so on) is akin to people no longer being able to service cars on their own. This analogy, which looks sound on a superficial level, breaks down when you spend more than five minutes contemplating it.

Alex Brown, the convener of ISO's OOXML subcommittee (SC34), criticized Microsoft last week for failing to properly support the standard in Office 2010. Brown declared that Microsoft's office format was "heading for failure" due to the growing number of unresolved technical deficiencies and Microsoft's own apparent lack of interest in implementing ISO's revised version of the standard. Microsoft technical evangelist Doug Mahugh responded on Wednesday in an effort to clarify Microsoft's intentions for OOXML support. He said that Microsoft is strongly committed to the standard and plans to achieve full compliance with the ISO-approved specification. He explained that Microsoft was unable to support strict OOXML compliance in Office 2010 due to various logistical issues and time constraints.

Good times, good times. Sony received a ton of deserved flak after it announced it would remove the PlayStation 3's "Install other OS" feature, despite advertising the machine with said feature, and despite promising only a few weeks earlier not to remove the feature. iPhone and PS3 hacker George "Geohot" Hotz promised to restore the feature - and less than a week later, he delivers.

Websites for over a decade have been transitioning to the Model-View-Controller paradigm, separating data from formatting and user interaction in their code bases. Unfortunately, this has meant not only the end of ugly early 90's vintage Geocities pages, but also of the era of digital, or more specifically computeral craftsmanship. The future of computers will depend on those artists, scholars, and programmers who can reunify content with format and remake programming as an art.

Via Ha.ckers.org, we get news of a cross-domain flaw using Flash or Silverlight content that allows the attacker to use the victim's browser as a proxy, including access to the user's session. Erlend Oftedal, the developer, explains how the system works and demonstrates the concept with a video. The flaw stems from developers lackadaisically allowing cross-domain requests from Flash across their whole domain (which obviously includes the user-account interactions); even Flickr and YouTube were culprits at one point.

"Last Friday HTC unveiled its entry-level Smartphone, aptly named the Smart. However, what we'd like to tell you about is not the new handset, but instead what happened during the press event inside the Taipei 101. This news story hasn't made it outside of Taiwan so far and we felt it was worth reporting on, despite the event taking place a few days ago. As the press conference was drawing to a close and the group photos were about to be taken, the event was gate crashed by representatives for one of HTC's suppliers. A woman came in shouting with several other people following her and there was a general confusion among the media at the event. The HTC PR representatives were doing their best to drag her away from the stage, while she was trying to hand over some kind of a list to Peter Chou, the president and CEO of HTC."