If you use the same terminal setup every time you start work in OSX, you might be interested in the short lesson Joey over at LosTechies put together on how to start up your terminal environment with just one command.

Digital Media Minute has done a lot of posts on iPad lately, but this pointer should be relevant to any iPhone developers who intend to get their iPhone applications on to iPad but haven’t yet gotten around to it. Check out this superb tutorial with plenty of screenshots and coding snippets, on porting an iPhone app to iPad, from Ray Wenderlich.

For more iPad articles, you might be interested in posts on an iPad meeting app, programming for iPad, iPad user interface design, as well as some thoughts on children’s book apps for iPad.

Thomas Fuchs created this gorgeous and simple iPad app for looking up time zones, called everytimezone. It worked well on the SDK iPad Simulator, but when he finally got his iPad he found the application to be very sluggish, so he optimized it.

Here he shares some lessons learned from the experience (there are a few surprises).

Here is a nice, non-mathematical explanation of what neural networks are , and how you might make use of them in applications you’re creating.

From Andrew Bragdon, et al. of Brown University comes Code Bubbles, an attempt to redefine the IDE interface. Interesting re-think:

…a novel user interface metaphor for code understanding and maintanence based on collections of lightweight, editable fragments called bubbles, which form concurrently visible working sets.

Without the file-based aspect of traditional IDEs, Code Bubbles functions by freely manipulating discrete units of code in a 2-D space: ideas are ordered in a friendlier way and the developer doesn’t have to move different locations to see the code fragments on which he’s working. Characteristics of “bubbles” fundamentally different from windows. The video makes a compelling case for Code Bubbles’ usability and usefulness.
(via Cedric Beust at java.dzone.com)

Here’s an excellent 37-item list of Django tips, tutorials and articles bundled all in one place with an emphasis on recent items, over at komunitasweb.com

With a new year upon us, it’s a time to examine the big questions: what is the best place to buy lottery tickets? Should I buy a puppy? But seriously, the sands of tech are changing rapidly so everyone should be looking to expand their repertoire, as in ‘what programming language should I learn next?’

H3rald.com has a great article on 10 programming languages worth checking out right now: Haskell, Erlang, Io, PLT Scheme, Clojure, Squeak, OCaml, Factor, Lua, and Scala. This is no halfhearted end-of-the-year “10 best” list, it’s a thoughtful and informed overview of the pros and cons of each language. The author is opinionated but frank, admitting that in the case of Haskell for instance, some of the more difficult concepts such as monads are still beyond his grasp. Very lively debate in the comments as you might expect from those wounded by the idea that their favorite esoteric languages would be left off.

Each of these top programming languages has a “To get you started” set of links; this is definitely an article to refer back to over the holidays, assuming you get any time off. I know I always appreciate meta- commentary and this is extremely well done.

The article gets bonus points for using the word “didascalic”. Who knew? (Wow, that word damn near exploded my voice activated typing software…)

Here’s a very nice, long list of free downloads of pdf-format ebooks related to programming. The bigger the web gets, the nicer it is to beat the clutter by having concise lists.

Have you seen Sublime Text? A Windows text editor for code, html and prose, with among other things, an interesting ‘Minimap’ feature that gives you a zoomed-out macro view of what you’re doing. There’s syntax highlighting for a long list of programming languages, multi-pane viewing etc. Free evaluation; $59 for a license seems high but the interface is gorgeous, I’ll say that. Via daringfireball.

Here’s a good read from Joel Spolsky, on what he calls ‘duct-tape programmers’. The post is actually a review of the book Coders at Work, by Peter Seibel, but Spolsky’s enthusiasm is infectious and spot-on. The inspiration in this case is Jamie Zawinski, who was at Netscape in the early days, and the point here is that delivering something imperfect is infinitely preferable to postponing a project (or never shipping) in the name of perfection. A pragmatic, functional approach may look messy to some, but the measure of success is not your approach, it’s the end to which your skills are applied. Not a new lesson, but worthy of a read.

“Yeah,” he says, “At the end of the day, ship the f*cking thing! It’s great to rewrite your code and make it cleaner and by the third time it’ll actually be pretty. But that’s not the point—you’re not here to write code; you’re here to ship products.”
My hero.