Nominally, this is about making your iOS apps smaller, but it's actually a great piece on how to think about software design and production.

Marc's list of portable music apps for the end of the year. Filed away.

Lovely article on Dudley Moore's jazz playing; I'd always enjoyed what I'd heard of it, but this gives a broader overview. That take on 'My Blue Heaven' is just great.

Really impressive: audiomux/midimux let you send audio and MIDI to and from iOS devices over a lightning cable. Which eliminates all manner of cable tangles, for starters.

Oh, awesome: a Pinboard Share extension for iOS 8.

New Danny Macaskill video: off-road (off ALL the roads) in Skye. Remarkable. Also: so much dronecam in biking videos now. (Nicely shot, thoguh).

Really, really useful: a tool from @mnot to test headers, caching, and responses to webpages. Will be using this a lot in future, am sure.

"The water that falls on you from nowhere when you lie is perfectly ordinary, but perfectly pure. True fact. I tested it myself when the water started falling a few weeks ago. Everyone on Earth did. Everyone with any sense of lab safety anyway. Never assume any liquid is just water. When you say “I always document my experiments as I go along,” enough water falls to test, but not so much that you have to mop up the lab. Which lie doesn’t matter. The liquid tests as distilled water every time." A truly lovely short story from John Chu.

The most useful tips in here: set the right headers; set the body of the response to an enumerator and it'll iterate over it, streaming it.

Some great Chess writing from Slate.

"‘If all that survives of our fatally flawed civilization is the humble paper clip, archaeologists from some galaxy far, far away may give us more credit than we deserve,’ the design critic Owen Edwards argues in his book Elegant Solutions." An excerpt from a Joe Moran essay on the paperclip.

"pup is a command line tool for processing HTML. It reads from stdin, prints to stdout, and allows the user to filter parts of the page using CSS selectors.

Inspired by jq, pup aims to be a fast and flexible way of exploring HTML from the terminal." That looks great.

"Something that journalists sometimes do is publish a disclosure statement. It’s sort of like an About Me page except it’s a listing of all their conflicts of interest—all the areas of coverage where you might have good reason to think they should not be trusted. It’ll say things like I once worked at Google or I’m married to an employee of Microsoft. I have never written one of these but I have fantasies about doing a comprehensive one. It would be the length of a novel, I think. An endless and yet incomplete litany of all the blood, privilege, history, and compromise on my hands." I could have quoted lots of this, but I chose this. It's good. It encapsulates the beginnings but not ends of lots of thoughts, and reminds me why, right now, I'm afraid of assuming anything about anything, why stereotyping "big companies" as being identical isn't just inaccurate but also unhelpful, and why the point of boundaries is that they always exclude _somebody_.

"Hatoful Boyfriend is the Fifa of pigeon romance and you should buy it for that reason alone." I'm loving the attention Hatoful Boyfriend is getting in the media; this review by Grant Howitt is charming, informative, and on the Guardian website. Brilliant.

Cracking interview with George Saunders, from 2011 (so pre-Tenth of December). Lots about the craft of writing, and about what Just Turning Up looks like. Also, his imaginary writing class in which Hemingway punches everybody out made me laugh out loud.

"Of course this is pure anthropomorphization. Bits don’t have wills. But they do have tendencies." This piece by Kevin Kelly is great – though this line neatly explains my suggestion that 'things' sometimes have 'desires' better than I ever have before.

Good to know SES can just be integrated as an ActionMailer delivery method.

Chunky has replaced Comicflow as CBR/CBZ reader of choice. It's really nicely made.

This is a good explanation of how to get sharp Canvas-based rendering on iOS browsers. It was on Posterous, so the only way to get at it was this archive.org page. Sigh.

A great post on the detailed design of an iOS app; I particularly like the focus on animatics, and also on rearranging the screen rather than always swiping to a new one; it's a thing I've sketched before.

"A day of support at Mutable Instruments’ is more commonly populated with “If you see a 100kHz square wave at this node, it means the integrator charges itself very fast, probably through the op-amp compensation cap only, not the external cap – check for a bad solder joint on C9” rather than “Have you checked that the power cord is plugged?” (though it happens). Furthermore, once kits get built, ideas of mods and firmware hacks crop up – all requiring expert guidance. All in all, the “support” role at Mutable Instruments is more like “product engineering – the lost levels” – and that’s why, following the introduction of a product – support can be done by no other than the designer of the instruments themselves…" Still, MI's products are getting increasingly lovely. I've always been tempted by a Shruthi, and the Anushri looks lovely.

"Prototype iPhone apps with simple HTML, CSS and JS components." Looks nice; also, lovely splash site.

"Hammer.js is a javascript library that can be used to control gestures on touch devices." Very nice. And: it has a jQuery plugin, too.

Sunrizer – basically, a tiny JP8000 clone.

Multi-touch instrument thing.

"DM1 is an advanced vintage Drum Machine. It turns your iPad into a fun and creative beat making machine."

Curious scale-based texture performance instrument.

"This script installs a patched version of ruby 1.9.3-p125 with patches to make ruby-debug work again (#47) and boot-time performance improvements (#66 and #68), and runtime performance improvements (#83 and #84). It also includes the new backported GC from ruby-trunk." Speed boosts for Ruby 1.9.3.

If you have MacPorts installed, OpenSSL runs into issues when you install rubies through RVM. This helps.