Instapaper will soon go iOS 5-only, we learn why the Clang project was started, and Tapbots being bully-ish about Copyright. Ad Show Notes Adobe has finally released Photoshop Touch for iPad. Steve Troughton-Smith has taken apart the app and found that it is indeed a cross-compiled Adoble AIR application. It’s the same app that also runs on Android. I tested it a bit and must admit that it runs quite well. Does this spell the end of programming Objective-C as we know it? I hope not. I don’t want to have to learn Flash or AIR for that matter. TextMate, our favorite text editor, did some statistics which OS 10 versions the TextMate 2 alpha is running on: 10.8 2.0% 10.7 86.7% 10.6 11.1% 10.5 0.2% “With such a small percentage on 10.5 it makes sense to drop its support. Moving forward we may decide that requiring Lion will be a reasonable tradeoff as it provides many underlying benefits we could take advantage of. The usage statistics will be monitored to determine the feasibility of this move.” This indeed means that OS 10 users seem to be very quick to adopt new versions of the operating system. Personally I am astonished to already see 2% on Mountain Lion, that’s a very big number for even the very first developer preview of anything. Speaking of dropping support for earlier Operating Systems. Marco Armand of Instapaper fame has released a minor update to Instapaper. And in the release notes he states that this is the last version which will support iOS 4. His next major update will only work on iOS 5 and above. In my experience all the good stuff that makes my live easier right now became widespread with iOS 4. That is, things like blocks and ARC. This is why ditching iOS 3 support relieved the most pain. Marco is blazing a trail here, which he can because his statistics seem to indicate that most of his users are quick to adopt the latest iOS version anyway. Obviously it is easier to only support the latest iOS, but I have yet to see a compelling reason or feature in iOS 5 that would cause me to to drop iOS 4 support. If you know any, then please let me know so that I can discuss it on the show. History Lesson: Did you know why Clang (aka LLVM) is being developed independently from GCC and is replacing it in more and more places? The GCC project began in the mid 80s by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation. Stallman’s radical idea was to develop software that would be shared rather than sold, with the intent of delivering code that anyone could use provided that anything they contribute to it would be passed along in a form others could also use. That’s the same Richard Stallman that blogged that he is glad that Steve Jobs is gone because he felt that Macs are just pretty jails. Some developers wanted to be able to have the compiler fronted in a dynamic library so that they can do syntax analysis from within tools. Like what we have in Xcode if you do Build&Analyze and also what ARC uses to determine what needs to be retained and what released. So somebody on the GCC mailing list asked this question: “… is there a reason for not making the [GCC] front ends dynamic libraries which could be linked by any program that wants to parse source code?” To this the Richard Stallman personally responded: “One of our main goals for GCC is to prevent any parts of it from being used together with non-free software. Thus, we have deliberately avoided many things that might possibly have the effect of facilitating such usage…” When I heard these quotes in a talk by Chandler Carruth, who is on Clang at Google, a light went on. So you see the historical answer is that GCC hat its time as one of the important drivers of Linux and free software, but was never meant to become part of something greater that could be used to develop commercial software with. This is why Apple (and many others) ditched GCC and now uses Clang. Because free software advocacy has become a jail of its own when it refuses to work with commercial software ou...