ranchero.com RSS: News and software for smart people. Mostly Mac.

Ars Technica: “OpenCL was proposed so that programmers could write software in a way that would allow computing tasks to be best handled by whatever hardware resources are available to a given machine.”

Ars Investigates: “Using unpublished APIs means that your applications can break at any firmware upgrade; Apple does not guarantee that routines will not change the way they stand behind the published APIs.”

Daring Fireball: “So, (a) Google Mobile is using a private API, and (b) to my knowledge, there is no way to duplicate the behavior of Google Mobile’s ‘just lift the phone to your ear to trigger the voice prompt’ feature using only the public APIs in the iPhone SDK.”

furbo.org: “Unless your Internet tubes are broken, you’re probably aware that we released Frenzic for the iPhone today... But let’s go beyond all of this self congratulation and look at some of the details about how to coordinate your App Store release.”

MacUser: “Since Apple’s own database often contains protected information, Burks took a simple but clever solution: create a duplicate database into which developers could file the same bugs they’re reporting to Apple, but which allows for searching and other features that Radar doesn’t.”

Maverick Software: Lemonade Stand is “a faithful remake of the classic Apple II game” with an “optional ‘Classic Graphics’ mode that shows the original Apple II graphics, for the full old school experience.”

I spent many hours playing this game, getting beat by my younger sister — who later got a master’s degree in economics.

TidBITS: “For the first time, Safari 3.2 includes two anti-phishing features designed to protect users from accidentally (or purposely) visiting fraudulent Web sites.”

Congrats to Gus on shipping VoodooPad 4! A big new feature is syncing, which I bet lots of folks have been hoping for. (Works via MobileMe or WebDAV.) Here are the release notes.

Pico and Sofa: “Versions 1.0 is out now, so say hello to the fresh new look of your repository and start saying less to that command-line interface.”

Blankbaby: “Scott McNulty watchers (and you know you’re one of them) might have been wondering, ‘What the heck has Scott been up to?’”

Scott’s been writing a book called “Building a WordPress Blog People Want to Read.” Now you know what to give as gifts this year. :)