The Pains Of iPhone OS Development

JWZ has written a pretty scathing (yet very entertaining) indictment of the whole "it runs OS X" aspect of iPhone OS programming. Some choice quotes:

I think it's safe to say that MacOS is more source-code-compatible with NextStep than the iPhone is with MacOS.

That's like, the defining characteristic of OpenGL. So OpenGLES is just a slight variant of OpenGL, in the way that [a] unicycle is a slight variant of a city bus. If you can handle one, the other should be pretty much the same, right?

Granted, most of his gripes are with the APIs, not the environment, but it is pretty lame that you can't, for example, get the HSV version of a color on the iPhone. Like he says, it feels like someone actively sought out and removed valuable API hooks. Le sigh.

A MySoju Plugin for Plex Media Server

It would be awesome if Plex, the Mac media centre software, had support for the CJK drama website MySoju. Fortunately, Plex has a relatively easy plugin architecture, so I've started working on such a feature!

So far, the plugin can browse all dramas, movies, staff picks and rankings. As for actually viewing the videos, if they are hosted on MSN Soapbox, they will work. Over the next week I will be adding support for as many of MySoju's sources as I can. I'm a bit worried about how hard supporting Dailymotion will be, since they're breaking the MySoju site right now. Time will tell.

Anyway, the plugin is progressing nicely, so if you want to see some screenshots, just click the thumbnails below!