If you’ve used the iPhone or iPod touch for any time, you’ve likely seen the small red badges that appear over applications on the home screen. These might indicate the number of missed phone calls or unread emails that accumulated since the user last opened Phone or Mail.

Progress bars allow end-users to anticipate wait times. They present bars that fill from left to right. These bars indicate the degree to which a task has finished. Progress bars work best for long waits where providing state feedback allows your users to retain the feel of control.

At this time, Apple provides 5 AppStore calls to its new p2-panda service plus a call to legal terms and conditions. I'm swayed by Ryan Block's excellent insight that p2 probably stands for Purple 2, the iPhone's code name

Hackers have been hard at work updating the open source iPhone SDK to work with Apple's newest unreleased firmware and here is what they have found: nearly everything that worked with earlier firmware continues to compile and work with the newer firmware.

What happens when you offer free technical support and application distribution for only $99? An oversupply of iPhone developer wannabees and an undersupply of Apple developer support resources.

Say you were working in an unspecified but extremely buggy beta SDK. Say you suddenly started encountering "could not open a new pseudo tty" errors whenever you tried opening a new terminal windows. There's not much help out there on the net for this extremely hypothetical situation.

I was up way way late and woke up way way early. I didn't sleep so you could--here are important things you need to know about the SDK.

Last weekend, I decided to expand Coverflow to work with my entire photo album. This involved exploring the MusicLibrary and PhotoLibrary frameworks to find out how I could extract a complete set of albums and their pictures. The PLPhotoLibrary class proved to hold the key. With it, I could request an album list, and then build up a dictionary of photos that linked back from the image identifier to the album it came from.

If you have even the slightest interest in the iPhone SDK be aware that Apple's servers are getting slammed from every direction.

After dumping strings from LayerKit, I'm pleased to have found two new previously unknown animations: mapCurl and mapUnCurl. These are the animations used in Google Maps to reveal the settings pane.