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Last week I launched the second major iteration of Facebook's iPhone app, which finally lives up to our users' expectations and delivers most of the features they wanted. Getting here has been really challenging, and I'm finally at a point where I can reflect back on the experience and try to share what I've learned.

A lot of people have been emailing me with Firebug questions in the last couple months - more emails than I've been able to reply to, so I apologize if you haven't heard back from me. In the last few days the emails have been more urgent than usual, so I figured that blogging would be the best way to get some answers out to everyone.

Today marks the third major iteration of this blog since its inception in 2002. On the outside there is nothing interesting about the new design - it's intentionally plain. The really exciting thing (to me, at least) is what you can't see: joehewitt.com is now 100% Python-powered.

The Carnegie Deli may be partially responsible for global warming.

Via John Resig we just got to learn about a clever technique applied by the Filament group in Boston called Progressive Enhancement with CSS support. The study rightfully claims that object detection to determine whether a user agent is capable of supporting a certain interface is not enough. You also need to make sure that [...]

We went through Google Code and did a lot of work to get it running faster. The team used a lot of the principles from Steve Souders book: High Performance Web Sites and ended up with a nice gain:According to our latency measurement stats, the user-perceived latency on Google Code dropped quite a bit, anywhere between [...]

Asciify is a new library that draws ASCII art for you, so it had "Friday" written all over it: There are trends on the web (as in real world) that last days or weeks and there are things that became a classic form of expression of the geek culture and are still interesting to explore after [...]

Stuart Parmenter has been blogging about his work on memory usage and various malloc() libraries and their tradeoffs. In his latest, he talks about the memory usage in Firefox 3 today and the work that he has done: Reduced Memory fragmentation: One of the things we did to help was to minimize the number of total allocations [...]

Neil Roberts has posted a great article on Creating Your Own $ with Dojo:The bling, one of the best global variables in JavaScript. A tool which has come to mean, as a function, a way to locate a node or set of nodes. And, as a namespace, a simple way to access often-used functionality. "This [...]

Man, I was wrong in my post on what about us? and the iPhone SDK. All I knew about was the VP of Phone Software saying “we have stuff coming”, but there is a lot more that that, it is just not mentioned in many places. If you head over to the iPhone DevCenter (registration required) [...]