A VIP is any person you designate as being important enough to have their messages treated differently by Mail. You designate someone as a VIP by clicking the star icon to the left of the person’s name in any incoming or sent message. You’ll immediately notice that every message to or from that person now displays a star in message lists, making it easier to find those messages. In addition, when you designate a sender as a VIP, that person gets his or her own entry in a new VIPs section of Mail’s Mailboxes sidebar. Click a VIP’s name, and you get a list of all messages, across all mailboxes (including Sent and Trash), to or from that person.

If like me, you use Mail exclusively, you’ll want to read this article as it details all the gritty details of what’s coming. Having been using the developer preview of Mountain Lion for 4 days already, I had not even noticed these changes yet.

But over that same stretch, the economy began moving in the right direction. Indicators of economic growth started moving upward, and the eye-popping indications of economic weakness started moving downward. That’s surely had an effect. And if the trends continue, it augurs very well for Obama in the general election.

Check out these two charts. Also, I suspect this is why the main Republicans message these days are contraceptives, abortions, and gays. As usual in an election year when they have no real platform to run on.

From talking to many developers about this privacy intrusion during the past week, it quickly became disturbingly clear to me that many aren’t familiar with hashing at all. This is also predictably (and entirely forgivably) true for the many journalists who have covered the story, unintentionally distorting the issue due to lack of education in the field.

This article, therefore, aims to introduce the concept of hashing in a clear, straightforward, and no-degree-required way, suitable for journalists and casual readers as well as programmers and software engineers. I’ll also explain why it’s suitable for preserving the privacy of contact information whilst still allowing for social functionality, and I’ll touch on whether or not you really need to store that contact information (hashed or not) in the first place.

He goes on to outline the things he touched on in the paragraph above. This is a must-read article for any web or app developer.

The best description I’ve heard, in years, about the differences and difficulties in developing open standards oriented web applications on a Macintosh vs a PC platform. You need to listen to the 5by5 Special #4: Kindacritial which aired yesterday.

At CPAC, some top conservative minds (stay with me here) got together to try to decide how to defeat the previously not terribly controversial law mandating insurance cover contraception. Their conclusion? Conservatives should just lie about it:

Stop talking about birth control. That was the key message from some of the most prominent leaders of America’s anti-abortion movement, speaking Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference. During a talk on how to advance the movement through messaging, an all-female panel discussed the Obama administration’s birth-control-coverage mandate and suggested that the best way to defeat it is by calling it an “abortion mandate.”

And people wonder why I lose all respect for someone when I find out they proudly proclaim themselves a member of the Republican party.

He makes an good point when talking about the insanely high resolution of a retina display on a 9.7″ screen:

This will present problems for developers and designers of iPad apps unless Apple also releases a new display with either a higher resolution or a HiDPI mode. Otherwise we will no longer be able to view 1:1 mockups or run the simulator at full size without clipping part of the view.

Check out the comparison chart he made on his site.

When implementing these features, I felt like iOS had given me far too much access to Address Book without forcing a user prompt. It felt a bit dirty. Even though I was only accessing the data when a customer explicitly asked me to, I wanted to look at only what I needed to and get out of there as quickly as possible. I never even considered storing the data server-side or looking at more than I needed to.

This, apparently, is not a common implementation courtesy.

13 out of 15! Zuckerberg’s cell phone number! Maybe I’m being old-fashioned here, but this seems unequivocally wrong. Any app, from Angry Birds to Fart App 3000, can just grab the information in your address book without asking? Hell. No. And Curtis is right in calling Apple out about this…apps should not have access to address book information without explicitly asking. But now that the horse is out of the barn, this “quiet understanding” needs to be met with some noisy investigation. What happened to Path needs to happen to all the other apps that are storing our data. There’s an opportunity here for some enterprising data journalist to follow Thampi’s lead: investigate what other apps are grabbing address book data and then ask the responsible developers the same questions that were put to Path.

Well put.