37signals Becomes Basecamp
Jason Fried: Moving forward, we will be a one product company. That product will be Basecamp. Our entire company will rally around Basecamp. With our whole team - from design to development to customer...
View ArticleBegging for App Ratings
Wil Shipley: The total number of users who’ve rated this particular version is only six. Never mind that 113 people have rated our app before—if you look at the “all versions” rating, our rating is a...
View Articleman’s Special Xcode Support
Wolf Rentzsch: So Apple’s man calls xcselect_get_manpaths() to dynamically add Xcode-specific paths to man's search paths. Sneaky. […] libxcselect.dylib is key to Apple’s technique of providing stubs...
View ArticleReplacing the Objective-C “Delegate Pattern” With ReactiveCocoa
Justin DeWind: Instead of having to assign a delegate to the UISearchBar and implement searchBar:textDidChange:, let’s modify the UISearchBar so there is a signal representing changes to the text.
View ArticleVerizon Using Net Neutrality Victory to Wage War Against Netflix
David Raphael (via Dave Winer): I’ve since tested this almost every day for the last couple of weeks. During the day – the bandwidth is normal to AWS. However, after 4pm or so – things get slow. In my...
View ArticleAvoiding Massive Controllers
Brad Grzesiak (via Mark Bernstein): Well, to be sure we’re on the same page, allow me propose rules that must be followed in order to adhere to this heuristic: The IBAction macro must not be used in a...
View ArticleTales From the Crash Mines
Landon Fuller: This has been a deep dive, and I hope that we’ve presented some useful methodologies that you can use to analyze complex or difficult-to-reproduce issues in your own code. Even if you’re...
View ArticleStrings, Unicode, Localization, and Parsing
The new issue of objc.io is all about strings. Ole Begemann: The truth is that an NSString object actually represents an array of UTF-16-encoded code units. Accordingly, the length method returns the...
View ArticleDesign Details: Paper by Facebook
Brian Lovin: Paper by Facebook has been out for a day now and the reviews are, for the most part, quite divided. I haven’t been an avid Facebook user for some time, but the design and attention to...
View ArticleScriptnotes on Final Draft
Scriptnotes 129 (via Guy English): Craig Mazin And so I was a very early adopter of Final Draft. And I stayed with Final Draft through the revisions. And along the way I got disillusioned. And I’ve...
View ArticleEmbedding Resource Files in a Cocoa Foundation Command Line Tool
Drew McCormack: Graham Lee and several others pointed me to two standard solutions: you can use the linker to embed the files in the __text section of the Mach-O binary, or you can use a tool called...
View Articlerezycle 1.5.5
Rezycle (App Store): Simply drop your classic application or resource file onto rezycle and it will extract all of the resources for you and place them into a folder next to the original file. But...
View ArticleAn Illustrated History of objc_msgSend
Greg Parker on the Mavericks version of objc_msgSend: The method cache data structure is rearranged for higher speed and smaller data cache footprint but larger total dirty memory footprint....
View ArticleOn Hacking MicroSD Cards
Andrew Huang: Today at the Chaos Computer Congress (30C3), xobs and I disclosed a finding that some SD cards contain vulnerabilities that allow arbitrary code execution — on the memory card itself. On...
View ArticleTimestamp Disservice
Daniel Jalkut: In the event that the timestamp server cannot be reached for whatever reason, codesign simply fails. This is probably a good idea, because if it’s important for signed code to also...
View ArticleAnatomy of a Cheap USB to Ethernet Adapter
Angus Gratton: One of them is sold on ebay for $3.85 AU ($3.99 US), including postage to Australia. The other is sold at Apple Stores for $29. […] The Apple adapter also has many more small components...
View ArticleHopper Disassembler 3.0
I highly recommend Hopper. Vincent Bénony: The user interface has been greatly enhanced thanks to the new inspector panel, which made its appearance on the right side of the main window. This panel...
View ArticleApple Passes Microsoft
Benedict Evans: This is a pretty good illustration of the scale of mobile: Apple limits itself only to the high end of the mobile market but still sells more units than the whole PC industry.
View ArticleSony and Camera Sensor Size
David Pogue: In short, the single most important statistic about a camera is not the number of megapixels (which actually means very little to picture quality). It’s sensor size. […] “We don’t believe...
View ArticleApple Emerging Technology Job
Apple (via Kontra): Apple’s Emerging Technology group is looking for a senior engineer passionate about exploring emerging technologies to create paradigm shifting cloud based solutions. The candidate...
View ArticleLobotomizing Quicken 2007
Avi Drissman (via Nicholas Riley): But Wealthfront uses Apex Clearing to hold their accounts, and while Apex paid their Intuit tax and offers QFX downloads, guess what? They paid for Windows but not...
View ArticleSlow Updater Purchasing Habits
David Smith: I was a bit surprised at how straightforwardly this analysis came out. It seems clear that the distribution of people who are purchasing your apps follows closely the overall adoption of...
View ArticleApple’s Secure Coding Guide
Apple (via Jim Manico): Secure coding is the practice of writing programs that are resistant to attack by malicious or mischievous people or programs. Secure coding helps protect a user’s data from...
View ArticleOpening Terminal Commands in Editor
When editing a command in Terminal, you can type Control-X, Control-E to open it in your text editor of choice (via Wesley Darlington). When you save your changes and close the document, the command is...
View ArticleUTI Type Browser
Jonathan Wight’s uti.schwa.io is a browseable, searchable listing of Uniform Type Identifiers.
View ArticleSwipeSelection Pro
Jeff Benjamin: Everyone can benefit from SwipeSelection’s extremely improved cursor management when compared to stock iOS. I apologize in advance to Kyle Howells, developer of SwipeSelection, but this...
View ArticleARM Immediate Value Encoding
Alisdair McDiarmid: The rotated byte encoding allows the 12-bit value to represent a much more useful set of numbers than just 0–4095. ARM immediate values can represent any power of 2 from 0 to 31. So...
View ArticleHow Do Alarm Clock Apps Work on iOS?
Ole Begemann: Rise’s surprising solution is to opt out of iOS multitasking altogether. What was presumably intended by Apple as a temporary option for apps when multitasking was first introduced in iOS...
View ArticleFleksy SDK for iOS
Speaking of keyboards, there’s now an SDK for adding the Fleksy keyboard to iOS apps. It’s like TextExpander, where each app has to embed the code separately, since iOS doesn’t allow this sort of...
View ArticleNSManagedObjectContext’s Parent Context
Benedict Cohen: parentContext was introduced alongside a new concurrency model. To use parentContext both the parent and child contexts must adopt the new concurrency model. But the problem addressed...
View ArticleAre Core Data Fetched Properties Useful?
Marcus Zarra: Unlike a relationship, there is no way to pre-fetch a fetched property. Therefore, if you are going to fetch a large number of entities and then desire to access the fetched property for...
View ArticleKVO Considered Harmful
Soroush Khanlou (via Marcel Weiher): All of these nuances in the API cause KVO to embody what is known as a pit of failure rather than a pit of success. The pit of success is a concept that Jeff Atwood...
View ArticleApple’s SSL/TLS Bug
CVE-2014-1266: The SSLVerifySignedServerKeyExchange function in libsecurity_ssl/lib/sslKeyExchange.c in the Secure Transport feature in the Data Security component in Apple iOS 6.x before 6.1.6 and 7.x...
View ArticleThe Netflix/Comcast Deal
Russell Brandom: US cable giant Comcast has announced a deal with Netflix allowing Netflix’s video-streaming service a more direct route through Comcast’s network, which should improve streaming video...
View ArticleFont Points and the Web
Craig Hockenberry: Let’s just say I spent a lot of quality time with Google before eventually stumbling across a hint on Microsoft’s developer site. The document talks about using a default setting of...
View ArticleCore Intuition Jobs
Daniel Jalkut on Core Intuition Jobs: Core Intuition Jobs aims to solve this problem by becoming the go-to source for both employers and job-seekers in the Cocoa development market. Other sites like...
View ArticleiOS Background Fetch
David Smith: There is, however, an intrinsic danger in applying this ability without fully thinking through the implications. When enabled within your applications you are essentially building a...
View ArticleiOS Keylogging Vulnerability
FireEye (via Ashkan Soltani): We have created a proof-of-concept "monitoring" app on non-jailbroken iOS 7.0.x devices. This “monitoring” app can record all the user touch/press events in the...
View ArticleWorking With Woz
Randy Wigginton: Working with Woz was like working with the smartest person you’ve ever known kicked up a couple notches combined with a practical joker. The best times Woz and I had were not coding,...
View ArticleCocoa Script “Shaders”
Gus Mueller: I also played around with Cocoa Script “shaders” for shape graphics in Acorn. This won’t ship in 4.4 (or maybe ever?), but it was fun to code up and might be something awesome some day....
View ArticleStarting to Demo the Wolfram Language
Steven Wolfram: We’re getting closer to the first official release of the Wolfram Language—so I am starting to demo it more publicly. Here’s a short video demo I just made. It’s amazing to me how much...
View ArticleApple Releases iBeacon Specification
Doug Thompson (via Sven Read): Apple has quietly rolled out its iBeacon specification as it starts to certify devices that carry the Bluetooth LE standard. Under their MFI program, manufacturers can...
View ArticleSoftware Update Backdoor?
Nat!: Another question I asked myself was: Is Software Update actually contacting Apple servers or am I being served a compromised update with even more security holes by the NSA? Does it matter where...
View ArticleOpt Out of Dropbox’s Arbitration Clause
Dropbox: We’ve made a lot of changes to Dropbox since we last updated our Terms of Service, Privacy Policy, and online Dropbox for Business Agreements. So today, we’re starting to email users to let...
View ArticleLife Outside the Mac App Store
Dan Counsell: It’s been 4 years and throughout all this time we've continued to sell RapidWeaver in and out of the Mac App Store. I expected direct sales to trail off as the years went on. I kept...
View ArticleHow to Succeed at Recursion Without Really Recursing
Mike Vanier (via @CompSciFact): The Y combinator is a higher-order function. It takes a single argument, which is a function that isn't recursive. It returns a version of the function which is...
View Articlebup
bup (via Charles Parnot): Highly efficient file backup system based on the git packfile format. Capable of doing fast incremental backups of virtual machine images. […] It uses a rolling checksum...
View ArticleiOS Security White Paper
Apple (PDF): Apple does not log messages or attachments, and their contents are protected by end-to-end encryption so no one but the sender and receiver can access them. Apple cannot decrypt the data....
View ArticleYou’re Using Your Camera’s Flash Wrong
David Pogue: Truth is, you shouldn’t use the flash at a performance like that anyway. Not at a sports event, not at a school play, not on Broadway, not at fireworks, not at the Olympics — because your...
View ArticleThe App Stores Are Not “Long Tail”
Yann Lechelle: Chris Anderson correctly analysed that the advent of e-commerce sites like Amazon or iTunes gave more prominence to the bottom of the catalogue than ever, therefore making it possible to...
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