ATPM 17.11
The November issue of ATPM is out: Cover Sponsors Welcome E-Mail MacMuser: Death of a Salesman MacMuser: Life Can Be So Cruel PEBKAC: On the Passing of Steve Jobs On a Clear Day, You Can See the...
View ArticleAnandTech’s iPhone 4S Review
Brian Klug and Anand Lal Shimpi: To re-state the evolution that Apple has taken with this design, the GSM/UMTS 4 had one transmit and receive chain, the CDMA 4 added a second receive chain for...
View ArticleApple’s Planned Obsolescence Schedule
Adam C. Engst: It’s not so much that iCloud is itself uninterested in the past, since Lion works on all Macs sold in the last 4 years or so. The problem is iOS, and the way Apple is keeping obsolete...
View ArticleGoogle Kills Its Other Plus
Andy Baio (via John Gruber): On Wednesday, Google retired a longer-standing “plus”: the + operator, a standard bit of syntax used to force words and phrases to appear in search results. The operator...
View ArticleThe Long-Term Failure of Web APIs
Nick Bradbury: I wrote the first version of HomeSite back in 1994, and seventeen years later I can still run it on the latest version of Windows. I created FeedDemon 1.0 in 2003, and it was the first...
View ArticleWhy the Mac App Sandbox Makes Me Sad
Pauli Olavi Ojala (via Peter Maurer): It’s important to note that these entitlements are granted by Apple, not by the user herself. App developers must provide justification for their entitlement...
View ArticleArsTechnica on Sandboxing
Chris Foresman: Sandboxing is designed to prevent apps from doing things that users do not intend—e.g., an exploited app taking over the network and being used for a denial-of-service attack. “Where...
View ArticleReal Security in Mac OS X Requires Apple-Signed Certificates
Wil Shipley has an excellent post about the bigger picture: The problem Mac developers are facing is that the two that Apple is enforcing on the Mac App Store (Sandboxing and Code Auditing) are...
View ArticleAlfred Powerpack and the Mac App Store
Andrew Pepperrell: Having the Powerpack in the Mac App Store would not only bring me more revenue, but it’s also a trusted discovery channel for new users – I *know* Alfred would have significantly...
View ArticleMacworld on Sandboxing
Lex Friedman: The Many Tricks team—Peter Maurer and former Macworld senior editor Rob Griffiths—is also concerned. “As of now, entitlements for the core features of many of our apps don’t even exist,...
View ArticleSichel on Sandboxing
Peter Sichel: Forcing an application like Phone Amego to be sandboxed puts the developer in the awkward position of choosing between dumbing down the application by removing features, or abandoning the...
View ArticleCreating iCal Events
Kirk McElhearn: If you double-click to create an event in Month view, and then type a time along with the name of the event (Read Walden 8pm), iCal will create a one-hour event at the time you specify....
View ArticleApple Edicts
Pierre Lebeaupin: In the future, Apple may claim that they warned developers of such things in advance but the truth is most of the stuff they warned about did not come to pass in the way they warned...
View ArticlekABUIDProperty
Mike Zornek: For example, with the release of iCloud I received emails from some ProfitTrain users who were getting warnings that the link between clients and the AddressBook cards were breaking. Turns...
View ArticleFlash Is Dead
Jeff LaMarche: I assumed the performance issues they were having back then were simply technical hurdles that would be overcome by Adobe's engineers before long. In the end, the lack of a monoculture...
View ArticleLuma Loop Discontinued Due to Bad Patents
James Duncan Davidson and Greg Koenig: In short, the idea of a sliding camera sling isn’t an amazing new invention. It’s just a really good idea that’s been around for a while and has been iteratively...
View ArticleThe Real Cost of Patent Trolls
Adam C. Engst on a paper from Boston University: [T]he cost has averaged $80 billion per year. Moreover, very little of this money ever makes it to the actual inventors, meaning that the money lost by...
View ArticleArithmetic Expressions in Shell Scripts
Mark Dominus: I had assumed that bc was a later development than expr, but it appeared in Unix version 6, while expr did not appear until version 7. So then I thought perhaps expr had been thrown in as...
View ArticleApple Removes “Texas Hold’em” From App Store
Eric Slivka reports that Apple has silently removed its own game from the App Store. It hadn’t been updated since 2008, but it still worked, and I know people who still play it. Rather than explaining...
View ArticleApple’s Aesthetic Dichotomy
James Higgs: When Steve Jobs first introduced the iPhone—perhaps his greatest product presentation—he joked that the iPhone was an iPod with a rotary dialing system on the front. It was deliberately...
View ArticleSteve Jobs and iAds
Jesper: His weirdly strong enthusiasm for iAds bothered me at the time and still does because he was more excited about people making ads than he’s ever been (publicly) about people making apps. For a...
View ArticleDeath and Resurrection of an SSD
Jonathan Rentzsch: SSDs live fast, die young, and pretend to be OK even while they’re dying. Don’t use one without awesome backups.
View ArticleNearly Hygienic C Macros via __COUNTER__
Jonathan Rentzsch shows how to use __COUNTER__ to generate “unique” identifiers for use in macros.
View ArticleSiri and OmniFocus
OmniFocus for iPhone 1.13 can now pick up reminders that you’ve entered via Siri. You have to give OmniFocus your Apple ID and password. Then it checks the iCloud calendar server for new reminders,...
View ArticleKindle Annotations Lost in Book Update
I’ve been reading the Steve Jobs biography on my Kindle and highlighting the interesting passages. On November 19, I received this e-mail from Amazon: We are happy to announce that an updated version...
View ArticleManual Entry in the iPhone Reminders App
Aaron Pressman: But there’s a big glitch by Apple with this system and that’s when Siri is offline as “she” frequently is. Then you are left to set the reminder by hand. And the problem is that the new...
View ArticleSteve Jobs NeXT Videos
Matthew Panzarino collected some links to videos of Steve Jobs from the NeXT era. (My favorite is probably still the one from WWDC 1997.)
View ArticleThe Sketchbook of Susan Kare
Steve Silberman: Inspired by the collaborative intelligence of her fellow software designers, Kare stayed on at Apple to craft the navigational elements for Mac’s GUI. Because an application for...
View ArticleDeleting Dave Winer’s FaceBook Account
Dave Winer deleted his FaceBook account, and it seems to be gone, but now there’s a page with his name and information from his Wikipedia page. It seems that you have to maintain your own profile just...
View ArticleYou Guys Are Millionaires Right?
shiftyjelly: Let’s not even get into the long debates you get into with people about whether they should buy your $1.99 app. People will spend hours researching a $2 purchase, browsing reviews,...
View Article“Spamming” the Mac App Store
Tim DeBenedictis (via MacNotables): You see, we have a basic version, a Plus version and a Pro version. And all three have been selling at this point for a year on the iOS App Store. The same three...
View ArticleObject File Inspection Tools
Mike Ash: Being able to see all stages of your work can be immensely helpful when debugging a problem. Although you can get a lot done only looking at the source code and the app’s behavior, some...
View ArticleGitbox Is 1 Year Old
Oleg Andreev: Gitbox is still lacking some interesting things like built-in diff viewer, line-by-line staging, tree view or submodules. Those will come soon. But many more important things were already...
View ArticleKindle vs. Nook vs. Kobo Review
Marco Arment: I’ve been able to generate newspaper-style navigation that works on all non-touch Kindles, but the Kindle Touch and Kindle Fire use new periodical-navigation formats that I haven’t been...
View ArticleQuickTime History
Tony Smith notes that QuickTime is now 20 years old (via Jonathan Rentzsch): Looking back, it's easy to dismiss the early QuickTime – with its tiny image size and scratchy, low bit-rate sound – as a...
View ArticleATPM 17.12
The December issue of ATPM is out: Cover Sponsors Welcome E-Mail MacMuser: The Best Thing About the iPhone 4S and How to Cope in Clink MacMuser: Box-Shifting Causes Migration PEBKAC: Staying Connected...
View ArticleNeoFinder 6.0
NeoFinder 6.0 is a Cocoa rewrite of Norbert Doerner’s venerable CDFinder. It looks like a great update, although I have less need for offline disk cataloging these days. I’ve transferred the contents...
View ArticleHex Fiend 2.1
HexFiend 2.1 adds support for binary diff viewing, choosing the text encoding, and more.
View ArticleiCloud: Lessons Learned
Kyle Sluder has posted slides from his talk, which is important since much of this stuff is not yet extensively documented.
View ArticleMFIndexSetForeach Macro
Michel Fortin has written a macro for iterating over an NSIndexSet. It looks to be easier and faster than writing your own loop, and also more convenient than using block iteration.
View ArticleBinary Constant Macros in C
Tom Torfs (via Jonathan Rentzsch): I’ve been missing the lack of support for binary numeric literals in C. To get around it I wrote the following handy macros, which allows you to simply write...
View ArticleTextMate 2.0 Alpha
As promised, the public alpha of TextMate 2 was released before Christmas. Some of the significant changes are support for non-contiguous selection, better multi-file find/replace, color themes, more...
View ArticleCheck App Store Updates With a URL
Cabel Sasser: To send your users to Mac App Store updates, use this URL: macappstore://showUpdatesPage
View ArticleThe Software Developer’s Dilemma
Dave Winer: The bottom-line is that the developers would have done better, imho, working with each other, than each of them making separate “deals” with Apple. Because to Apple, they weren’t deals at...
View ArticleHelp Finish QuicKeys 4 for Lion
The lead programmer for QuicKeys has sadly died, and Startly is seeking someone to replace him and complete the update for Lion (via Chucky). I used to be a heavy user of QuicKeys. Here’s a review from...
View ArticleThoughts on Writing Emails Using Markdown
Benny Kjær Nielsen: Essentially, I would like the visual appearance of an email to be under the control of the recipient and not the sender. The typical workaround when viewing emails is to configure...
View ArticleStatic Code Analysis
John Carmack: The first step is fully admitting that the code you write is riddled with errors. That is a bitter pill to swallow for a lot of people, but without it, most suggestions for change will be...
View ArticleCornerstone and Subversion 1.7
Zennaware: For example, 1.7’s re-implementation of the working copy status API used by Cornerstone is now 10x slower than the same API in Subversion 1.6. It provides the same output, but what...
View ArticleThe Failure of iMessages
Drew Schuster: OK, so sending a text and claiming it failed isn’t that bad. What would be really bad is if a “Delivered” text was never actually received. That happens too. All the time. I sent my dad...
View ArticleState of the Meat 2011 Edition
Gus Mueller: I’ve come to the conclusion that relying on Apple for any sort of syncing solution or general hosting of your data is probably a bad idea.…Well, the solution I’ve come up with is to ignore...
View Article