Mostly about iOS software development.
Here are a few things I’ve noticed that just don’t make sense in Mac OS X v10.5.
The new Microsoft commercial starts with a John Hodgman dressalike (You can’t really call him a lookalike, but at the distance the camera is at it doesn’t matter) saying “I’m a PC and I’ve been stereotyped.” It then goes to various people asserting they’re a PC. It’s interesting at first, but after a few seconds you realize: This is all Microsoft’s got for this commercial. After a minute of droning, the commercial blissfully comes to an end.
It makes slightly more sense than the Gates & Seinfeld commercials, but replaces the quirkiness of those ads with banality.
Bruce over on WarpedVisions writes on entering the world of Objective-C and Cocoa development.
I first started developing an application for Palm in 2000 with the Palm IIIc. I was amazed at how well-thought out the API was. A few things were missing, such as POSIX-compatible routines. ((Expecting full POSIX support on a Palm back then was maybe a little unrealistic, but expecting the available routines to match POSIX definitions is quite a bit more reasonable.)) The API looked a lot like Carbon, which was a perfectly reasonable way to develop applications. CodeWarrior was a decent-enough tool, and growing in capabilities. New hardware, while not announced or even previewed yet, was on the horizon that could take away most of the nastiest problems with Palm OS, which were rooted in the 680×0 architecture.
It’s way too early to tell if LaCie is still the “all that and a bag of chips” hard drive company, but I can tell you this right away: The case is the best external case I’ve ever personally bought, and probably better than the stackable system Discovery bought from LaCie over a decade ago. It’s extremely solid, aluminum and rippled like a heatsink.
I’ve been using this iMac for a few weeks, and I’ve noticed an odd melty-plastic smell from time to time. I didn’t associate it with the iMac, though; the top of the iMac was hot, but not unbearably so.
I picked up a nice, shiny 24” iMac on Friday from Simply Computing in Langley for my employer to replace my elderly Core Solo mini. Monday, Apple refreshed the model. I realized I didn’t actually mind at all, but it seemed it might be worth a quick email:
Gruber at Daring Fireball writes about the restriction of one application at a time on the iPhone. Read it before you go on.
Writing a background task for Touch OS X would be very, very hard. Well, actually, not so much hard as taking a lot of skill, time and effort. I can really understand why Apple wouldn’t want just anyone doing it. But before I get too stressed over it, it’s worth asking a few questions:
So I’m about five days into my free .Mac trial, and I thought I’d write up some thoughts.
I pay about $60 per year for 500 GB of storage and 5 TB of bandwidth from DreamHost. .Mac costs $100 per year. For that much, it should be really, really special. On a strictly numerical level, DreamHost beats .Mac. Now, it’s true that DreamHost’s reputation for reliability has taken a beating the last year or so, but for $6 per month I can accept a few days per month of down time. And it’s nowhere near that bad; it seems to be less than one evening every month or two.
Apple claims to have fixed the issue where applications could run automatically out of a Time Machine backup. Look for CVE-2008-0038 in Apple’s About the security content of Mac OS X 10.5.2 and Security Update 2008-001.
Continue reading “Apple claims fix to Time Machine security bug”