Back in September, Apple announced new iPods, including a new iPod Touch. Despite the hardware upgrade and a price cut, the refurbished 1st generation iPod Touch is still a good choice.
Since I started iPhone development, I wanted a physical device to test my software on. So I started saving money for an iPod Touch. Once I had about 180 USD, the choice between getting a new 2nd Gen Touch, or a refurbished 1st gen model came into play. (more…)
I, Keaton Brant, am proud to announce that I have finally finished a project that I have been working on for months. It’s been a tough road, I’ve had to devote many hours a day just to ponder the hugeness of this task, but I have finally done it. Yes, I have done what many have tried and failed to do, I have made a “Hello World” app in Xcode!
Note: this post was originally published on my personal blog.
I sat down & worked it out the other day, and I’ve been a ‘switcher in waiting’ for 18 years – give or take a few days… that’s a long time, but I suppose I have spent most of it convincing myself that I ‘didn’t need one’ and they were for ‘Arty’ Types, and they didn’t do ‘Business Stuff’ and a whole heap of the kind of thoughts that Apple turned into reality with the ‘Mac & PC’ ads – both in the USA and over here in the UK.
(if you’ve never seen them a) where HAVE you been? and b) go find them on Youtube when you’re finished here, they’ll make you smile and nod understandingly too…)
So I’d be quietly hankering after a change of computer for ages – but what made me finally take the plunge, you ask? (more…)
September 16th, 1985
Apple’s chairman and co-founder Steve Jobs leaves the company after a boardroom battle for control of his own company with then CEO John Sculley (that’s right, the Pepsi guy!). (more…)
The problem with .Mac (the previous name for Mobile Me) was never the concept, nor was it what was promised, the problem was always the implementation. I expressed my views on .Mac back in January 2007 in a post entitled “.Mac – The Devil is in the Implementation”, and nothing has really changed since. I had high hopes that Mobile Me would finally give us the .Mac we’d always wanted. If all Mobile Me had been was a working version of .Mac without any new functionality it would have been great! However, since it’s launch Mobile Me has just been one disappointment after another. Things started badly when it took them days to get the system even remotely stable, got worse when they permanently lost thousands of people’s email, and didn’t improve at all when we found out Apple had lied to us about push.
Yesterday Apple released security update 2008-005 which was supposed to fix the DNS flaw I recently complained about Apple not having fixed yet. Well, it appears that Apple only half-fixed the problem. Yes, they have fixed the BIND DNS server in OS X, but in reality that only protects X-Serves running a DNS server. Sure, regular OS X ships with the BIND DNS server installed, but it’s not on by default, and almost no one turns it on. What we all use all the time is the stub resolver that’s part of OS X, and that’s what Apple didn’t fix. This means that regular Mac users are still not protected from this DNS flaw while just about everyone else is.
One of the things I really love about OS X is its Unix underpinnings. Under the hood we get all the *nix tools and utilities I’ve come to know and love. Printing with CUPS, remote shell with OpenSSH, Windows sharing with SAMBA, web publishing with Apache, and so on and so forth. This gives OS X great power, but it also places a great responsibility on Apple. Just like with any other software, vulnerabilities surface in open source programs. In general the open source community is very responsive to security issues, and patches are released quickly. Those patches protect those who update, but they leave those who don’t even more vulnerable. The reason for this is that the patches can generally be reverse engineered, making it easy for the bad guys to attack un-patched machines. In order to keep OS X secure Apple need to push out patches in the open source components in OS X to users as quickly as possible. This is where Apple fall down, they are notoriously slow at getting patches out.
