Categories

The following items are in the Observation category.

Homebase

A lot of people I know and respect have been commenting on problems associated with the iPhone mute switch:
John Gruber – On the Behavior of the iPhone Mute Switch
Andy Ihnatko – Unmuting on The Mute Question
Marco Arment – Designing “Mute”
Guy English – Mute This
Both sides of the argument have valid points-of-view. This really is a [...]

Un-Trusteer-ed

The bank we use for our business account recently mandated the use of a product called Trusteer Rapport while accessing our information online. Although Mac OS X doesn’t have any problems with “increasingly sophisticated malware in the online environment”, I do need to periodically check our accounts and transactions so I proceeded with the installation.
The [...]

Great writing, terrible reading

Apple has recently released Xcode 4—a major part of this release is an overhaul of the user interface. Change in your development environment is always a bit disruptive, but overall I think the move towards a single-window environment that adapts to different working modes is a good thing.
But this post is not to debate these [...]

Twitterrific firsts

Why are third parties important in the Twitter ecosystem?
Let Twitterrific count the ways:

First use of “tweet” to describe an update (see page 86 of Dom Sagolla’s book.)
First use of a bird icon.
First native client on Macintosh.
First character counter as you type.
First to support replies and conversations (in collaboration with Twitter engineering.)
First native client on iPhone.

And [...]

Communal computing

Dear Steve,
First, let me congratulate you and everyone at Apple on the release of the iPad. From my dealings with your company, I know it wasn’t easy. Thanks to everyone for busting their asses: a lot of very complex puzzle pieces came together during those last 60 days!
I recently had an encounter with Bill Atkinson. [...]

UDID not

Here we are on the brink of a new iPhone OS product introduction and developers are facing yet another crunch with device IDs for Ad Hoc testing.
Apple currently lets each iPhone developer, whether a company or an individual account, assign 100 devices for testing purposes. A large chunk of those available devices get used by [...]

Brain farts

What happened?
In spite of plenty of advance warning from Twitter, we got caught by the Twitpocalypse bug.
For the 2.0.1 release, we had tested our software extensively. I actually wrote an emulation layer on top of the code that reads data from Twitter that added a large number to every ID read from Twitter. This testing [...]

A phone by any other name would smell as sweet…

The general consensus is that there will be a new iPhone announced next week. I, like others, think it’s going to have new features and capabilities. But how is Apple going to label this new device?
iPhone 3G?
It’s entirely possible that Apple will keep the same name as the previous version. There’s precedence in the Mac [...]

Of toolbars and actions

Another area where I find iPhone development to be a bit convoluted was with toolbars and action sheets. The sheets are conceptually tied to the toolbar, yet there is no glue to combine UIActionSheet with UIToolbar. It’s also fairly difficult to represent your application state in the toolbar—an example is the refresh button in Twitterrific [...]

Matt Gallagher deserves a medal…

Every once in awhile you read a blog post that completely changes the way you think about a problem. Matt Gallagher’s Cocoa With Love is one of those blogs where it happens often. If you’re not subscribing to his RSS feed, do it now.
In particular, this post addressed a problem that every iPhone developer has [...]