At Forbes.com, Morgan Brennan reports on the new 8000-square foot Savant Experience Center, a typical “swanky” Manhattan apartment with one special difference — it’s automated with Apple technology. Brennan writes that nearly every feature of the multi…
People toss around the term "fanboy" to the point where it means almost nothing, but if you're looking for a real fan of Apple's retail store aesthetic, check out David Wu's home office. Not only did he have a replica of the Apple Store's iconic Fetzers…
The very best basketball free throw shooters can sink the ball about 90 percent of the time. What would it take to get to 95 percent? WIRED's Robbie Gonzalez steps up to the foul line with top shooter Steve Nash to find out.
Spoiler alert: If your boss does not need an elephant, he is definitely NOT going to buy one from you. If he will, he will regret it and eventually you will too. I must appologize to the reader who was expecting to find an advice on selling useless goods…
In Glassboard 2.2 for iPhone (released yesterday) I used a technique for reducing startup time that is worth writing up. THE THREE PHASES OF STARTUP A table-based, data-driven app like Glassboard goes through three states: 1. Loading. System loads the…
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, In a previous post I examined how with iOS 5 it became much easier to customise the appearance of some common UIKit controls using resizable images. In this post I want to go a little…
Several weeks ago, a developer sent a video as part of his TUAW product pitch. The app itself was interesting enough but I was blown away by the video's music. It was smart, it was contemporary, and it had excellent production values. So I started to…
To be sure, I think OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion is the best OS Apple has ever released. It feels like a completed version of what Mac OS X 10.7 Lion should have been. It's fast, it's clean, it melds some iOS concepts to OS X and, for the most part, it just…
Thought you received a text from your beloved ex wanting to get back together? It could be one of your friends pranking you, at least if you use an iPhone. An iOS "hacker" going by pod2g is drawing fresh attention to a long-extant SMS spoofing flaw…
The Save dialog for apps that support OS X 10.8's Documents in the Cloud feature makes iCloud the default location for saving a new document. And Ted Landau found that you can't change the default folder location.
I thought this was important enough to share in a short blog post… Just 10 months ago, Mozilla started to migrate their Selenium projects from the Selenium RC API to the WebDriver API. I’m thrilled to say that this is now complete, and that no Selenium RC…
If you go to the Time Machine System Preference and click on Select Disk, if you already have a disk set as your backup and you select a second disk, you are presented with a dialog asking if you want to delete the current disk or use both disks for Time…
Dave’s added an Apple tab to his news river. Good selection of feeds. Update 7:40 pm: Underneath is a JSON feed. Which makes it super-easy to re-purpose and display however you want. If you started today, you could write an iOS or Mac app that displayed a…
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, Lion and now also Mountain Lion have an annoying tendency to helpfully terminate applications for you. I spotted a tip by Matt Neuburg over on the TidBITS blog this week which offers a…
Lifehacker has a simple look at how to set up Mountain Lion's built-in text expansion (or, as Apple calls it, "substitution") options. In System Preferences, under Language and Text, you can go in and set up any number of text shortcuts that will expand…
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, After upgrading to Mountain Lion I have been hitting some problems with my Mac sleeping when I was expecting it be doing some work. Typically this happens when I leave it running a script…
I had many applications show up as "Installed" in the update pane of the Mac App Store even after I had updated them. Apparently, if you have copies of an application on your system, even on a secondary drive, they are discovered by the Mac App Store.…
I came across this Apple technical note this morning, which describes how to flush the DNS cache on your Mac. We have a hint for 10.5, which is also valid for 10.6, but we're not up to date. So, as a reminder, to flush the DNS cache in Mac OS X 10.5 and…
If you've tried burning the Mountain Lion installer to a standard DVD, you've probably noticed that it does not quite fit. Fortunately, there is a way around this. The problem is that the size of the InstallESD image is fixed at 4.75 GB; slightly larger…
A few years ago I wrote about Orbicule's Undercover 4 software. Undercover lets you remotely track and monitor a missing Mac, and can even help you recover your stolen gear. Given the Mac security issues in the news over the last few days, it's worthwhile…
If you MUST have The New Yorker available at all times, and you own an iPhone, the now universal app is for you. Subscribers will get the magazine for free after activating a digital subscription. Others will find the August 13 and August 20 issues…
The new iPad's Retina display is stunning for photo exhibition. Photographer Derrick Story offers some tips to getting your photos ready for viewing.
Migrating Mail from Lion to Mountain Lion leaves behind a folder containing previous attachments. Attachments in Lion were saved to ~/Library/Mail Downloads, but under Mountain Lion, Mail is now sandboxed, and the new path is…
There is no preset keyboard shortcut for Notification Center, but you can set one in System Preferences > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts > Mission Control. [kirkmc adds: You can also set a hot corner in the Mission Control preference pane. I find the top…
For those of us who stayed up late last night to watch the streaming coverage of the Curiosity rover's landing on Mars, it was a treat to see the huge numbers of MacBooks, iPads, and even iPhones that were in the control room at NASA's Jet Propulsion…
My colleague Steve Sande touched on this subject of all the Macs at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in an earlier post, and I've been doing some digging to find out more about all the Mac love at our space agency and its field centers. JPL is managed by…
Under normal circumstances, the proceedings of a patent trial would be about as exciting as watching grass grow on TV, picture-in-picture, while paint dries on the main channel. However, Apple versus Samsung has been surprisingly fascinating so far, but…
Since Mountain Lion was released, I find that my Macs go to sleep when I don't want them to. I had my Energy Saver preferences set to 15 minutes, but I've noticed that when something is active, such as a download, they got to sleep after 15 minutes, rather…
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, The release of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion this week also brought us an Xcode release with some long awaited Objective-C improvements. If you upgraded your development machine to Mountain Lion…
In OS X Mountain Lion, Apple has added extra protection around the address book and restricted apps from gaining access to the contents without a user's permission. This added security is beneficial for users, but it poses a communication problem for…
I was rooting around my system today, and wondering if there's any way to find out if an application is from the Mac App Store. The Info window - when you select an item and press Command-I - doesn't say anything, but the System Information application…
Much rejoicing accompanied the news that Mountain Lion brought back the "Save As..." option (which had been taken away in Lion and replaced with the not-nearly-the-same-thing "Duplicate" command). Unfortunately, Save As was relegated to a sub-menu…
For fans of the Terminal, Mountain Lion brought some new command-line utilities. Perhaps the most notable is fdesetup, which Apple explains briefly: "fdesetup allows third-party management tools to enable FileVault, determine encryption status, capture…
With Mountain Lion, you can now use the OS to encrypt disks other than the startup volume, assuming they are in GUID format. This includes USB flash drives and external Firewire/USB/ThunderBolt drives. In the Finder, open a new window. Find your mounted…
This Mountain Lion 101 feature is a quickie -- Apple's Mail app now has a new feature called VIPs that gives you one-click access to emails from those very important people in your life. Emails from VIPs have a star next to the sender's name, and a…
[Post updated, see below.] Whole-drive encryption isn't one of the sexiest features in OS X, but it's nice to know it's there. FileVault 2 (introduced in Lion; the original FileVault began in 10.3 Panther) can be very useful, especially for Mac users with…
One of my favorite features of Mountain Lion to demonstrate so far has been the iCloud Document Library. This is a way to store your iWork, TextEdit, and Preview documents in iCloud so that they are immediately accessible from other Macs on the same…
One of the flagship iOS features to carry over to OS X Mountain Lion is AirPlay Mirroring, which allows users to mirror their desktop to an Apple TV. System audio can also be streamed to AirPlay-compatible devices, which means that apps without custom…
Although Messages has been available as beta software since February of 2012, it's now part of OS X Mountain Lion. This app replaces the old iChat app, providing a consolidated way to send messages not only to other Messages users, but also to friends…
I'm a developer. One of the things we devs do to pass the time is complain about how long it takes to compile and brag about the power of our development systems. Hot-rodding your system isn't just limited to development, though. There are lots of people…
LED notifications -- the flashing reminders of incoming calls, waiting voicemail or text messages -- are often cited by Android users as an essential advantage over the iPhone. A dedicated LED on the front bezel of many Android devices lets you know when…
The threat of SQL injection has appeared prominently in the news recently: SQL injection was documented as a security threat in 1998, but new incidents still occur every month. Making honest mistakes, developers fail to defend against this means of…
A new video was recently released by Apple for recruiting purposes, but perhaps most interesting for us, it is a quick glimpse inside the company's culture. Yes, it's an official video, so things don't get down and dirty at all, but there are definitely…
A trip to the doctor's office usually means one thing -- filling out one form or another. For patients, it's a necessary evil; for health care practitioners, it's a requirement. Longtime Apple developer MacPractice announced today that it has released new…
Oliver Drobnik over at Cocoanetics has posted another really great how-to write-up, this time about Xcode and command-line tools. He shows you how to access apps from inside the Xcode bundle by using xcrun, and how to set your default Xcode install (via…
Are you enthusiastic about Apple's Keynote app for the Mac and wonder what new features Apple may roll into a future version of the App? If you answered yes, then you need to check out this post from Les Posen that was noticed by MacSparky. The…
Facebook has announced a the availability of iOS SDK Beta 3.0. It's a major update for developers and includes goodies like: * Better user session management * Ready-to-Use Native UI Views * Modern Objective-C language features support * Improved…
After months of testing, the team behind the latest version of the extremely popular Cocos2D game engine for iOS has released version 2.0 of the framework, and it's available for download right now. The framework isn't completely compatible with version…
Mac OS X now has a very basic, built-in font sampler, at least as of 10.7.3. If you don't care about having customized sample text, Font Book can do it without any add-ons. Select the desired fonts in Font Book, choose Print from the File menu, and choose…
mikejuk writes "Although the TIOBE Index has its shortcomings, the finding that Objective-C has overtaken C++ is reiterated in the open source Transparent Language Popularity Index. The reason is, of course, that Objective-C is the language you have to…
Subscribe Sign in Sign up or login to join the discussions! Sign up to comment and more Sign up Running with iOS: Strava Run vs. RunKeeper vs. Nike+ Is Nike+ still the one to beat in the iOS running space? Ars investigates. In May of 2006, Apple…
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, I recently posted about some of the common ways of using number formatters. In doing so I omitted to mention that is common to cache both number and date formatters in iOS applications and…
I have habitually declared my properties as nonatomic. Exceptions are extremely rare. Since atomic is the default, I have to do this: @property (nonatomic, strong) NSString *foo; But it occurs to me now that switching to atomic will not be a performance…
In 1995, Steve Jobs gave a rare interview to Robert Cringely for a PBS special called Triumph of the Nerds to talk about the genesis of the personal computer. Most of the hour-long interview had been cut down to a few minutes to use for the three-part…
Some projects that I work with tend to autogenerate a lot of files, autotools projects in particular are very good at that. Most gnome software correctly adds all the autogenerated files to .gitignore files automatically, so git nicely ignores them and you…
Back in May we discussed using Python, R, and Octave as data analysis tools, and compared the relative strength of each. One point of contention was whether Python could be considered a legitimate tool for such work. Now, Bei Lu writes while Python on its…
I was never satisfied with results of "Reduce File Size" Quartz filter when trying to make some PDFs smaller before sending them by e-mail. It made them too small, and the graphics were fuzzy. I eventually found where these filters are: …
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, Prior to iOS 5 it was not easy to style the appearance of common UIKit controls such as the navigation bar or the tab bar. It could be done but you had to resort to subclassing or create…
I wrote one week ago about how to find duplicate indexes. This time we’ll learn how to find unused indexes to continue improving our schema and the overall performance. There are different possibilites and we’ll explore the two most common here. User…
Craig has some hot tips for debugging Core Data.
Setting up your Mac for remote file access can be handy when you need to retrieve an errant file while on the road. Dan Moren walks you through the process of setting it up.
Oggi riunione del consiglio, per trarre le conclusioni sulle relazioni degli advisor sulle operazioni immobiliari con parti correlate (i Ligresti). Nel...
In a conversation on Twitter yesterday, Daniel Jalkut, of Red Sweater Software, asked whether there was a way to find out what entitlements a sandboxed app has. Brian Webster, of Fat Cat Software, shared the solution. Apparently, this command provides the…
I like the Cocoa responder chain — I like being able to specify nil as target and have the action message follow the responder chain until it’s handled (or not). I like this so much I almost never specify a target — I (just about) always use nil. But this…
I often need to concatenate images into a single image. It's a simple operation, but I never found the right tool to do that. So I made one. It's very simple, read the code, you might learn some stuff:
Telerik's free Test Studio for iOS offers an exciting new tool for developers. It allows you to record and execute automated tests in your mobile apps and websites. Users can also use the tool to provide feedback to your team as they test. Telerik worked…
Get your business card collection under control with these card-scanning apps for iOS.
Hey—we've moved. Visit The Keyword for all the latest news and stories from Google Insights from Googlers into our products, technology, and the Google culture A few months ago, we introduced Project Re: Brief, our experiment to reimagine online…
The very best basketball free throw shooters can sink the ball about 90 percent of the time. What would it take to get to 95 percent? WIRED's Robbie Gonzalez steps up to the foul line with top shooter Steve Nash to find out.
This is a hack to work-around the lack of support for file attachments on the Github issue tracker. You can of course host your files somewhere else and link to them, but it's a bit annoying to not be able to attach files directly on a bug report because…
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, I have previously posted on some of the pros and cons of adopting various storyboard features in an existing App. In writing the post on prototype table cells it occurred to me that I have…
On software, projects, ideas, random thoughts, and more.
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, Well that was quick! WWDC 2012 finished on Friday and here we are on Wednesday with the sessions videos available for download. Assuming you are an Apple registered developer (iOS or Mac)…
This post is a step-by-step guide to set up Percona XtraDB Cluster (PXC) in a virtualized test sandbox. I used Amazon EC2 micro instances, but the content here is applicable for any kind of virtualization technology (for example VirtualBox). The goal is to…
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, The NSNumberFormatter is one of those useful Foundation classes that is easy to forget about. It has a simple purpose of allowing you to flexibly convert backwards and forwards between…
The Glassboard 2.0 launch counts as one of the best days in my career — we had way more downloads than I expected, and people liked the app. I had setup an “inessential” board and posted the invitation code, so we were able to talk with people as they were…
Anandtech spent some quality time with the new retina MacBook Pro and, as expected, took a deep dive into the hardware that makes up the device. In a series of posts, the hardware-focused website examined the SSD improvements and explained how Apple…
The very best basketball free throw shooters can sink the ball about 90 percent of the time. What would it take to get to 95 percent? WIRED's Robbie Gonzalez steps up to the foul line with top shooter Steve Nash to find out.
While Apple is already updating its own apps for Retina display, officials with third-party developers Adobe and Autodesk on Tuesday said they’ll need time to ship Retina-optimized apps to the public. Their Photoshop and AutoCAD applications,…
One of the cool things about Objective-C is all the common conventions. My code should look like your code. But there seems to be one area where we’ve decided that anarchy is okay. I’m a wild fan of chaos and things-on-fire — everywhere except for code. So…
At yesterday's keynote to the 2012 WWDC conference, Apple made a number of simultaneous moves in its global chess game with partners and rivals. Let's try and unpack what we can of Apple's overall strategy by analyzing the tactical choices it has made. The…
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, Whilst making some changes to this blog recently I used the Google Developers PageSpeed tool to check page load times. One of the things it suggested was to optimize images by performing a…
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, I recently posted on creating static table views with storyboards. In this post I want to look at some other changes introduced with iOS 5 to make it easier to create dynamic table views. …
Two weeks ago we were honored to have Brandon Schauer, Adaptive Path’s CEO, come speak to us about the difference between User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX). UX designers and researchers often say that UX is the most important element, and…
Web service to look up HP and Dell computer hardware support status A few days ago I reported how to get the support status out of Dell using an unofficial and undocumented SOAP API, which I since have found out was discovered by Daniel De Marco in…
Most of us in the sighted world never need to use the amazing accessibility features that are built into iOS, but blogger and developer Stephen van Egmond recently found that these features go well beyond what is expected by even allowing the blind to…
At Mozilla, we believe the web is the platform. It’s the one place where we can share apps across many devices using ubiquitous, open technologies: HTML5 and JavaScript. Today, where we have many devices running proprietary platforms at our fingertips, the…
Your camera's aperture setting gives you creative control over the look and feel of your photos--learn how to use it properly.
The next 4 posts were intended to be just one, then it evolved to be quite huge, so it got splitted in 4 posts that will be posted over the next days. All started when i was working on a mockup for a theme. I am still unsure what do do about it, making a…
One of the best places to show off sumptuous design and photography is the iPad, and Hipstamatic is taking advantage of that with its new Snap magazine, a digital publication that combines Hipstamatic user pictures with print and other art that's…
Subscribe Sign in Sign up or login to join the discussions! Sign up to comment and more Sign up Hands-on: Web development on the go with Diet Coda for iPad Panic's mobile Web development tool is impressive, despite some rough edges. Panic has…
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, For a long time after Xcode 4 was released I felt that I was always fighting the user interface. I never seemed to have the right window configuration for the task at hand. I was constantly…
Iodine is an open source application that has a client and server which in combination will allow a client to tunnel their IPv4 traffic over the DNS protocol and potentially bypass some censorship of traffic on the LAN or even WAN. Installing and setting…
Copyright © 2019 - K Harrison Privacy and Cookies Terms of Use, If you are reading this post then it means some changes to this blog that I have been working on this week have gone live. If you subscribe to the RSS feed this probably also means that you…
I used to think one should never look at max_binlog_size, however last year I had a couple of interesting cases which showed that sometimes it may be very important variable to tune properly. I meant to write about it earlier but never really had a chance…
Controlling the volume of the startup chime is easy to set in the System Preferences Sound panel, but you need to make two different settings if you have external speakers connected to your Mac. There is no need to use scripts or any other coding to make…
This post is by Jishnu Menon, data and product counsel for Mozilla. Prior to Mozilla, Jishnu has practiced law at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati and as in-house counsel for Adobe Systems and Ning and blogs intermittently. Choosing a good legal team for…
Let’s Sing! and Let’s Sing! Free are like karaoke Draw Something. The apps are by Lex Friedman and Marco Tabini.