/dev/random

Rogue Amoeba has filed bug reports for many of the iPhone SDK’s limitations, including:

Allow applications to be installed at the user’s discretion, not Apple’s

Allow applications to run in background on iPhone

A MediaPicker API for accessing the iPod music files is needed

Add option to allow iPhone applications to access entire filesystem

Allow iPhone applications to access the [...]

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I don’t pay much attention to Windows shareware & freeware, so I haven’t heard of G-Archiver until I read this item at Coding Horror.

I was looking for a way to back up my gmail account to a local drive. I’ve accumulated a mass of important information that I would rather not lose. During my search [...]

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XCode 3.1 with the iPhone SDK includes a very interesting new compiler, llvm-gcc. This is an alternate version of the standard C compiler based on the llvm open source project for improved optimization & CPU architecture support.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “New compiler in iPhone SDK”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2008/03/08/new-compiler-in-iphone-sdk/” });

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I finally downloaded the iPhone SDK and I’ve been exploring it all day. However, the license has some serious restrictions which may affect our ability to develop our product for the iPhone. In particular:

3.3.1 Applications may only use Published APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any unpublished [...]

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I’m debugging a piece of code (which I didn’t write) that acts as a specialized web server when I found a little gem (more like a turd). When a system call fails, it simply calls exit(0) to quit immediately with no error message and no attempt to recover. Argggh!
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Don’t ever do this”, url: [...]

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David Watanabe came up with a great idea to make money on the new free version of NewsFire: include three paid-for feeds that the user cannot unsubscribe from. Site owners can bid for a spot as one of these feeds, bringing Watanabe revenue while offering a great product for free.
Recently there was an uproar when [...]

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Obsolete Skills is a wiki inspired by Scoble’s recent post listing “things we used to know that no longer are very useful to us”.
One of the “obsolete skills” listed on the wiki is assembly language programming. Although most programmers won’t write an entire application in assembly language, it’s still a very useful skill for several [...]

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One of our customers was having a strange installation problem after upgrading their Mac from 10.4 to 10.5. It turns out they reformatted the drive as a case-sensitive file system. During the installation, a utility gets downloaded from the server. The installation process specifies a pathname to execute that utility, which doesn’t match the case [...]

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Repairing permissions is considered the Mac equivalent of snake oil or waving a dead chicken. It’s usually the first thing suggested for fixing problems, although in most cases it does nothing. There are a few rare problems that it actually does fix, and I encountered one of them today.
One of our customers has been having [...]

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We released a new version of LoJack for Laptops today. One of the major changes in this version is a new installer. Instead of using Apple’s installer, this is a full Cocoa application which handles user registration, assigns a serial number through a web service, and ensures that it’s calling successfully. This is the major [...]

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As a developer, my least favorite thing is having to maintain backward compatibility with older systems. It keeps me from being able to use the latest features and I often have to have some code duplicated to do things differently depending on the OS version.
For example I’m using the new, preferred method with launchd [...]

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When writing Objective C code, never forget to have your init method return self or bad things will happen, but maybe not in a debug build. I wasted over an hour on that today when my debug build worked perfectly but a release build crashed in awakeFromNib where it was initializing a series of items [...]

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I’ve made a few improvements to my2unz.com over the weekend. I set up several color variations of the theme, and enabled theme switching. I also did some work on the iTunes module and changed the database tables slightly to add a few new features.
One of the problems with the previous version is that I considered [...]

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I gave up on using AppleScript Studio for my Installer front-end application. AppleScript’s SOAP implementation seems to be broken. I ended up writing it in Objective C instead, using Web Services Core. It isn’t that much more difficult than writing it in AppleScript, and I’m able to use the window layout I already created for [...]

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I’m writing an AppleScript Studio application which needs to call some SOAP web services before running an installer. Somehow AppleScript seems to be adding a bogus namespace to the SOAP call.
The method I want to call should look something like this (actual names changed):

<RegisterUser>
<UserData>xyzzy</UserData>
</RegisterUser>

Instead, the request looks like this:

<m:RegisterUser xmlns:m=”http://myserver/mynamespace”>
<UserData>xyzzy</UserData>
</m:RegisterUser>

The AppleScript code looks pretty standard:

tell [...]

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I’ve been trying to use Jasen’s branch of WiiRemote Framework from Subversion which integrates my code and is supposed to make it more reliable on PowerPC. Unfortunately I found that it makes the connect much less reliable, at least on my MacBook Pro. I fixed the problem with Miis other than the first one being [...]

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I haven’t had a chance to do much work on Mii Transfer this week. but I’ve changed the way I read Mii data to read the entire 750 byte block (+ CRC bytes) into a buffer and then simply copy the requested Mii from the buffer. I also fixed the reported bug where Miis other [...]

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I’ve been looking at the code for sending Miis to the remote and I discovered it’s not as simple as receiving a Mii. You can request a single Mii, but you can’t send only a single Mii - you need to send the entire block of 10 Miis with the properly calculated CRC. That means [...]

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I just released Mii Transfer 0.1a to fix the launch problem on PowerPC Macs. There are no code changes, I simply linked it with a universal build of WiiRemote framework. Intel Mac users don’t need to update.
I also added a troubleshooting section to the readme file. The major problem on G4 Macs (which is actually [...]

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I’ve released the full source code for Mii Transfer including the modified version of WiiRemote Framework, and I’ve also created a project page with all of the download links.
SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: “Mii Transfer source code & project page”, url: “http://mcdevzone.com/2007/03/11/mii-transfer-source-code-project-page/” });

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