Computers Posts

• 04.13.08 Cloudy As Buzzwords (Social Software, Web, Computers)

  I have many ideas for applications, but most of them seem to rely on similar kinds of infrastructure, in particular a distributed, secure application-level messaging system. Unfortunately, this doesn’t really exist yet, at least not in any form that meets my needs.

  What am I talking about here? More colloquially, it’s a mechanism for letting applications all over the network send messages to each other, without requiring a central server, and without allowing messages to be eavesdropped upon or faked.

  Let’s take it one buzzword at a time…… MORE

• 04.12.08 Unstealthing, Incrementally (Social Software, Me, Computers)

  I got about 14 minutes of fame back in January with a blog post, wherein I grumbled about (among other things) how I disliked Apple’s culture of secrecy, and announced that I’d left Apple to work on my own, unspecified, project. In the intervening three months, I haven’t said anything about what that project is, almost as though it were … secret.

  The irony of this is not lost on me.

  Admittedly, there are things about my … MORE

• 04.02.08 On First Installing Adobe’s Photoshop Elements 6 (Computers)

  I’ve been waiting eagerly for my pre-ordered copy of Photoshop Elements 6 to arrive. The previous version I had was 2.0(!) which had been balky for a long time and totally lost the will to live (or launch) when I installed Leopard two years ago. Acorn and Pixelmator are nice apps, but they just don’t do everything I need an image editor to do — I don’t mean the “pro” features, rather the labor-saving conveniences … MORE

• 03.21.08 The iPhone Has Blinders On (Social Software, Computers)

  I bow to my esteemed colleague Craig Hockenberry’s greater experience in iPhone development; but I must disagree with his take on the infeasibility of background applications. He gives two reasons why networked apps shouldn’t run in the background — one technical and one user-interface.

  Battery life.

  The heart of the problem are the radios. Both the EDGE and Wi-Fi transceivers have significant power requirements. Whenever that hardware is on, your battery life is going to … MORE

• 03.18.08 The Origin Of The iChat UI (Ideas, Social Software, Me, Computers)

  I had lost this historical document for a long time, but finally found it the other day on an old backup CD. It’s the original 1997 sketch I made of a chat user interface based on speech balloons.
  … MORE

• 03.14.08 iPhone Developer Rejections Top 10,000 (Humor, Computers)

  CUPERTINO, California—March 14, 2008—Apple® today announced that more than 10,000 iPhone™ developers have received enigmatically-worded rejection letters for the beta iPhone Developer Program. The iPhone Developer Program provides developers with a complete and integrated process for developing, debugging, and distributing applications for iPhone and iPod touch, complete with real-world testing on iPhone.

  “Developer reaction to our email has been incredible with more than 1,000 snarky posts and irate comments on high-profile Mac websites,” said Philip Schiller, … MORE

• 03.13.08 Physical Attacks via FireWire (Computers)

  This is pretty scary — a proof-of-concept attack that disables authentication in Windows within seconds, just by plugging in a special FireWire peripheral. It’s well-known that with physical access to a computer you can compromise it; but generally that involves activities that are time-consuming or blatantly obvious, like rebooting from a CD or swapping out hard drives. This new attack, though, takes only a few seconds; and the peripheral might look as innocuous as an … MORE

• 03.10.08 Did I Miss The Boat For Developer Keys? (Me, Computers)

  Am I the only one who hasn’t yet gotten a response to their iPhone developer program application … including the precious, precious developer certificate that lets you download apps to an actual iPhone?

  I stupidly forgot to apply until Thursday evening (I was too busy trying to download the SDK), so there are probably three billion others ahead of me, and Apple did say they were accepting “limited numbers”.

  I did get GeekGameBoard running in the simulator … MORE

• 03.07.08 The Beauty Of 99¢ iPhone Apps (Ideas, Computers)

  After digesting yesterday’s iPhone announcements [with fava beans and a nice Chianti] I started thinking about the pricing models made possible by the “Application Store”. In particular,

  How cheap can an iPhone app be?

  I think the answer’s clear. The Application Store will obviously be based on the iTunes store, whose bread-and-butter is a product, the AAC audio file, that sells for … 99¢. Apple’s clearly able to make a profit at that price point, despite credit-card processing fees, bandwidth costs, and comparable payments [Updated. Thanks, Dru!] to the record labels. So I see no reason they wouldn’t allow a developer to price an application that low.

  But why would a developer want to sell an application for a net 70¢?

  Micropayments

  Because at such a low price, with a one-click store a couple of taps away, it becomes an impulse purchase. It’s a form of micropayment, an idea that’s been talked about for years but hasn’t widely taken off due to the practical difficulties of collecting very small payments. The few areas where micropayments (albeit larger than the canonical 1/10¢ originally proposed) have worked include the iTunes store, and the downloadable-game stores for the Xbox and Wii.

  And let’s not forget the most amazing example of what people will pay for if you make it convenient enough: ringtones. The practice of charging suckers $2 for a 30-second snippet of a song they already have, is a multi-billion-dollar industry.
  … MORE

• 03.07.08 GeekGameBoard — Getting closer to iPhone-ready (Games, Computers)

  To encourage development, I’ve started an open source project based on the GeekGameBoard game-development sample code that Apple published last December (which, by a strange coincidence, I wrote.) I hope to have it ready for iPhone game development soon.

  You can browse the Mercurial repository online, or download the current source code. It’s BSD-licensed, and your contributions are of course welcome (emailed patches are preferred.)

  The changes since Apple’s original sample-code release are:

  • It no longer requires garbage collection. I love GC, but it’s not supported on the iPhone, where I am definitely planning to use GGB.
  • I fixed some memory leaks of CoreGraphics objects.
  • I fixed an assertion-failure when kinging a checker.

  What Is GeekGameBoard?

  GeekGameBoard is a small Objective-C framework for implementing the user interface of a board or card game. Many games can be implemented in less than 150 lines of code.

  It also demonstrates generally-useful Core Animation techniques like:

  • Hit testing
  • Dragging CALayers with the mouse
  • Loading images from files and setting them as layer contents
  • 3D “card-flip” animations

  Framework classes include Bit, Piece, PlayingCard, HexGrid and more. It comes with sample games from Klondike solitaire to Checkers and even Tic-Tac-Toe. It’s all ready for you to add AI, network play, new game definitions…

  GeekGameBoard runs on Mac OS X 10.5 or later. iPhone support is coming soon.

  … MORE