Able Mac’s Blog

Light Peaking over the horizon

Intel & Apple have been working on a new connector.

At first glance, it seems like a replacement for Fire Wire, or USB, or DsiplayPort, or maybe even Ethernet.  But it’s more like a replacement for all of them and more.

Currently, DisplayPort supports 8.64 Gbit over 2 Meters carrying video and audio signals.  That makes DisplayPort an audio video cable suitable to replace HDMI, DVI, VGA, and all the audio cords that commonly go with them.  DisplayPort 1.2 version should even support daisy chaining monitors.

Step that up a notch when you think about Light Peak.  We’ll be able to connect hard drives, mice, keyboards, displays, pen tablets, and much more, all with a single kind of cables.  And if the devices have two or more ports, we’ll be able to daisy chain them.  A single run can be up to 100 Meters (328 ft, just like cat  5 ethernet) and transmit at 10 Gbps full duplex (just like cat 6 ethernet, but a whole lot cheaper and thinner).

They demonstrated connecting two computers directly together, but didn’t explain how they’d deal with connecting two computers to 1 monitor (assuming the monitor has multiple Light Peak connectors).

I have some suggestions.  Let’s say each device should have a status:

• Sleeping
• Idle
• Mutually in use
• Exclusively in use
• Offline (for maintenance)

Any computer connected anywhere in the chain should be able to request use of, and secure mutual or exclusive control of any device that it supports.

A device like a display may allow two computers to each have a portion of the screen.  A pen tablet or video camera could send it’s output to multiple computers.  And a device like a keyboard should exclusively send output to the input of a single computer.  Hard drives could come in two flavors, Basic HDD offering only an exclusive use channel, and an Enhanced HDD that could offer NAS like features.  Speaker devices could come in Basic Speakers which allow exclusive connections, or do a simple mix of multiple connections, or Enhanced Speakers which could have a mixer built in that could allow exclusive or mutual control to any computer (password protected?).

The possibilities are truly delightful.

Light Peak

iPhone 3GS Invisible Shield peeling at the corner

I’m hard on my gadgets.  So I protect them. Sometimes that makes them look ugly, but better ugly and working than a beautiful piece of junk.

I’ve used the Invisible Shield on the original iPhone (EDGE, aka. 2G) and it did an ok job on that.  I expected that they’d have learned from that and the shield for the 3GS would be better.  Nope, quite the opposite. The shape of the 3GS may be harder to “cover” with their material, but even the flat screen doesn’t stick as well.  I’ve already peeled the back and side protection off and cover it with an iFrogz case instead.

It is guaranteed, but for a $25 full iPhone protection, even a $4 S&H charge to get the replacement seems like a bad investment.  Don’t throw good money after bad.

I did have the full protection on this unit, but the corners peeled badly from just being in my pocket.  It was nice while it lasted.  But the corners  weren’t covered completely (by design).  My iPhone jumped out of my shirt pocket as I was running and when it hit the cement and slid, it actually ripped the invisible shield and scratched the corner.  I’m sure it would have been a lot worse without the shield, but it shouldn’t have scratched it at all.  I’m confident my original iPhone with invisible shield wold have been fine.

Incase you’re wondering, yes, I applied generous amounts of the invisible shield fluid per the instructions, and I also waited 48 hrs before putting it in any case or pocket.  The most I did with it was to carry it in my hand from one flat surface to another.  I even used the earphones for every phone call in that 48hrs.  I tried very hard to remove all the air bubbles with the included squeegy, but it was much harder than on my original iPhone.  It’s like they changed their glue.  The “micro air bubbles”, as the instructions describe them, never did disappear nor absorb in.

I love the idea of an invisible shield, and on my original iPhone their product worked good enough that I recommended it to lots of people, but I just can’t recommend this current product of theirs.

As for the iFrogz case I’m currently using, I’ve already broken the thin plastic piece that goes under the home button, so I’m still looking for a good solution.

Apple Inc adds a camera to the iPod Nano, but not the iPod Touch.  Someone actually released pictures of an iPod Touch that had a camera, but the new iPod Touch DOES NOT have a camera.

The Touch with a camera could have been a fake, but the circuit boards look identical, and they’re very different than the previous gen iPod Touches, so it’s pretty clear that the leaked photos of a Touch with a camera were real.
It’s suggested that the cause for dropping the camera is more likely to be a bad lot of camera sensors from the manufacturer, than Steve’s official statement, where he claims they chose to not add a camera so they could drop the cost to the magic $199 price point.

We may never know for sure, but I for one agree with the idea of a parts supply issue.

Automator married Services, and the couple has of really cool uses. One that caught my attention was making a browser window that simulates the iPhone Safari so you get the mobile version of web content on your desktop (think: “short and to the point”).

There’s a great overview/tutorial on PixelCorps:
http://pixelcorps.cachefly.net/mbkv_237_540p_h264.mov

The use the “Website Popup” automator action, which doesn’t come with 10.6 by default. So fire up my search engine of choice and search for it.

GOOGLE:
“website popup” AND automator

Or better yet, use my results.
http://www.macosxautomation.com/services/learn/tut04/index.html

In the end, they are both good choices for most things.  Apple fan boys may try to say that OS X is perfect and Windows is junk, but that’s just not true.  Microsoft fan boys may try to say that OS X isn’t compatible with anything, but that isn’t true either.

The real heated debating comes in when people start talking about which is best for a specific task.  Is there enough benefit to warrant a switch to the other OS?  Not usually.

Macs have a reputation for being better for video editing, and audio mixing, and all things dealing with media of any kind.  There are software solutions for Linux and Windows that meet some specific needs, so if that’s the need you need filled, and you already have Windows, then stick with it.

Windows PCs have a reputation for being the business centric computers of choice.  Again there are software solutions for specific needs on the Mac, and if you already have a Mac, then stick with it.

It is worth bringing up a couple hot topics that might make it worth switching.

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In the early days of the Internet a bleeding edge company called Tribal Voice released Powwow which defined most of the features in modern chat programs. Things like online status, and multiple chat windows, and even voice chat.

Before the modern look of Windows was established by Windows 95, there was Windows 3.11 WFW (Windows For Workgroups) and Powwow was there. In those days, internet users could purchase Netscape 2.0 from their ISP to use on Dial-up connections. Those were different days.

These days Mozilla doesn’t sell Netscape, they give away FireFox. A lot has changed, and a lot hasn’t.

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Apple is patching more than Microsoft, or is it the other way around? That must mean one has a better OS than the other, right? This whole argument is flawed.

How many patches are for things that can actually be exploited.

Web Servers for example, IIS on Windows, and Apache on OS X, aren’t enabled by default. Patching them doesn’t make them any safer; they’re not even running.

It amazes me how no one ever seems to count the things that count. “They” just count everything and argue over who’s doing more good.

The question should not be “how many things could need a patch?” but rather, “how many things DO need a patch?”
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Code Signing for iPhone App development has several pieces.  It helps to have a complete list with descriptions.
1. Developer Certificate
2. Public Key
3. Private Key
4. CertificateSigningRequest.certSigningRequest
5. Developer.mobileprovision
6. AdHoc.mobileprovision
7. AppStore.mobileprovision
8. Xcode Project

Things get a little more complicated when there’s more than one developer, or more than one project, but these are the basics.  Make sure all this works first, then move on.

We start by opening Keychain Access on our development mac and produce a certificate signing request.  It’s during the generating of that signing request that keychain generates the encryption key pair (public & private keys).  The signing request will be submitted to the iPhone Developer Portal (website).  After the signing request is submitted and accepted at the iPhone Dev Portal, you can download the Developer Certificate and double click to add it to your keychain.
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In real life there are push button switches that you push down, and they stay down. Push again and they come back up. On the iPhone the default control for this behavior is the UISwitch which slides from “on” to “off” and back.

The switch is a great UI concept, but it didn’t fit into my latest design concept, so I used the standard UIButton. In the Interface Builder it’s easy to drop in a “Round Rect” button, but there is no setting to “stay on” when pressed. The UISwitch has a “Momentary” check box, which means “Turn back off when released”.

My first instinct was to track the button’s state in the view controller and swap images in code. This is where reading saves a ton of time.
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If you’re a developer, you know that 1,000 new APIs means more software you don’t have to write to get the job done. You also know that’s about 1,000 more things you need to learn to use as quickly as possible so your competition doesn’t get a head of you.

This can be a scary concept for new developers, but if that’s you, don’t let it get to you. The truth is that there are way more APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) than any one project will ever actually use. It will be possible to come up with incredibly new and creative Apps using a small portion of the current APIs for years to come.
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