Twitter recently introduced a feature on its website called "Who To Follow". This feature presents you with a list of people you aren't following already, but who are active in your social graph. However, I happen to be very proactive in finding new people to follow through a variety of means, and have no need for Twitter to point it out to me. I thought it was a bit obnoxious to see, especially considering both of my first recommendations were people I had blocked.
This Safari extension removes that box from the Twitter homepage, whether you have it turned on for you or not. It's a simple CSS stylesheet that sets display:none on that box. You'll never have to see it again.
You can download it here. I'm still a bit new at Safari extensions, but it should auto-update in the future if I ever release an update.
Released.
JailbreakMe.com is a website that offers visitors the ability to jailbreak their iPhone without a computer-based tether. It does this by exploiting the system-wide ability for applications to read PDF files, where an incorrectly-formatted PDF file can lead a hacker to do anything they want to your system. While this bug CAN be used maliciously to steal all the personal data from your phone, the developers in this instance used it to enable jailbreaking.
Others will tell you why you should or should not jailbreak your iPhone. Others will decry the developers for bringing to light a serious vulnerability in the iPhone OS. In this blog post, I won't do any of that, but will instead point out some things you should and shouldn't do if you decide to jailbreak.
Backup first, and backup the backup
It should go without saying that, before you start mucking around with the internals of the software on your phone, you should back everything up with iTunes. Sync down all the data into iTunes, and explicitly backup by right-clicking the iPhone in the sidebar and choosing "Back Up". Once that is done, you should backup the actual backup files to somewhere safe. This way, if you ever want to go back to a vanilla iPhone, it's fairly straightforward. The files are located in ~/Library/Application Support/MobileSync/Backup.
Understand what you're doing
Jailbreaking lets you run apps on your iPhone that, for a variety of political and technical reasons, you could not run otherwise. Apple has gone to great lengths to prevent you from running unauthorized apps on your iPhone, and for several reasons; the most important is for security. Since jailbreaking is designed to let you run those apps, that means that in order for the jailbreak to work, several of those security measures are simply shut off and disabled. This does not mean that you'll automatically get viruses and have your data stolen, but it does open up more avenues for hackers to gain access to your data. You simply must be more vigilant and attentive about security when your phone is jailbroken.
Only add sources that you trust completely
When you jailbreak, you will notice a new app on your home screen, called "Cydia". You can think of this as the jailbroken App Store for your iPhone. You will be able to use this to install lots of apps; you can also install mods that change app icons and fonts, mods that change how apps behave, and mods that add new features system-wide. One way this differs from Apple's built-in App Store is that third parties can publish their own list of apps and mods at their own whim, and users can add those lists to Cydia. You can find lists of third-party sources available by doing some creative Googling.
Now, since you can add any third-party list you want, and those lists can contain mods which can access all of the data on your iPhone, you need to be extremely mindful of which sources you add. Seemingly innocuous apps, such as simple wallpaper lists, can contain code which subtly and sneakily siphons away your contacts, or worse. Since you don't have Apple vetting apps before they hit your phone, you won't be able to trust that an app isn't malicious if it's from an unknown source.
Only install what you need
Many of the apps and mods you can download through Cydia will not be things that you can technically do on the iPhone using Apple's published APIs. An example of this is the project which allows you to install a Growl-like UI for push notifications; it simply is not possible to do through the App Store. This means that you will have mods injecting code into the memory of other apps (sometimes into EVERY app). The more mods like this you have, the more they will start to clash with each other. This can lead to crashes, drained batteries, hangs, and system slowdown. You should consciously try to minimize the number of mods that you install, to preserve the experience of your iPhone.
Be mindful of OpenSSH
Packages in Cydia often times will require use of other libraries to achieve their goals. These needs are called dependencies in Cydia, and they will be listed when you try and install packages. There are packages which will blindly install a package called OpenSSH, which installs a server on your iPhone that allows you to log in via a Terminal. Now, this package uses a file on the iPhone to determine what the default password is, which happens to be 'alpine'. As you can imagine, many people don't change that password by default, and instead just let the default stick and never change it; this led to disaster last year when someone used the default password to extort lazy iPhone jailbreakers.
If you install this package, the absolute first thing you should do is change the root password.
Be wary of iOS software updates
In all likelihood, your iOS software updates will be far more involved than non-jailbreaking. The hacks used to enable jailbreaking are usually patched in the next update of the OS. This means that, if you want to keep your jailbreak mods, you will need to wait for the iPhone dev community to release an updated jailbreak procedure. Sometimes this takes hours, sometimes this takes weeks. Once the jailbreak is released, updating generally consists of backing up everything, restoring your iPhone to the new OS, re-jailbreaking, and reinstalling all of your jailbreak software. It is a far more involved process, on top of the already involved update process of the iOS. You will likely update the OS far less than you would if you were non-jailbroken.
For those that don't know, I've been employed at Ambrosia Software for almost 2 and a half years. In that time, I've helped our team ship some great products, worked to massively improve the user experience on our web site, and expand our presence in and use of social media. It was a great ride that made me a better software engineer by an order of magnitude, and I am forever grateful for the opportunity.
As of this morning, I have accepted a software engineer position at ngmoco:). As part of this, I will be ramping down my current work at Ambrosia, prepping for a move to the San Francisco Bay Area over the next month. I will begin at ngmoco:) in July.
I am extremely excited for this opportunity to contribute to the world of social gaming, and look forward to what the next few years will look like. I wish my colleagues at Ambrosia Software the best of luck in the future.
Caboose is an app that loads notifications from the Boxcar service. It provides a reusable class for interacting with the Boxcar service for receiving push notifications. Currently it loads notifications for one account and dumps them to a Growl feed, but a full UI is planned.
In development.
This is hilariously effective. It scrapes a few online lyrics databases and does some analysis to determine the quality of a rhyme. Be sure to check the bottom of the whitepaper for some sample output. Direct PDF link.
I wish we could do something as beautiful as this in the United States.
Credit to Rajesh Kumar Singh/AP.
For a little less than a year, I've been writing code built atop Twitter, specifically Matt Gemmell's MGTwitterEngine. I've got a few things running on this code, which I've not talked about publicly (other than minor hints on Twitter), but have been well-received by the few people who have seen it. Still, these projects have needed to extend both MGTwitterEngine and related libraries to add functionality or fix bugs. I'll spend this blog post documenting some of those changes across the different projects.
MGTwitterEngine
Most of these changes were made to make the engine's behavior a bit more extensible. Here's the GitHub repository.
MGTwitterEngineIDis a typedef for unsigned long long values. Everywhere a user ID or tweet ID is returned, it will return one of these. You will want to check your existing Twitter code to make sure there are no potential Twitpocalypse-related problems, updating old data types to the newMGTwitterEngineID.- Subclasses of
MGTwitterEnginecan now override a new method,-_sendRequest:withRequestType:responseType:, if they want to use custom networking code (such as with anNSURLRequestqueue class). I use this to implement both Twitter's password authentication and OAuth, and decide at runtime which to use. - Added a
-connectionStarted:method toMGTwitterEngineDelegate, which can be used to update your UI. - Fixed a few bugs in the YAJL parser which crashed or parsed incorrectly.
Things I still need to do:
In my custom subclass ofUpdate: Thanks to Uli Kusterer, the dependency onMGTwitterEngine, I use a class I wrote calledTCDownload, which I'll talk about below. There are still a few references to it in myMGTwitterEngineclass; those should be fairly straightforward to remove.TCDownloadhas been removed. The changes have been merged from his fork into mine.- Add full support for Twitter lists. I have some basic Twitter list functionality working in a private subclass, but far from all of it. There are some problems with the YAJL parser that don't appear easily fixable with the stock
MGTwitterEngine(specifically, the API key for the list description is the same as the key for the user's bio, and these are overwriting each other internally). I'm going to look into replacing the manual parsers - Add full support for new-style retweets. Haven't started this yet.
- Add support for geolocation in incoming and outgoing tweets. Haven't started this yet.
yajl
I've forked yajl to support 64-bit tweet IDs, mainly by changing the callback methods and the string parser from strtol to strtoull. Here is the GitHub repository.
SSCore
This is a repository of scattered classes which serve various purposes. There are two classes which are relevant for our discussion, TCDownload and TCOAuthDownload. You will need the TCDownload class if you use the vanilla MGTwitterEngine fork, although I'll be removing those dependencies. Here is the GitHub repository
TCDownloadis a generic wrapper that encapsulates an HTTP request to the interwebs. It wraps NSURLRequest and NSURLConnection under the hood. It automatically queues request and gets callbacks on a background thread (although you can change either of these). I use it a few places inside myMGTwitterEnginefork, but removed most of those changes and put them in a subclass.TCOAuthDownloadis a subclass ofTCDownloadwhich accepts OAuth tokens and sends out requests with the correct headers. It relies on theOAuthConsumerframework, which I'll talk about below.
OAuthConsumer
This framework deals with OAuth. Twitter has officially announced that basic auth will be dead in June 2010, so getting on the OAuth bandwagon now is a good idea. Here's my fork of the OAuthConsumer framework on GitHub.
- Changed the signature code to use Common Crypto instead of the C libraries' HMAC APIs. This seems to work more consistently on both Mac and iPhone.
- Added a
-parseHTTPKey:value:method which is used to parse extended attributes in OAuth access tokens. Twitter uses this to pass some special metadata, like the username of the logged-in user. Subclasses ofOATokencan extend this to parse those tokens.
OAuthery
This isn't strictly a tool for doing Twitter development, but it can be handy when learning how to implement the OAuth login flow. I posted about it more back in January, and you can find the code and a prebuilt app over at GitHub.
Technical details of the upcoming Flash Player for Mac, wherein the Adobe team is switching to using Core Animation to do faster rendering of non-video Flash files. It's worth noting that the performance will only initially be seen in Safari on Mac OS X 10.6, as the plugin is fully Cocoa-ized now.
Also interesting to note is that Flash is still using the ancient QuickDraw APIs which have been deprecated for years.
iPhone had the first two store UIs; the iTunes Store for content like music and movies, and the App Store for software. The iPad will add a third, the iBookstore, for buying eBooks. These stores all provide content for users to extend the utility of their device. But each has a pretty different user interaction model for accessing, purchasing, and consuming that content.
- The iTunes Store is a separate app that is completely distinct from the iPod app. When you find something to buy, prompting you for your iTunes account password. It then adds the purchase to the app's Downloads tab. Once you have purchased the content, you must then switch back to the iPod app to listen to or watch it.
- The App Store is a separate app. When you purchase something, it prompts you for your iTunes password, and then exits to the home screen, switching to the screen where the app will live. The state of the download is reflected in the app icon. When the download is complete, you tap the icon on the home screen to use it.
- The iBookstore (the one word is the official name as used by Apple) is not a separate app, but lives within the iBooks app on the iPad. Purchasing content prompts for the iTunes password and downloads in-app, which can be directly accessed after it has finished downloading.
Each type of content follows a different workflow when going from access to purchase to use. If a goal of the iPad's low price is to drive content sales through the three stores, as some speculate is the case, then the purchase model should be as streamlined for the different types of content. Forcing different workflows will only confuse users who can't remember which type of content comes from where.