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The Apple Blog
The Apple Blog, published by and for the day-to-day Apple user, is a prominent source for news, reviews, walkthroughs, and real life application of all Apple products.
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iPhone Security: Refurb iPhones Still Have Old Data on Them?
I was a bit worried when I found out about this story, but I should have seen it coming. Engadget reports that people who are purchasing refurbished iPhones (from Apple, no less) are able to recover old data off of the devices using some freely available tools.

I’ve had to take my iPhone in to the Apple Store for issues twice, and both times, they simply replaced it with a new one. But you’d expect that they would have erased the data on the device first, right? Well, you need to format, write over the entire drive, and erase again if you want to make sure that your data can’t be recovered from a storage device. (To be absolutely sure, it’s a good idea to shred the drive, but that’s apparently not an option here.)

Apple’s technicians are apparently only doing a basic software format and reinstall, and dropping in a new SIM. That’s adequate in most cases, given that most of us don’t work for the NSA, and most people buying the devices aren’t too curious about said data. It sounds like it’s pretty difficult to really do anything about this, unless you can make good friends with the guys at the Genius Bar, and have them do a secure wipe for you. Something tells me that isn’t part of their usual routine.

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More 3G iPhone Rumors: Gizmodo "Confirms" It
Gizmodo is “confirming” that Apple will release a 3G iPhone next month at WWDC. This is a fairly widely circulated rumor - Gizmodo isn’t saying anything new, but is just betting all of their chips that it’s true.

Leo Laporte has mentioned a couple of times (on his TWiT podcasts) that he believes the iPhone 3G will be available on other carriers besides AT&T in the United States. The iPhone is a strong product and has definitely gained a strong foothold in the market and given RIM a run for its money, but has been limited in sales by the fact that it’s currently tied to what most people believe is one of the least-reliable cell networks in the nation. Having a new iPhone that operates on Verizon or Sprint would make it an interesting product and definitely increase adoption. I, for one, would prefer this, as large parts of my lovely home state of Illinois outside of Chicago are not well-covered by AT&T.

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What Apple's Rumored Tablet Should Look Like

These photos are taken from the TED blog. Yves Behar, the designer for the XO Laptop discusses what V 2.0 will look like. The new XO laptop, set to arrive in 2010, looks like two giant iPhones glued side-by-side. An all-touchscreen interface, with accelerometers to orient the screen to the correct perspective, and Pong make this look like a must-have, not to mention a way better design than the current XO laptop.

I suggest Apple rip this design out from under them and throw some sweet OS X goodness on there.

Behar says this second version of the XOXO “is a book, a tablet, a board…and yes, a laptop too if that is what you need. The design is still green and white, but thin, simple, and un-interrupted by keyboards, buttons, speaker holes, input devices and visible connectors. And it is soft to the touch, like a piece of luggage, everyday luggage you can take anywhere.”

[Via TEDBlog]

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Book Review: Cocoa® Programming for Mac® OS X, Third Edition
Addison Wesley Professional started shipping the Third Edition of Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X by Aaron Hillegass this month. Hillegass’ book is considered my most to be the de-facto intro-to-OS X programming text. I own (and have now recycled) the first edition of the book and have gone through the majority of the Third Edition (at least reading-wise). Here’s my take on this latest incarnation.

The Text At A Glance

Aaron has a great, teaching-writing style. You definitely get the feel of being in the classroom, learning right from the professor. The preface makes at least two, fairly substantial claims. First, that the nook covers the Objective-C language, Cocoa design patterns and how to use Xcode, Interface Builder and Instruments. And, second, that you will learn 80% of what you need to know to get started programming for the Mac. I have to agree with both claims as you will definitely learn a great deal of the fundamentals of the language and tools and that the book can be used as a reference post-read.

This third edition has been updated to cover Leopard-only technologies (such as garbage collection and Objective-C 2.0) and does a decent job showing where to utilize the new language features and delves into the depths of intricacies of the new memory management facilities in Leopard (and how to code for both Tiger & Leopard). Covering tools like gdb and Instruments is an amazing thing to do, since many programmers are still rely solely on printf or (in the case of Mac programming) NSLog.

The sample applications range from trivial to pretty neat & indicative of real-world Mac programming, error-logic and all. I especially like the challenges in the exercises, many of which have you modify example code, sometimes accompanied by the mantra: “This is hard, and you are not stupid.”

If you are interested at all in programming for OS X or have programmed for the Mac and want to pick up some hints on how code specifically for features in Leopard, Aaron’s books is a must-buy. I’d definitely recommend keeping all of Apple’s updated Objective-C 2.0 information handy as it will fill in the 20% Aaron doesn’t cover and go a bit deeper as well.

The Gory Details

Here is a breakdown of the chapters and what each covers:
- Chapter 1. Cocoa: What Is It?
- Chapter 2. Let’s Get Started
- Chapter 3. Objective-C
- Chapter 4. Memory Management
- Chapter 5. Target/Action
- Chapter 6. Helper Objects
- Chapter 7. Key-Value Coding; Key-Value Observing
- Chapter 8. NSArrayController
- Chapter 9. NSUndoManager
- Chapter 10. Archiving
- Chapter 11. Basic Core Data
- Chapter 12. Nib Files and NSWindowController
- Chapter 13. User Defaults
- Chapter 14. Using Notifications
- Chapter 15. Using Alert Panels
- Chapter 16. Localization
- Chapter 17. Custom Views
- Chapter 18. Images and Mouse Events
- Chapter 19. Keyboard Events
- Chapter 20. Drawing Text with Attributes
- Chapter 21. Pasteboards and Nil-Targeted Actions
- Chapter 22. Categories
- Chapter 23. Drag-and-Drop
- Chapter 24. NSTimer
- Chapter 25. Sheets
- Chapter 26. Creating NSFormatters
- Chapter 27. Printing
- Chapter 28. Web Service
- Chapter 29. View Swapping
- Chapter 30. Core Data Relationships
- Chapter 31. Garbage Collection
- Chapter 32. Core Animation
- Chapter 33. A Simple Cocoa/OpenGL Application
- Chapter 34. NSTask
- Chapter 35. The End
(Choosing to cover topics such as threading is a huge plus and not the normal faire for this type of text)

Full book reference information:

Title: Cocoa® Programming for Mac® OS X, Third Edition
Publisher: Addison Wesley Professional
Publish Date: May 05, 2008
Print ISBN-10: 0-321-50361-9
Print ISBN-13: 978-0-321-50361-9
eText ISBN-10: 0-321-56273-9
eText ISBN-13: 978-0-321-56273-9
Pages: 464

You can find it at Amazon (they even have a Kindle-ready version), Safari Books Online and (most likely) at your favorite local bookstore.

List price is $49.99 USD but you can find it in the low $30’s if you poke around.

If you snagged a copy of the tome, drop a note in the comments with your take on the text.

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iTunes' Attackers
Netflix and Napster are both launching assaults on Apple, today. CNET is reporting the release of Netflix’s Apple TV rival, simply called Player by Roku, and Napster is getting into the digital music distribution with apparently an identical model to iTunes ($0.99 a song, $9.95 an album).

I am all for competition, but I don’t think these two alternatives provide much to combat Apple’s dominance. Let’s take a short look at each.
(more…)

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SiteSucker Updated

This is a minor update to SiteSucker, but it is a program that I depend on, so I am posting it.

For the uninitiated, SiteSucker is a program that sucks everything (pages, images, etc.) out of a website and downloads it to your hard drive. I use it because I update my school web page at the beginning of each year, but I don’t want to lose all the information from before. I don’t usually go back and look at it much, but mainly save it as a backup of what happened the previous year, in case I lose some other record.

The updates are:
- Allowed users to view the download settings while downloading.
- Replaced wildcard support in paths settings with regular expressions.
- Removed “Get Files via Image Links” from the Download Option and added “Only Follow Image Links” option under the Advanced tab in the download settings.
- Added an option to save log files in ~/Library/Logs/SiteSucker.
- Added a Logs tab in the Download Settings window and reorganized the settings.
- Added scanning of the style attribute in all tags for URLs.
- Replaced URL parameters with a value in local file names.
- Deleted empty folders in the download folder when all downloads are paused.
- Modified the document format to improve performance when analyzing files.
- Fixed an issue where some files failed to download when a download was resumed.
- Fixed some issues with the Open File command.
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