Phil's Ramblings » Apple

Porting apps to iPad

Phil — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 17:56:42 +0000

My business iPad arrived last Thursday, and I spent the first few days absorbing the feel of the built-in apps and thinking about how to alter my existing iPhone apps so that they fit in with the iPad idioms.

I use the list and navigation controller combination a lot on iPhone, so the natural progression is to [...]

Revised Gravatars Plugin

Phil — Thu, 20 May 2010 16:35:37 +0000

Phil has updated the OS X Address Book plugin for Gravatars to handle mixed-case email addresses. [...]

Everyone’s doing it…

Phil — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 21:47:45 +0000

…so I may as well join in, and post an opinion of the iPad before I’ve seen or touched it.

First, let us look at why the iPhone is successful – it comes down to the simple fact that it’s the first handheld device to be designed for human beings. I previously owned a HP device [...]

Apple Customer Experience Could Use Some Work

Phil — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 19:54:15 +0000

My preceding post documents my problems buying a MacBook Pro from the online Apple Store UK. I find it rather confusing that this was allowed to happen.

André, who has used Macs for considerably longer than I, told me 6 or 7 years ago that Apple outside the US is just a sales organisation with none [...]

The MacBook Pro Saga

Phil — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 18:39:16 +0000

For the impatient, Bish (a chap at work), has helpfully provided the following edited form of the saga:

“So basically: you ordered a MacBook Pro from Apple, and they’re going to deliver it.”

The rest of you can read on. I ordered a 15″ MacBook Pro on March 3rd, as follows (screenshot of order confirmation screen):

It seemed to me [...]

Podcast episode 3 stuff

Phil — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 18:49:14 +0000

I promised to write about some bugs in Apple’s iPhone security sample application. The ones I noticed are in this file, in the routine getHashBytes:. For a start, the output of the SHA-1 algorithm is always exactly 160 bits, or 20 bytes. So you can change:

uint8_t * hashBytes = NULL;

to:

uint8_t hashBytes[20];

then also delete the malloc/memset/free [...]

Stealing usability from Apple

Phil — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 19:37:56 +0000

Apple’s OS X, which I use for most things at home, has a cool feature on its ‘dashboard’ which allows a webpage or fragment thereof to be displayed as a ‘widget’. Ubuntu comes with a similar ‘dashboard’ thing; Compiz fusion knows it as ‘Widget Later’. I was unable to find a web-viewing widget installed with Ubuntu, [...]