Apple on The Dangling Pointer

Choosing Between Google, Amazon, & iCloud Photos

Sun, 19 Mar 2017 19:12:32 +0000

I recently went down the rabbit hole of figuring out if I am using the right solution for offsite storage of my photo library. I've been using iCloud Photos for over a year and am not totally happy with the solution. I decided to try out both Amazon Prime Photos and Google Photos.

My home Internet connection has a 5Mb/s upload speed which feels pathetically slow. I wanted to test each solution with a good chunk of my photo library uploaded which made this a time-consuming experience. Here's what I came up with after about two weeks of futzing.

Another day, another set of iTunes Connect errors

Fri, 04 Nov 2016 13:20:24 +0000

Easy Mac to Mac Screen Sharing

Tue, 03 Nov 2015 15:00:00 +0000

Screen sharing over iMessage is not a terribly well-known feature of Mac OS X - but it's incredibly awesome and easy to use. The only requirements are the person needs a relatively new Mac OS X install (Yosemite or higher) and iMessage enabled on their Mac.

In Messages, find your existing conversation (or create a new one with the user).
Click the Details button up top and click it.

Find the little icon that looks like two squares with an offset between them and click it.

Select Ask to Share Screen.
The other person should get a notice and they can accept it.

Once you're sharing you are in view-only mode - you have to click the icon in the upper left to request control of their desktop.

Pretty simple! I've had some issues in the past with the notifications never coming through for screen sharing but it seems to be resolved with Mac OS X 10.11 (El Capitan).

This feature is temporarily unavailable

Wed, 28 Oct 2015 17:41:31 +0000

While updating a few apps today, the Apple App Store is giving me this super helpful error message.

Temporarily Unavailable - This feature is temporarily unavailable. Try again later.

I hadn't realized updating/installing apps was a feature!

Extending your Apple Watch with WiFi

Tue, 27 Oct 2015 19:43:58 +0000

WiFi on Apple Watch!?

It's not completely obvious but the Apple Watch supports WiFi networks starting in Watch OS 2.0. How does one configure WiFi to work with the Watch? It's not terribly obvious so I threw this guide together.

My Situation

My Apple Watch was not configured to work with WiFi. I have both 5GHz and 2.4GHz networks in my home. I normally do not join the 2.4GHz network because it doesn't work as well as the 5GHz. I looked at the Apple Support page on WiFi for the Apple Watch and realized my situation. Apple Watch only supports 2.4GHz networks.

Even Apple Leaves TODOs in Production Code

Wed, 22 Apr 2015 16:05:45 +0000

My credit card got charged today for my Apple Watch which wasn't supposed to ship until June. I was so excited that I tweeted the shipping notification to sarcastically note the availability in June still.

Copying that text into a tweet, I actually got:

Preparing for Shipment TODO: Pull info bubble content div up to the order list level (only need 1 per page) and refactor info bubbles into single conditional & span based on group status type OR alternatively, refactor to single info bubble per delivery group based on status shipped shipped Available to ship: June

Apple at 9:41am

Fri, 03 Apr 2015 14:41:08 +0000

In my post on using QuickTime to record an iOS device I mentioned the carrier and time are fixed at simple dots and 9:41am. Why 9:41am? Well I knew there was a reason behind it and did a quick search to review the reason.

January 9th 2007 .. iPhone announcement day .. 9:41am:

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2007/01/09/live-from-macworld-2007-steve-jobs-keynote/

Creating your Verse in the Play that is Life

Sun, 29 Mar 2015 15:41:08 +0000

I've recently become a fan of Walt Whitman's poem from 1892 entitled "O Me! O Life!". I've heard the poem in the past but it has never resonated with me until hearing Daniel Steinberg, an iOS developer and trainer, used it in his keynote at CocoaConf Chicago.

O Me! O Life!

Oh me! Oh life! of the questions of these recurring, Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish, Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?) Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d, Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me, Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined, The question, O me! so sad, recurring—What good amid these, O me, O life?

Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks Calendar + Google Sync Problems

Thu, 05 Jun 2014 15:23:24 +0000

On occasion my Calendar on Mavericks gets hosed when syncing with Google. If I look in the console, I see errors like the following mentioning "An error exists on principal":

6/5/14 10:05:00.337 AM Calendar[59555]: [com.apple.calendar.ui.log] [An error exists on principal: [iCloud]] 6/5/14 10:05:00.338 AM Calendar[59555]: [com.apple.calendar.ui.log] [An error exists on principal: [Time Off]] 6/5/14 10:05:00.340 AM Calendar[59555]: [com.apple.calendar.ui.log] [An error exists on principal: [Events]] 6/5/14 10:05:00.341 AM Calendar[59555]: [com.apple.calendar.ui.log] [An error exists on principal: [Launch]] 6/5/14 10:05:00.341 AM Calendar[59555]: [com.apple.calendar.ui.log] [An error exists on principal: [Conferences]] 6/5/14 10:05:00.342 AM Calendar[59555]: [com.apple.calendar.ui.log] [An error exists on principal: [Some Team]]

Apple's Public Mailing Lists

Wed, 23 Apr 2014 15:00:21 +0000

You may not be aware but Apple has a pretty extensive set of public e-mail discussion lists.

https://lists.apple.com/mailman/listinfo

There are topics ranging from fundamental Objective-C issues through to development for their various desktop applications. Some of the lists are quite chatty but you can subscribe in digest format to get a daily e-mail instead of each individual message. This is a great way to reach engineers working on the piece you're interested in and is a quite interesting place to lurk.

iOS - Customize Table View Cells

Thu, 07 Jul 2011 20:02:48 +0000

Ever wanted to have alternated colors on your table view cells? If so, you've probably done something inside of cellForRowAtIndexPath and applied a background color to your cell there.

Would you be surprised to know that's completely wrong? Yup. Wrong. WRONG WRONG WRONG.

I didn't know this, but any styles applied to cells based on state or whatever should really be in willDisplayCell - NOT when you configure the cell itself! Per Apple's documentation for the Table View delegate -

iTunes Connect - Invalid Binary

Thu, 26 May 2011 13:11:51 +0000

I spent the past week pulling out my hair trying to submit an update for Centare's EyeOnWeather application to iTunes Connect. I kept getting a reject from the system and all I got for an error message was "Invalid Binary." THANKS, THAT'S SOOPER.

Eventually I ended up attempting to contact iTunes Connect Support for further details. I thought it might have been missing icons, malformed Info.plist, something. I haven't changed anything in the project drastically with how it builds, so I was at a loss. Turns out, I was picking the wrong provisioning profile in my setup. Man I felt stupid. Ends up that I'm not crazy - Apple's documentation on how to set up your project for building still only references Xcode 3. Awesome for the rest of the world using Xcode 4. Here are some tips I got from Apple iTunes Connect support for pulling in information to submit to their developer team:

Xcode 4 - Problem submitting App with Static Library

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 01:12:16 +0000

I'm submitting a new version of my Migraine Diary App to the App Store and was running into problems with Xcode 4 giving me the following error: "[Your App Name] does not contain a single-bundle application or contains multiple products. Please select another archive, or adjust your scheme to create a single-bundle application."

There is an issue or maybe it's an intentional design thing with Xcode 4 and how it handles statically built libraries being included in your project. I'm specifically using Core Plot and it's instruction set hasn't been updated for Xcode 4 yet. Here are the things I had to do to get Core Plot to bundle correctly with my App to submit it:

iOS Basics - UINavigation Controller & Back Button Text

Sun, 20 Mar 2011 15:16:09 +0000

I've brought an old project out of the moth balls recently, the Migraine Diary application I wrote as part of my master's thesis. It was my first "real" iPhone app and I call tell I didn't know what I was doing entirely looking through the code. What this has forced me to do, however, is re-learn some of the basics of iOS development and of Apple design patterns. I have been spending some time back in the Apple developer documentation and will probably be posting some of the gotchas that tripped me up two years ago and I'm solving now with the better, more elegant solution.

Mac OS X - Adding a loopback alias

Fri, 04 Feb 2011 16:13:33 +0000

I do a lot of local web development on my MacBook Pro. Frequently I had multiple tiers of servers running - a Jetty instance running the web tier and a JBoss/EJB server doing the business tier behind it. The problem is JBoss opens up so many ports on a particular network adapter and trying to get JBoss and Jetty to share a single IP is a nightmare. So the easier way is to just create a new IP or alias your localhost (127.0.0.1) into something like 127.0.0.2. When you start up Jetty, you pass in the binding IP of .2 and then JBoss and Jetty place nice with each other.

CDMA / Verizon iPhone

Sun, 09 Jan 2011 19:58:15 +0000

There has been quite a bit of press about the upcoming Verizon / CDMA iPhone. I'm happy to hear that AT&T will finally lose the monopoly on the iPhone in the United States, but I'm disappointed that nothing has come out yet about T-Mobile carrying the GMS version of the phone. AT&T needs the competition to spread out the massive amount of users onto another network because frankly, they can't handle the amount of growth they've experienced. The iPhone is a great device, and I've had nothing but a positive experience for the most part with AT&T.

Installing MySQL 5.5.8 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard

Tue, 21 Dec 2010 14:17:30 +0000

Installing MySQL should be a no brainer on any operating system, especially with how mature of a product it is. Apparently that assumption is incorrect. I tried installing the most recent GA release of MySQL on my new Snow Leopard machine, and found I couldn't start the blasted server. I've become lazy the older I get - I don't want to screw around with shell scripts, hacking this tweaking that. If I'm provided a Mac-based installer I WANT IT TO WORK. So, if you're like me and are frustrated as all hell with not being able to get MySQL to start via System Preferences after installing the 64-bit version (maybe 32-bit as well), do the following:

iPhone Migraine Diary

Thu, 31 Dec 2009 23:35:05 +0000

I may have mentioned it before, but I created a Migraine Diary application for the iPhone as my master's captone/thesis project. The school year finished out for me and I submitted the application to Apple on the 29th. Two days - TWO DAYS - later they approved it and it's listed in iTunes!

Head on over to Net Workz LLC to find the app.

I still have a lot of work left to do before I'm really happy with it. Help screens, more graphing, and encryption are two things I really need to get out there. Until then, enjoy!

Xcode SCM & build directory

Mon, 03 Aug 2009 22:23:25 +0000

Xcode has a build directory inside of your project, which you shouldn't be including in your source code management repository. Simply said, those files change so much and are "discardable". There is no way to easily exclude this directory from your repository. The accepted way to fix this (after some digging) is to simply move the build directory for Xcode to a temporary folder.

To move the build directory, click on the Xcode menu in your menu bar, and click on Preferences. Change the folder under "Building" to a temporary folder. I created a tmp directory in my user folder.

Thoughts on the iPhone 3GS

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 14:53:41 +0000

Everyone is giving their two cents about the iPhone 3GS. I'm excited to see that Apple is releasing a faster phone that still feels like the first generation iPhone. Developers are used to a specific screen size for instance. Drastically changing the environment will create the discord other cell phone manufacturers feel when it comes to 3rd party applications.

I do suspect, however, that next year will bring drastic change to the iPhone. Apple is still getting to where they really wanted the 1st generation iPhone to be. They realized that its easy to make their own hardware and software, but its hard when dealing with so many third parties. Cell phone carriers like AT&T stand in the way of real progress. Why doesn't Apple follow suit with Virgin and create their own private label cell phone company? I suspect that would give them a lot more flexibility in pricing and give them the ability to put whatever carrier they want behind the name.