Out of Beta!

I’m happy to announce that Developing for Apple Watch, Second Edition is now out of beta! You can order the eBook version and receive it nearly-instantly, order a paper edition, or order both and get the eBook now and the paper edition in the mail. And of course, it’s available on Amazon if you prefer to buy it there (but if you want to support me and the Pragmatic Bookshelf, buy it direct!).

One of the more interesting things I did for this book was to create a promotional video for it. With some guidance by Chris Adamson, I used Motion to stitch together some music, the cover image of the book, and some screen captures to bring the book to life in a more visual format. It’s on YouTube, so I guess this is where I say, “Be sure to like and subscribe!”

GCD Example Updated (Now With More Speed!)

Due to popular demand, I’ve updated my GCD example from previous talks to include a few things to make the example not only do something on a background queue, but also snappy. It should scroll much better now. A quick rundown of what changed:

  • Images are now resized. Since the example uses wallpaper-sized images, there’s no sense in not resizing them to go on a 44-pixel-tall table view cell. I’m using the popular image-resizing routines from Trevor’s Bike Shed to do the resizing with a nice interpolation quailty.
  • Those resized images are now cached. I use an NSCache to store the images. If the app receives a memory warning, it’ll jettison all of the cached images, but if you’re just scrolling up and down this is a quick and dirty way to cache the images. I had never really used NSCache before, so this was a good excuse to try it.
  • I’m at CocoaConf in that state down to the South today, so this post has been brought to you by late-night hotel room caffeine. I made some other changes to the project to deal with a weird table view cell bug that I’ve submitted to Apple; a post on that is coming up next!

Apple Surveying 32-Bit Third-Party Kernel Extensions

Today I noticed something new in my LaunchDaemons folder: /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.apple.third_party_32b_kext_logger.plist. It starts a Ruby script (/usr/libexec/third_party_32b_kext_logger.rb) when your Mac starts up that (and I could be totally wrong, as I don’t know Ruby) appears to use /usr/sbin/kextfind -system-extensions to identify third-party kernel extensions (e.g. kernel extensions for which the identifier does not begin with com.apple) that exist only in i386 or PPC forms. It makes sense why Apple would do this, as a move to 64-bit only would be in keeping with their typical attitude on leaving old hardware platforms behind, but this particular file is odd in that it’s in /Library/LaunchDaemons and not /System/Library/LaunchDaemons, where most Apple-created jobs are. Maybe this was a task given to a programmer new at Apple who was unfamiliar with the typical folder hierarchy on a Mac, but this smells odd. The only result I found for it in Google was this Apple Support forum post.
So, I did some investigation, and found that it uses the domain “com.apple.kexts.32bitonly” with the defaults command, and in my system log is this line:

/var/log/system.log:Mar 22 19:31:30 Jeff-Kelleys-MacBook defaults[3439]: \nThe domain/default pair of (com.apple.kexts.32bitonly, lastRan) does not exist

That is reason enough for me to believe that it’s installed as a part of Mac OS X 10.6.7, as that message signifies its last run time (the script quits if it’s been less than a week since it last ran). So, being the diligent former sysadmin that I am, I looked at the 10.6.7 update’s files, and didn’t see anything (else) of note. I don’t see a point in the script that reports this to Apple, so I don’t know if this constitutes a breach of privacy on their part, but it’s interesting nonetheless that it would appear that Apple is gauging whether or not they can leave 32-bit kernel extensions behind with minimal customer fuss.

Take Me Home Now Free

Take Me Home is an ancient, buggy iPhone app that was my “Hello, World!” in the App Store. Its sale rate has plummeted to only a couple of buyers a week and, with the prevalence of real, honest-to-God GPS apps in the store these days, its usefulness is questionable. So from here on out, it’s free. I can’t promise to continue supporting it—especially for new devices and APIs—so the best I can do may be to remove it from the store in the event that some update breaks it.

Enjoy!

New Safari 3.2 Feature: Secure Website Identification

Here’s a quick tip that slipped through the blogosphere (at least none of the Mac blogs I subscribe to featured it): in Safari 3.2, released last week, Apple’s added a feature from Firefox 3’s “awesome bar”: when you’re on a secure website, such as a bank’s, that has identification information, it’s displayed in green (though in Safari it’s at the top-right of the title bar).  A screenshot:

 

Safari 3.2 adds secure website information to the title bar.
Safari 3.2 adds secure website information to the title bar.

Along with a phishing filter, it looks like Safari is stepping up to the plate as a secure browser.