Category Archives: Apple

My WWDC 2009 Predictions

So I’m trying to keep awake while I’m on my flight to San Francisco for WWDC this coming week, I thought why not share my predictions about what’s going to be announced. I also figured this would be a good time to update my blog since I have quite a while before we land.

1. Snow Leopard

After looking at the sessions and labs for WWDC this year, I think it’s safe to say we’ll see a release of Snow Leopard. From what I’ve been able to read from the net it looks like it’s nearing RC/Gold status, so I think this will be one that will be talked about to death!

2. iPhone 3.0

As a beginning iPhone developer, I’ve been playing with some of the goodies in the 3.0 SDK since April. I’ve also had the chance to put it on a phone (since beta 2) and have seen it mature and become a stable working update. There’s definitely some features I’d really like to have on a day to day case, so hopefully this comes out at the conference and I’m not having to put the OS Beta on my standard use phone.

3. iPhone 3G v2

I think we will see this announced, but I don’t think it’s shipping until Julyish. One thing Apple did wrong last year was release several products as once which was a disaster (MobileMe, iPhone 2.0 OS, iPhone 3G)!! I think after last years mess, they’ll end up releasing the OS update at the conference, and the new phone in July.

4. iPod Touch v3

This I think they will de a device update on as well and it will be available after the keynote. It will include a new 64GB option. I also think that this will have a camera on it.

5. Minor Hardware Updates

This is something they’ve been doing without waiting for some sort of Press event or Conference, so I’m not sure if this is something we’ll actually see or not.

This pretty much sums up my predictions. I would love to be surprised by the “one more thing” but I’m not sure what this could be. I think the iPhone as a device doesn’t need to be this as pretty much everyone in the modern world are expecting this to come out. Personally I’m still waiting for a tablet or touch netbook. I’d like to see this at least announced next week with a ship date of sometime in July. If by chance this was something that was a reality, I’m sure they’d be sold out by the end of the conference. (I’d be coming home with at least 1) :)

Stay tuned for my after keynote post and other WWDC posts as the week goes on. I’ve got lots of ideas floating around, so we’ll have to see what’s under NDA and what we can talk about.

Zune/iPod Mention on Family Guy Last Night

If any of you happened to miss Family Guy last night, there was quite the funny mention about the Zune failure.

If you would like to watch it, check it out on hulu. You can also watch it below.

Objective Resource for Faster iPhone Development

I recently came across Objective Resource for developing iPhone applications that talk with a Rails backed website. According to the site,

ObjectiveResource is an Objective-C port of Ruby on Rails’ ActiveResource. It provides a way to serialize objects to and from Rails’ standard RESTful web-services (via XML or JSON) and handles much of the complexity involved with invoking web-services of any language from the iPhone.

I’ve had a chance to play with it this weekend and have found it to be pretty easy to work with. The developers of Objective Resource have created a pretty good Getting Started Guide you can follow, or you can watch a screencast of it as well. They even offer an example project for you to work with that gives you both the iPhone app (via Xcode) and the Rails app so you can see how everything works together.

One thing the example project does not include is accessing a Rails app that has authentication. Of course I was thinking I was all setup for this, but soon realized that I did not add my Active Resource functions in so that my app would work with XML/JSON requests. Luckily, while I was out in Denver, CO for iPhone Development Training (by Pragmatic Studio) I was able to get my hands on a copy of Advanced Rails Recipes by Mike Clark. I was extremely pleased that Mike graciously gave me the copy he had laying there for free. The particular recipe in the book that helped me was the Authenticate REST Clients. After I rewrote my authentication piece of my Rails app, I was getting data back and into my iPhone app. It was a very good feeling!

I thought I would include the screencast that the Objective Resource developers created. It runs about 6 minutes and is definitely worth a watch if you are looking at using Objective Resource for your next iPhone app backed by a Rails app.


Getting Started with Objective Resource from Josh Vickery on Vimeo.

iPhone App test post

Just testing the wordpress app for the iPhone. I think this is a good idea for smaller posts but I’m not sure I’d want to use this all the time on the road.

Quite Funny!!

I found this to be pretty funny. Hope you guys like it as much as I did.


Video tutorial: unlock iphone

Ruby Vulnerabilities

An Apple Product Security technician has identified multiple vulnerabilities with Ruby, which if exploited could be used in denial of service attacks. It does not have to be just Mac OS X that this afects. It looks like it’s all versions based on the official post from the Ruby development team.  To find out what version of Ruby you are using open up Terminal or your command-line prompt client and type

ruby –version

You should get something like this

ruby 1.8.6 (2008-06-20 patchlevel 230) [i686-darwin9.3.0]

Now you can see that’s I’ve already went ahead and updated my version, so yours might have patch 110 if there was a patch level. To update your Ruby version all you need to do is visit the link above and choose which patch you need to install.  For us Ruby on Rails developers you’ll need to upgrade to Ruby 1.8.6 patch 230. You can download it here and type the following in your command-line prompt.

curl -O ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.6-p230.tar.gz
tar xzvf ruby-1.8.6-p230.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.8.6-p230
./configure –enable-shared –enable-pthread CFLAGS=-D_XOPEN_SOURCE=1
make
sudo make install
cd ..

You can then check your version by typing.

ruby –version

If you have any problems, feel free to comment below.

UPDATE: After posting this I was having a hard time keeping an instance of mongrel running.  I did some searching and found out that the option they have offered us does have a bug still in it.  So what that means is that we either update and have issues or stay at what we’re currently at and deal with the possibility of denial of service attacks.  Keep your eyes posted to the Ruby on Rails blog for an update. I’ll post another update here as well once things are figured out.