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The Apple Blog

TheAppleBlog, 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.


When The Cracked and The Cracker Meet: An iPhone TaleToday

Imagine sitting down to talk with the guy who just broke into your apartment and stole your TV. You might ask him, “Why did you steal my TV?” and he might answer “Because I wanted it.” or “Because I wanted to sell it.” In the real world, a thief’s motivations are generally not very complicated. On the internet, though, those who crack or otherwise pirate software usually aren’t after money, since they generally give away the fruits of their labour. Since that’s the case, a conversation between thief and victim might prove a little more useful.

And it did, for iPhone developer James Bossert, who together with his wife, Constance, developed the Whack’em All game, which is based on the concept of the popular carnival Whack A Mole game. According to an article at TorrentFreak, James took matters in to his own hands when he noticed one day that his user base had spiked, gaining over 400 users in one day, compared to the usual ten. Excited, he looked into the purchasing numbers via Apple, only to find out he’d only sold 12 copies, which was pretty much par for the course.

Mitigating a Missing Mobile Safari Security FeatureJanuary 2

In the event you were too distracted by the festivities associated with the ringing in of the new year and missed the news: the internets are broken (again).

To be more specific, what has actually happened is a portion of the trust system that is the foundation of secure transactions on public IP networks has been found to be deficient, mostly due to laziness of services such as Verisign and RapidSSL and lack of knowledge/skill on the part of site owners.

The key to this deficiency lies in how SSL certificates are “signed” (a way of proving their validity). This post is not about the intricacies of public key infrastructure (PKI), so the takeaway is that certificates signed with a hash algorithm called “MD5″ really cannot be trusted anymore and those that are signed with the “SHA-1″ hash algorithm can be trusted (at least to the extent you trust the site you are visiting or the issuer of the certificate). If you are a site owner, make sure your current SSL certs use SHA-1 and insist that your certificate provider/authority (CA) does not use MD5 anymore.

Getting the Most Out of Leopard’s Quick Look FeatureJanuary 2

I imagine most people using OS 10.5 have become acquainted with Quick Look, which is one of my favorite Leopard features. Quick Look’s basic function, as its name suggests, is as a quick and convenient way to take a peek at what’s in a file without actually opening the file, switching Finder views or opening the file’s corresponding application.

A quick recap for folks who may have gotten their first Mac for Christmas or recently upgraded to Leopard and not yet discovered Quick Look, just highlight the desired file’s icon in the Finder and press the Spacebar.

If the file is a text document, you’ll see a preview something like this. If it’s not big enough, click an arrow button at the bottom of the Quick Look window and it will zoom to full screen display.

If it’s an image file, the preview will appear like this with another icon beside the full screen zoom toggle icon that you can click if you want to add the picture to your iPhoto photo collection. Quick Look can preview all popular graphics formats such as JPG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, Camera RAW, and Photoshop, as well as PDF.
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Goodbye 2008, Welcome 2009January 1

Well, it’s 2009. The last year people can wear those ridiculous “200X” glasses. How unfortunate.

2008 turned out to be the biggest year in TAB’s four year history. The main event being that we joined the GigaOm family. It was an outcome I had in no way planned or pursued but it turned out to be exactly what we needed to step things up.

2009, I’m certain, has a few tricks up its sleeve and I’m excited about where TAB is heading.

Thanks so much for being a part of this. We hope your 2009 is full of new year’s resolutions that you actually follow through with. But even if you don’t, we’ll still be your friend.

Love,
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Analysis of a Rumor: Large Format iPod TouchDecember 31 2008

As you may or may not be aware, TechCrunch reported yesterday that a larger format, 7 to 9-inch iPod touch was in the works at Apple and would arrive by next fall. They claim to have received the information from three seperate, independent sources, one of which is said to have actually handled a prototype of the device.

TC’s sources say that Apple has been working on a large format device internally for a while now, but that they were not sure how the public would receive such a device, and whether there would be sufficient demand to justify production. The success of the App Store is said to be the tipping point that finally pushed them to pursue it seriously.

This rumor has quickly been taken up by many, if not all, of the major Apple blogs on the web. And for good reason. Looked at in context, it actually has a lot going for it.
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