It's a blog! by Hugh Marshall

Hugh Marshall is an Accounting student at Victoria University in Wellington, New Zealand. He's interested in Photography, Coffee, Running, and has an addiction to tech blogs.

[hughmarshall]

My iPhone 4 has gotten so slow, I'm finally upgrading it to iOS 7. If it's gonna be slow anyway, I may as well be running the latest version

— Hugh Marshall (@hsmarshall)

November 30, 2013

So.

Yea. It happened.

[hughmarshall]

Wikipedia returns to Spotlight Search in iOS 7.0.3

SO Happy about this.

And no, I still haven't installed iOS 7 on my iPhone 4.

That's a terrible idea.

(via macstories.net)

[hughmarshall]

iOS7 (again)

I currently still have an iPhone 4. It's incredibly slow. So naturally, I don't want to update it to iOS7, which reports seem to indicate makes it even slower. But do you know what's maddening? Apple, in it's infinite wisdom, has decided that every time I turn on my phone, I should see a notification badge on the settings icon. A notification THAT I CAN'T GET RID OF. For an update I don't want. ARGH.

[hughmarshall]

iOS 7

I've only installed it on my iPad 4, but I've found it surprisingly buggy. Changing wallpaper is veeery slow, even forcing a restart of the device once, and occasional weird interface glitches. Still considering whether or not to risk installing it on my iPhone 4.

[hughmarshall]

It's finally happened.

[hughmarshall]

The head of New Zealand's Institute of IT Professionals, Paul Matthews, celebrated the passage of the bill, tweeting: "Software patents are now disallowed in New Zealand. #Historic #Awesome #Yay."

The hashtags sum it up pretty well.

[hughmarshall]

Perhaps what Nuance really meant to say is that the GM would be available on September 10, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on here.

It's also a Tuesday. Apple likes Tuedays.

[hughmarshall]

Q: Did Chairman Bill Gates ask you to stay or go?

Ballmer: No. Bill -- I mean, no. Bill respects my decision. I mean, it's one of these things when if it's -- you know, ultimately these kinds of things have to be one's own personal decision.

Sooo... that's a yes? no? yes?

[hughmarshall]

Little ol' NZ bringing us into the future.

[hughmarshall]

John Gruber sums up why:

I think their only chance to make this happen is, and always was, if Mark Shuttleworth steps in and ponies up the dough on his own. People who use and know Ubuntu skew towards not paying for things. People who pay for things don’t know Ubuntu.

Which is sad, since the phone actually sounds pretty amazing.

(via Daring Fireball)

[hughmarshall]

Last Thursday, an intruder attempted to secure personal information of our registered developers from our developer website. Sensitive personal information was encrypted and cannot be accessed, however, we have not been able to rule out the possibility that some developers’ names, mailing addresses, and/or email addresses may have been accessed.

...

In order to prevent a security threat like this from happening again, we’re completely overhauling our developer systems, updating our server software, and rebuilding our entire database. 

For my birthday present, I asked my parents to pay for membership to the iOS developer program. It was difficult enough trying to explain to them what it was exactly that they were paying for, without having to also go into "Well... you can't actually buy it for me right now because they were hacked, and then they took the entire site down to try to fix it..."

[hughmarshall]

My First iOS Apps

So I've finally started learning iOS development, and so far, I'm really enjoying it. After about 36 hours, I've gone from knowing basically nothing about Objective-C and Cocoa, to creating two very basic iPhone apps. I've been using Stanford's iTunes U course on iOS development and also following the tutorials on Apple's developer portal, both of which are pretty amazing.

The first is just the basic "Hello World" app from the Your First iOS App tutorial at Apple's developer portal, with a bit of colour added to make it slightly less boring. The app consists of a Text Field, for the user to enter their name; a Label, which displays the string Hello + the text entered in the text field; and a button, which displays the label when pressed.

The second is the first part of the "Matchismo" app you create as part of Stanford's iTunes U course on iOS Development. Currently, all the app does is create an array representing a deck of cards, display a button in the shape of a card, and a Label. When the button is pressed, the card is "flipped over" displaying the face of the next card in the deck. Pressing the button again removes that card from the deck and presents the next card, which is face down. The label updates with each "flip" of a card. Once the deck is empty, the app simply creates a new deck, resets the counter, and continues. Eventually, this will grow into a card matching game similar to memory.

[hughmarshall]

The Bluebox Security research team – Bluebox Labs – recently discovered a vulnerability in Android’s security model that allows a hacker to modify APK code without breaking an application’s cryptographic signature, to turn any legitimate application into a malicious Trojan, completely unnoticed by the app store, the phone, or the end user.

I used to think Android was rubbish just because of the user experience.

(via The Loop)

[hughmarshall]

(via Ctrl Alt Del - Mattrick, out! (2013-07-03))

[hughmarshall]

Definitely worth a read.

[hughmarshall]

Marco Arment, on iOS 7:

The theme is clear: iOS 7’s UI requires some of Apple’s biggest strengths, and efforts to copy it will be hindered by some of Android’s biggest weaknesses.

[hughmarshall]

Apple’s reasoning was that they will not allow iOS applications to use iCloud to sync “non-user-generated” data between devices. After some lengthy followup, we learned that while using a “drawing application” to create a new piece of art and then saving that file would be considered “user-generated”, using our app to add a signature and content to a PDF and saving it as a new file is not “user-generated”. The exception, of course, being for Apple’s own iOS applications, like those in iWorks. So after a long phone call with Apple that equated to my logical arguments being repeatedly contested with the same sentence from an apparent script (“your app does not follow our guidelines regarding user-generated documents in iCloud”), what was their recommendation for how to get over this hurdle? Use a 3rd party iCloud competitor. Wow.

Apple really doesn't "get" cloud services. And they really need to.