Category: Apple

Apple hardware, software, website, technology

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Apple

iPhone 5 Thoughts

iPhone 5

iPhone 5

Some thoughts on the iPhone 5:

  • Design – The black model is a bit of a departure having finally removed the metal ring that’s framed the iPhones of the past. It looks more subtle in white. Otherwise it’s the classic iPhone design, just longer.
  • Dimensions – The larger screen will be nice, I suspect they’ve held the line in dimensions with the 4S to avoid fragmenting the ecosystem too much and upsetting developers (see: Android). Letterboxing makes old apps usable. It’s hardly perfect but a respectable long term move. Unlike many other phones it still seems usable with one hand.
  • Camera – In my opinion one of the bigger features is the improved camera. “The best camera is the one you have on you”. For more and more people it’s their phone. It will never replace an SLR, sheer physics and properties of light limit that. It however is substantially better than previous incarnations. Sapphire Crystal lens is pretty cool too. My lens scratched once before and it cost $30 to swap out the back panel. This means that won’t be likely to happen again. Backside ilumination sensor and large aperture mean better night photos. Something just about every mobile phone stinks at.
  • Panorama – Lots of apps already offer this feature. Apple did mention there’s new “image processing chip”. Curious if some of the algorithms to do panorama’s are accelerated for performance. That would make it a huge win. Also potentially better quality for the time it takes to process.
  • LTE – About time. I suspect they’ve been playing with LTE for ages, but opted against it because of power consumption. Apple held the line with power consumption. Seems like a win.
  • Dual band WiFi – I’m assuming both the iPhone 5 and Kindle HD include 5 GHz because the chipset offers it. While 5 GHz is fast, it’s got pretty limited range, and isn’t really necessary on a mobile device, especially one that can only process so much data at a time. You’re not pushing 300 Mbps to the iPhone 5. Marketing hype, but it’s not a bad thing to have.
  • New Display – Integrated touch is pretty neat. Rather than 2 layers to the screen it’s now one. Given the previous one generation was glued, this doesn’t really make repairs any more expensive. You had to replace the whole thing anyway. Apple mentions it makes things brighter. I’m betting that means they need less power per pixel to light the screen meaning it’s more energy efficient and thus cuts power needs despite the larger size or at least offsets it.
  • Lightning – New cable isn’t terribly surprising. It sounds like an active cable, but it doesn’t seem 100% certain. I’m betting it will be difficult or impossible to see cheap 3rd party cables like we did in the past if that’s the case. The adapter is ugly, and I’ll likely be using those for a while to keep my old stuff working with it. Budget for a few cables and at least one adapter. Eventually we’ll forget about that migration.
  • New earbuds – I’ll hold judgement. The original ear buds were actually decent sound wise, however it was virtually impossible properly position them in your ear to appreciate it. I ditched the Apple ones long ago for something more comfortable.

Overall the announcement met my expectations. I didn’t expect an all new phone, just a ton of revisions. It makes sense Apple didn’t include NFC. If Apple wants to go the payment route I’d expect them to do so via a Pay with Square like geofencing scheme.

Lastly, it appears AT&T will grandfather existing unlimited data customers even with LTE. Not so for Verizon customers.

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Apple

Macintosh SE ROM Easter Egg

NYC Register did some interesting digging into the Macintosh SE’s ROM to find an Easter Egg. This particular one is the photo of some team members. It’s actually quite interesting that they had enough extra space on the ROM to do that. You’d think for cost reasons they’d go with as little as they could get away with.

This makes me wonder how many similar secrets have never been discovered, and some that will perhaps never be discovered.

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Apple

How To Stop CalendarAgent From Eating CPU

Recently ran into an issue with Calendar causing a huge CPU spike. Checking the system.log I noticed the following repeatedly in my log:

CalendarAgent[379] Unexpected EOF, returning last token as fallback

CalendarAgent is essentially Calendar’s backend (that’s how it’s also able to power the notification center). The best resolution I’ve found is to completely clear out the calendar and recreate it. Process I used was as follows:

  1. Remove the Calendar from “Mail, Contacts & Calendars” pref panel (just uncheck from the account). Then go into Calendar and make sure the account is removed. If it’s not, remove it.
  2. Delete ~/Library/Calendars/
  3. Delete ~/Library/Preferences/com.apple.iCal.plist
  4. Go back into the “Mail, Contacts & Calendars” pref panel, put the calendar back. Give it some time to download.

That seems to have worked for me.

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Apple Security

iPhone Too Secure From Law Enforcement?

According to the US Department of Justice (DOJ) the iPhone is largely uncrackable at this point:

“I can tell you from the Department of Justice perspective, if that drive is encrypted, you’re done,” Ovie Carroll, director of the cyber-crime lab for the CCIPS division of the Department of Justice, said earlier this month during his presentation at DFRWS. “When conducting criminal investigations, if you pull the power on a drive that is whole-disk encrypted you have lost any chance of recovering that data.”

Of course there are a fair number of tools out there for iOS 4 and below including UFED Ultimate and XRY. There is a lack of iOS 5 tools, at least that are being publicly advertised.

However, there’s arguably little need for such a tool anymore. As users put data on in “the cloud”, law enforcement doesn’t even need the physical phone, they can just send a request to Apple (or Google) for the data they want. I suspect this is at least part of what Steve Wozniak was talking about when he mentioned “horrible problems” in the next five years. It’s worth noting Apple has almost zero transparency regarding law enforcement requests and how they are vetted. It’s not even clear a warrant is necessary to request data. The law certainly isn’t clear in that regard.

If anything, I think it’s becoming easier for law enforcement, not harder.

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Apple Networking

iOS 6 Adds Wi-Fi Plus Cellular

A nice little scoop from Apple Insider about iOS 6 shipping with a new setting. Wi-Fi Plus Cellular it will allow your phone to fall back to cellular when a Wi-Fi access point is slow. A rather nice little enhancement.

I’d actually love to see Wi-Fi be geofenced, so that it will automatically enable itself in certain locations. I don’t need Wi-Fi on all the times, but there are certain locations where iOS devices could utilize it. Why should I need to toggle it myself if the device knows where it is? I’d love if my phone knew it had access to Wi-Fi at home and could switch automatically when I’m home. It seems like this would be simple enough to do right. Apple does all the pieces already, it’s just a matter of doing it together.

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Apple Space

Mars Curiosity Lands

Mars Curiosity First Pics

Mars Curiosity First Pics

I’ve said it once today, and I’ll say it again:

Realization: No matter what I do today, it won’t be as awesome as landing a 1 ton robot on Mars with a space crane.

Curiosity is the pinnacle of science and if it’s predecessors (Spirit and Opportunity) are any indication will have a long life of helping us explore Mars.

A neat little side note is that the processor of choice in the rover is a RAD750. Which is based on the PowerPC 750, aka the PowerPC G3. When you look at the specs, you’ve got to admit, it looks a lot like those G3 Mac’s (except they used spinning disks and not flash storage back then):

On-board memory includes 256MB of DRAM and 2 GB of Flash Memory both with error detection and correction and 256kB of EEPROM.

A neat little tidbit. This rover’s close relative was my desktop computer in High School.

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Apple

SVN In Mountain Lion

This one caught me by surprise. With 10.8 Mountain Lion, installing Xcode doesn’t mean tools like svn will be automatically available via command line. If you want to use svn by terminal for example you’ll have to first open Xcode, next go into Preferences and find the Downloads tab. Then install “Command Line Tools”. After a few minutes you’ll then have all the old tools you know and love available just like before.

Seems SVN is 1.6 what shipped with Mountain Lion:

$ svn --version
svn, version 1.6.18 (r1303927)
   compiled Jun 15 2012, 19:07:58

To bad it’s not 1.7. Lots of nice improvements since 1.6 shipped. Apple tends to be somewhat conservative in what it bundles, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone.

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Apple

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion

OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion is pretty nice, however I don’t think it really has a killer feature (though John Siracusa’s exhaustive review lists pretty much every change). Notification center is in my opinion the closest to it, and not for notifications itself, but because it can serve as a sort of dash board for calendar making it really accessible. I think that will change my workflow a bit. Lots of subtle UI polish which is nice and appreciated. For those who use Calendar’s location field for phone numbers it’s nice that it’s always completely visible now and never cut off. Apple’s been resolving this slowly over time. OS X 10.6 was terrible when it came to this.

I still don’t understand why my desktop picture reverts every OS upgrade. I’m also a little disappointed HFS+ hasn’t been replaced with something more modern.

Overall a smooth upgrade.

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Apple Mozilla Web Development

On Apple’s Lack Of Adaptive Image Support In WebKit

It’s becoming clear to me that despite Apple having a huge chunk of the mobile web, it still treats the web as a second class citizen on iOS and Mac OS X. My latest battle is adaptive images, in particular for use in High DPI devices (“Retina” on the Mac). High DPI displays are awesome. I own an iPad 3, and it’s one of the greatest displays I’ve ever looked at. What I don’t get is why Apple is making it so difficult to take advantage of as a developer.

Currently, there’s no easy way to switch image resolutions based on the display being used. The basis of that isn’t Apple’s fault. Nobody thought of the problem when HTML was first created. All of the methods have ugly tradeoffs. They are hacks. Even Apple.com doesn’t have a great solution. They were doing image replacement (easier to read version here). Apple does however have a solution called image-set which looks like it will be in iOS 6 and Mac OS X 10.8.

That’s several months later. The iPad 3 was announced March 7, which was only about 2 weeks after the initial proposal. Why wasn’t a solution for web authors included when the iPad 3 shipped? It seems silly that there’s no API to properly interface with one of the most touted features of the new device. Of course there’s a way to take advantage of that brilliant display if you build a native app.

You could argue that Apple didn’t want to rush implementing something proprietary without discussing it with the community at large, but Apple has said in the past:

tantek (Mozilla): I think if you’re working on open standards, you should propose your features before you implement them and discuss that here.
smfr (Apple): We can’t do that.
sylvaing (Microsoft): We can’t do that either.

So Apple is pretty candid about reserving the right to implement features without discussion, yet nothing happened. It’s not that such a discussion would have been a “leak”. The iPhone 4’s display would be adequate justification for the feature. In fact it’s mentioned in the first sentence of that proposal in www-style by Edward O’Connor. So not disclosing the new product doesn’t seem to be the reason either. Apple could have done this a year ago without anyone being any wiser about the iPad 3’s display.

I can’t be the only one who’s scratching his head over this. Why didn’t the iPad 3 ship with a browser capable of providing an efficient way to switch images? The cynic in me would say “to encourage native app development”, but then why bother now?

The upside is Apple products have high OS adoption rates. All those retina iPad 3’s will be running iOS 6 relatively quickly. If it were a popular Android device I’d be much more concerned because we’d be dealing with 2 years of devices on a stale OS with no support. This is why we need more competition in mobile. We need web solutions to be a priority, not an afterthought.

As far as I’m aware image-set is also prefixed, but that’s another rant.

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Apple

The iPad In Star Wars

StarWars Tablet Computer
© 20th Century Fox

StarWars Tablet Computer

It dawned on me today while watching “Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace” that George Lucas actually featured a surprisingly iPad like device. It was used by Shmi Skywalker, Anakin’s mother (left) and Queen Amidala (right) to watch the podrace which occurred over a larger terrain than spectators could see. It was wireless, thin, and roughly the same form factor, but with handles. In theory if licensing weren’t so complicated we could watch sports like that today at stadiums.

Interesting to note that even in a world where interplanetary travel is almost trivial, a tablet computer is thicker than the iPads we have today. Then again the timeline was “a long time ago”. What an amazing world we live in when you can beat George Lucas’s imagination in a mere 15 years.

Capture © 20th Century Fox