KDBDallas

Most of the following was in response to the blog article by Layton Duncan of Polar Bear Farm.

iPhone developers were happy to see the AppStore come to life as it gave us a official way to release our app to the world. Little did we know that people would freak out about having to pay even $1 for apps, when before the App Store we were selling to the Jailbrake community for $10 or so, without complaint.

The $1 app issue is unfortunately not one that I think Apple can fix, as it’s not them causing it. It’s the consumers. Consumers seem to have it in their head that it is ok to pay $5, $10, $20 and up, for desktop applications, but that an iPhone app for some reason shouldn’t cost more then $1. Maybe they are stuck in the mind frame of old school cellphone apps/games that were absolute crap and not worth more then $1 (if even that), or if they just don’t understand what it really takes to make a beautiful, stable iPhone application.

Personally I think it is a combination of those 2 and that when the app store opened people were not sure what to charge, and some of the bigger name companies came to the AppStore with free and low price apps, and this set the consumers in a mind frame that free or almost free is what is expected. Who knows, maybe they are just cheap. The only way around this that I can see is for all or at least a large amount of developers to “ban together” and start charging a fair (to both sides) price.

No doubt it will hurt sells at first but perhaps we can get passed the misguided mentality.

Update: YouTube took down the video claiming Copyright infrigment (even though it was a 3min clip). Search YouTube for “Simpsons Mapple” and I am sure you will find others.

With the latest iPhone firmware update (2.2), Apple fixed several “security holes”, one of which broke KillExchangeLocks version 2.0.

The fix that broke things was CVE-ID: CVE-2008-4229

Impact: Restoring a device from backup may not re-enable the Passcode Lock

Description: The Passcode Lock feature is designed to prevent applications from being launched unless the correct passcode is entered. A race condition in the handling of device settings may cause the Passcode Lock to be removed when the device is restored from backup. This may allow a person with physical access to the device to launch applications without the passcode. This update addresses the issue by improving the system’s ability to recognize missing preferences. This issue does not affect systems prior to iPhone OS 2.0 or iPhone OS for iPod touch 2.0. Credit to Nolen Scaife for reporting this issue.

http://lists.apple.com/archives/security-announce/2008/Nov/msg00002.html

The key parts here is the resoultion, “This update addresses the issue by improving the system’s ability to recognize missing preferences”, and the person to blame is Nolen Scaife for reporting this issue.

KillExchangeLocks version 3 does not implement the ideal solution as Apple has done a pretty good job on their fix. Instead of removing the passcode automatically like before, instead you now force the settings app to alow you to remove the passcode, as if you had setup a passcode without using Exchange.

This still times out every 24 hours like before, as Apple is actively querying the Exchange server every 24 hours to update and/or validate the security settings.

The up side is you should only have to run this part once, and you will always be able to remove the passcode.

Version 3 gives you the option if you want to modify your Auto Lock timeout.

The problem here is that the iPhone will over write any change if you go into the Settings app and click on the General tab (which shows your timeout setting).

Therefore this could need to be reset often, if you go into Settings -> General a lot.

I added some extra Time out levels for your convience.

You can now choose between: Never, 1 min, 2 min, 3 min, 4 min, 5 min, 10 min, 15 min, 20 min, 25 min, 30 min, 35 min, 40 min, 45 min, 50 min, 55 min, and 1 hour time out levels.

As I said before, this is by no means the ideal fix, but it is the only way I have found so far, and I figure this is better then having nothing.

If you really want a better fix in place, I would ask you to think about donating to this project as that would make it easier for me to work on this project then other paying projects. It is in no way required, but welcomed. If you wish to donate you can do so using PayPal.

KillExchangeLocks is available in Cydia under Utilities.

In Mac OS X 10.5 Apple added a new set of API’s for adding an application to the users login items in Cocoa.

In looking for the way to use this new API, I stumbled upon Justin Williams’ blog carpeaqua.com where Justin was nice enough to put together a code example project showing just how to use this new API.

You can grab the sample project at his public code repository http://secondgear-public.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/SGLaunchAtLogin/

Thanks again to Justin for making this available.

Hopefully this page helps with his Google position for people searching for this info.

Read his full post at: http://log.carpeaqua.com/post/27727810/adding-an-application-to-login-items-in-mac-os-x

Desktop Remind is currently a featured download AND a staff pick on Apple.com’s downloads page!

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/productivity_tools/

I saw this in MacWorld and if you saw my post when I got my Mac Pro you will know that I think is SO true.

The Mac Pro is so sexy inside, unlike all other computers I have made or owned.

Just found this email in my inbox and I found it humorus so I thought I would share.

(Click to enlarge)