Apple Posts

A small update to the Mac Oil Price Widget has been released. This fixes a couple of bugs that would cause all prices to be displayed as positive and for the percentage of change to not be accurate. You can download it over on it’s page.

Because I’ve encountered this problem twice, I’m going to do a little write-up about it. As much for me as for the next person who encounters this problem. In a very un-Apple way, this process is very poorly documented and very un-intuitive from a user-developer standpoint. Everything that’s here, I’ve culled from Googling about aimlessly and finding on Stack Overflow. **Symptom: **You create a new app in Xcode with no changes and launch it. It launches just fine. You then go to the target summary settings and click “Enable Entitlements” and have an iCloud key/value store and or containers. Now you launch it and nothing happens. Nothing appears, but Xcode still thinks the app is running. **What’s Happening: **To understand what is happening, you have to go have a look in the Console application (note, the actual system Console.app, not the debug console in Xcode). Open that up and select “All Messages”. Look for something that looks like this: 1/28/12 7:49:03.945 PM taskgated: killed <your app ID>[pid 43838] because its use of the com.apple.developer.ubiquity-container-identifiers entitlement is not allowed What’s happening is that taskgated is killing your app because it’s not properly signed to use iCloud. And for some reason that is not entirely clear to me, the app being killed is not at all reported back to Xcode - Xcode thinks the app is running. So you just sit there waiting for something to happen with no clue that this sinister lurking background process has killed your app. How to fix it: There are two ways you can go from here to fix this. The first and easiest, if you are just turning on entitlements and aren’t intending to use iCloud, you can just remove the iCloud Key/Value Store and iCloud containers from the target summary. After doing this, it should work. But, if you are making an iCloud-enabled app, there’s a long list of things you need to do. First, understand that you need to be a paid member of Apple Developer Program. Log into ADC. Go to the Mac Dev Center, and the Developer Certificate Utility. Create an App ID by going to App IDs and clicking the Create App ID button in the upper right. Enter the name of your app and the bundle identifier. It usually looks something like “com.company.app”. Click Continue. Your app ID should be entered. Click the App ID you just entered, then click “Enable for iCloud.” Click save. Next, go to Certificates. If you haven’t created any certificates yet, click “Create Certificate” in the upper right and follow the directions. Note, you need both a development and an application certificate. Next, go to Systems. Be sure you’ve added your Mac (and, for good measure, any others you’ll use for development). Finally, go to Profiles. 1. Click Create Profile in the upper right. 2. Select "Development Provisioning Profile" 3. Give it a name. 4. Select the app you created in step 3. 5. Select the certificate you want to use. 6. Select the systems you want to use (I did all). 7. Click "Generate" It may take a few seconds, then it will give you a download. 8. Open the downloaded profile. It will open in the "profiles" preference pane (which doesn't seem to appear until you try to install a profile). Click install. Now, in Xcode: 1. Go to Window > Organizer. 2. Select "Devices" on the top, and "Provisioning Profiles" on the left. 3. At the bottom, select "Automatic Device Provisioning" at the bottom, and click "Refresh". If you've never done this before, you'll need to log in with your ADC username and password. 4. Give it a second, it should pull in your profiles. 5. Go to your project, select your app target and select "Build Settings." Scroll down to "Code Signing." You may need to go to "All" from "Basic" in the predicate selector. 6. Under Code Signing Identity, select the dev profile you just created. Note: don't use the wildcard one - it doesn't seem to work. Whew. Now, if everything went as planned (and you sacrificed a goat to Tim Cook and Tim found your sacrifice pleasing) you should be able to launch your app with no errors. But help! I got a weird failure on build! If you get a failure on build that looks like this: Command /usr/bin/codesign failed with exit code 1 Then it is possible that your developer certificate is set to “Always Trust” in Keychain. It needs to be set to “System defaults” for reasons that escape me entirely. Note, this may not be entirely accurate and may even be cargo-cultish. But I’ve encountered this “issue” twice now (once in December, and once now) so I decided to write down my steps so that, in a few months when this befuddles me again, I’ll know where to look for the answer.

After a far longer wait than was intended, the Mac Oil Price Widget version 2.0 has been released. It was completely rewritten – like, I didn’t even look at the old code – and uses Bloomberg Energy as it’s information source. The display was also simplified – I really didn’t care about the chart in the old version, so the new version prominently displays the price and how much it’s changed. Download Here!

A few months ago, I decided I wanted to try exploring the Mac App Store ecosystem as a developer. I’ve been writing little Objective-C apps for myself for awhile, and I decided I wanted to see what it was like from the other side. So I wrote this little app called Airplane Setting. It was a stupid simple little app that made it easy to turn off your radios with a single action. I wrote the app and paid my $99 admission fee. And after a month of back and fourth with Apple and a couple of rejections for what I consider to be dubious reasons as best (especially seeing as how I could point out existing apps in the store that broke the “rule” they said my app was breaking, but whatever, their store, their rules…), my little App was finally approved for sale. It did moderately well, passing 1,000 downloads with virtually no advertising from me. I had big dreams for this little app. Plugins, global hotkey support, localization, Applescript support, and more potential functionality. But all that was dashed by “Entitlements” and Apple’s requirement that all apps must be sandboxed. Look, in theory, the idea of sandboxing an app is not bad. The problem here is Apple’s all-or-nothing approach to sandboxing. The selection of entitlements are just so limited as to be nearly useless for anyone creating a unique, new or complex app - especially one that requires hardware access. Your choice is either to sandbox your app, choosing from the available selection of entitlements, or not sandbox it and not be in the Mac App Store at all starting in March. There’s no reason to only provide such a limited subset of functionality that a developer must choose from. Would it not be better to provide us a wider set of entitlements and allow us to justify our reasons for needing them when we submit our app? The reason Apple gives for requiring sandboxing is to prevent “rogue apps” from destabilizing the system. But when you consider that the App Store itself is curated, this requirement makes even less sense. If Apple is curating the store, how does a “rogue app” end up in the App Store? I’m a huge Apple fanboy. I have almost all Apple hardware in my house, from my iMac to my Macbook Pros, to my iPad and iPhone and my wife’s iPod Touch. I had AppleTVs before they were cool (and there’s one on every one of my TVs now). I love Apple. But as an developer … I [expletive] hate Apple for this “innovation” that crippled my once-promising little app. So, at this point, my options are: Leave Airplane Setting in the App Store. Doing so will mean no further updates so I’ll likely cease development. Remove Airplane Setting from the App Store and start distributing it exclusively from the website. My original intent with Airplane Setting was to explore what it was like to be an App Store developer. I guess … now I know what it’s like to be an App Store developer, and living in constant fear of Apple as a sword of damocles hanging over your head.

Dear Eclipse, We’ve known each other a long time, haven’t we? I remember when we first met. It was way back in 2005, two jobs ago when I was working at interactive Point of View. I was still a young, naive kid, just out of college. At the time I was just getting my start writing serious PHP code, and you were a breath of fresh air compared to what I had been using before (Dreamweaver). You seduced me with your awesome power and functionality. I used to love being able to have code on top and a browser window underneath. Ironically enough, one of my favorite features would eventually be something I couldn’t care the slightest about. Later that year I would move on to Asteria, and I took you with me. This was the first time I had two monitors on my desk, and I kept Eclipse in one, and a browser in the other while programming. Again, your raw power made complex tasks easy. I discovered Subversion integration, which made Tortoise (I was still on Windows at the time) irrelevant to me. Your Subversion tools turned me into a huge fan. When I moved jobs again, to dealnews, I again took you with me. Much to the chagrin of my coworkers, I preached the gospel of Eclipse. When I first started I was still in the Windows environment and my setup was much like it was at Asteria. Later that year when I switched to Mac, I again took you with me. You occupied a place of honor in my dock. We upgraded together. Through Callisto, Europa, Ganymede, Galileo, Helios and Indigo. We upgraded through Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion together. Sure, we had our occasional disagreements and outright fights. I remember one time when you would absolutely choke on the size of dealnews’ code tree. I would try other editors and IDEs. I tried jEdit, Coda and TextMate. But I always came back to you. But all things change, and this time I think we’re finally through together. The first sign you were no longer interested in me was the dropping of the official PHP build - the one I had been using for years. But you knew I was worried - you even said so on your website and pointed me to PDT - PHP Development Tools. This aphrodisiac, you told me, would make our relationship just like we were kids again. But what you didn’t tell me was that PDT would make you crazy and unstable in the worst kind of way. Your behavior has become increasingly erratic whenever you take PDT. You developed bugs, including ones that I could no longer justify. Ones that were literally costing me time every day. You said PDT could auto-complete code and when it does it works great. But when it doesn’t, the display glitches up the file so badly that the only way to get back into a usable state is to close the file and reopen. Now imagine doing this four or five times for every file you’re editing, every time you try to auto-complete some HTML. Your ill tempered behavior is costing me time and money. I tried to talk with you about it, but all you could say was NullPointerException. So, I’ve thought a lot about this. It’s been a good six year run, but I think it’s time we ended our relationship together. The truth is that I know about your other boyfriend, too. I know his name is Android, and I know you guys have been spending a lot of time together. And I’m okay with it. Really. All things change and we all have to adapt. The truth is I’ve been fooling around some with your cousin Netbeans, and I think we’re really hitting it off. In many ways, she reminds me of you. The difference is, Netbeans has herself together, is trying hard to improve herself and hasn’t forgotten who her friends are, instead of getting strung out on PDT and spending all her time hanging out in the backseat of Android’s Pinto. So goodbye, Eclipse. What we had was wonderful while it lasted and I’ll always treasure our time together and the memories we made. I hope your new life works out. Maybe we’ll see each other from time to time, but I honestly I don’t think that would be fair to Netbeans. She’s my new IDE now. -Rob Peck Eclipse User, 2005-2011

Normally, I’m not one to be too taken with the death of a “celebrity” … … but this one hurts. We truly lost a titan of our generation. A man who became synonymous with the company he founded, and whose products made life more awesome for millions of people. As I look around my house, pretty much every room has some touch of Apple, and all of that thanks to Steve. Rest in Peace, Steve Jobs. The world was enriched by your presence and is saddened with your loss. Thank you for everything you did.

I’m aware that the Mac oil price widget has quit functioning, and I’m aware of the cause as well. I’m working towards a more robust solution and should have something in the next week or so.

Because there doesn’t seem to be a good, simple way to track oil prices on the Mac dashboard anymore since the previous widget I used quit working, I whipped up a quick little widget that allows me to monitor the price of Crude Oil on the New York Mercantile Exchange. You can download it over on its own page.

So today, out of nowhere, Xcode 4 finally landed as an official release. After seemingly forever in beta, and me quipping more than once about it’s similarity to Duke Nukem Forever, Apple finally pulled the trigger and released it. But something changed. Xcode now has a price. And that has left me, as both a Mac user and a Mac developer, with a lot of questions. It’s either $4.99 if you’re not a registered, paid Apple developer, or free if you are a registered, paid Apple developer (with all its $99 per year price tag glory). Supposedly there’s some crazy accounting reason that they have to charge for it. This, of course, leaves open the possibility that Xcode will soon be free again once OS X 10.7 arrives. But, it also leaves open the possibility that Xcode will no longer be distributed with OS X and will always have a price tag. It may not even stay $4.99. It may be $49.99 or $499.99. There are additional questions, too. Does this mean that Apple is still distributing Xcode as a bundle with GNU GCC? Because there are things (such as MacPorts) that rely on the underlying foundation provided by the developer bundle that don’t actually use Xcode. Before, those were completely free. Now, they cost $4.99 unless they have split the underlying compiler from the IDE. And if they are still distributing it with GCC, that leads to all kinds of crazy interesting licensing questions. But I think the worst part is that there is now a barrier to entry, however low, to being a developer on a platform that is already a minority in market share. I can’t understand how Apple potentially believes that it is good and right to trade short term profits for long term growth in the number of potential developers. For the future of the Mac platform, I sure hope this isn’t their line of reasoning. So, let me tell you a little story. My first dabbling in programming came courtesy of QuickBASIC back in the MS-DOS and Windows 3.1 days. This was the late 80s or early 90s, so I would have been 10 or 11 at the time. I stumbled across the Qbasic environment included with MS-DOS by accident and found Nibbles. And, after playing it, I discovered that I could change things by making changes to the strange text presented on the screen. I could change colors and speeds. But it would be a couple of years before I really understood what I was doing. When Windows 95 came out (and along with it, Visual Basic 4), I talked my parents into getting me a copy. I don’t remember how much it cost but it was probably a lot because it was one of the few Christmas presents I got that year. But boy did I run with it. I’ve periodically felt guilty over that expense because I didn’t actually make anything really useful with it, but it was instrumental in furthering my education. Now I could do things on my computer far beyond what poor ol’ Qbasic was capable of. So I wrote lots of silly little programs. I put together a “family newsletter” one year that was installed and ran as a piece of software. I was pretty proud of that. I even wrote some software for my high school as part of a software development and AP Computer Science courses. Eventually, I would move on to other things. Other versions of Visual Basic, Java, C, a brief foray into LISP and Forth-based languages for programming MUDs, and eventually web programming. First in Perl, then in PHP. I even landed my first paying programming job while still in high school, writing applications for a local transit contractor. At first, these were Visual Basic applications. But by the time I left (August of 2000) everything was going to the web and so were we. But I can trace everything - my entire career, and my consuming passion for software engineering - back to Qbasic and Nibbles. A silly little game about a block snake, and a free development environment included with the operating system. Had I not stumbled on Qbasic and Nibbles, there’s a chance I would never have been a developer. This is not about $4.99. I spend more on coffee in a week than that. My worry is about that 11 year old kid out there somewhere who may never get the opportunity to stumble across Xcode or the sample applications in /Developer and realize the raw power they possess. This is an area where Apple, a company with billions in cash on hand, should be happy to show a loss. It would be to the benefit of their platform, both now and in the future. One of the great benefits of the Mac platform has been it’s low barriers of entry to developers. Sure, one could argue that the hardware is more expensive (and I could counter-argue that, for the quality of the equipment you are getting a bargain), but the development tools have always been freely available online and included with the machine. You could dabble in programming to your heart’s content. Sure, if you want to put something in the app store(s), you had to pay for admission, but there was nothing stopping you from getting all the way to that point, or even distributing your creations on your own. But this new trend of charging for the development tools - even if it is a paltry sum - sends, to me, a worrying signal about the course Apple intends to tread. They’ve now moved the gate from the last step to the first step. It’s a course that Microsoft, as above, once tread. Microsoft? They now give away a version of Visual Studio for free.

I have more than 20 various IM accounts set up in Adium on my Macintosh. But during the day, the only one I really want to be active is the one I use for work. The remainder, I want to leave logged in, but showing as away with a warning not to bother me unless it is important. But half the time I forget to set all those accounts as away, or I forget to set the work one as available, or some other issue that would arise out of a manual process interferes and too often it doesn’t get done. Enter AppleScript. I whipped up a surprisingly easy AppleScript to do just this: tell application "Adium" go away with message "Working. Please do not disturb unless necessary." go available first account end tell Because the work account is the first one, this makes it easy. It just sets all accounts as away and then sets the work one available. I shove this in my MarcoPolo ruleset to fire when I arrive at the office. The script to reverse the change when I leave is even easier. This is fired when I leave the office: tell application "Adium" to go available