Day: December 22, 2010

Categories
fixing your desktop

Apple’s bad engineering: my Air just snapped

I now get to join the (sadly non-exclusive) club: My Macbook Air just snapped at the hinge, and now the lid WILL NOT close and WILL NOT stay upright – it just falls flat on the desk, like a book lying open.

I’m blogging this purely for anyone with an Air who doesn’t yet know about it – this is APPLE’S FAULT, it’s a manufacturing defect, and they are (usually) obliged to fix it for free. If they make a mistake, the charge can be anywhere from $500-$1,000 (from reports I’ve heard) – so you *really* need to know about this.

Sob. Whimper. No laptop, and I can’t even put it back in the case / bag – I have to hold it two-handed to stop it from ripping apart at the seams.

Sadly, this laptop has been upgraded and repaired before, and has scratches and minor bumps on the case, so I’m dreading getting ranted at by the Apple staff. This has happened before, when a brand-new Apple power adapter broke within two weeks, and the manager on duty was having a bad day and decided to accuse me of “deliberately” breaking it so I could get cash for it. Seriously? I would break my laptop to try and get a $60 refund? Yikes. Get a grip, lady!

Categories
fixing your desktop photos security system architecture web 2.0

FlickrEdit – looks like a virus?

IMHO, Flickr/Yahoo has one of the best user-authentication systems I’ve ever seen. I’m sure it’s no accident that Twitter (eventually) moved to a system that is extremely similar.

(NB: I don’t know if flickr copied if from someone else, but they were the first I remember seeing like this, many years ago)

You want sensitivity in your security? Yeah!

It’s so sensitive that it’s currently blocking FlickrEdit’s (bad, broken, buggy) implementation. Not just with an error; not even with a warning … but with giant red letters, a yellow background, and a warning icon:

I was pretty annoyed that the app was seemingly so poorly written it wasn’t doing the desktop-based auth that it should be – and that it popped-open a web browser and “told” me to login (Flickr’s auth-system is slightly more seamless than that, and a much better user-experience).

But I was very impressed that Flickr noticed it too, and decided to warn me that this might be a scam of some kind…

Leaving just one question…

…is this open-source project buggy, or has someone hacked the source and put in a virus? Hmm…

Well. I’ve contacted the project owners, and informed them. Interesting to see what they say.

In the meantime, I have so much faith in Flickr’s authentication system (e.g. I know that it doesn’t share passwords) that I’m happy to go ahead and use the application. There are very few systems where I’d do this, but flickr’s (approach) is one of them.

Categories
iphone programming

Writing apps for Nokia / Ovi – Attempt 1

I’ve written lots of apps for iPhone/iPad and Android. Recently, Nokia kindly gave me a new N8. So, over Xmas, I thought it would be fun to write some games for it.

Didn’t get very far. Nokia “only supports Windows”, according to their developer site.

There also seems to be a lot of confusion over which language they expect you to use – Symbian C++? (which has the confusing one-line explanation “Edit”) … Python? … J2ME? … etc.

I found a promising doc that talked about “porting from Android to S60” – which would give modern developers a way to write good code (i.e. in Java), and then back-port, maybe. But it was riddled with missing links, missing info, and bizarre propaganda (e.g. implying Android is “bad” because it supports standards like Java, whereas J2ME is “good” because … it doesn’t)

At this point, I (temporarily) gave up. I’d like to re-visit this in the New Year, but right now I don’t have a Windows machine with me (I’ve only got my Apple laptop). Android will let me write code on my laptop, then jump straight to my desktop once I’m back at work.

Of course, Apple only “allows” you to work on non-Windows machines – but they are the market-leader, they can get away with this (evil though it is!). IMHO, Android and Nokia/Ovi cannot.

I’m surprised and disappointed that Nokia has so little apparent interest in pulling-in wayward iPhone devs. If it were me, I’d have thrown up a massive, colourful, front-page picture saying: “iPhone developer? Fed up with Submission? Want to sell your apps to 1 billion people? Click here!” … or similar.

Given how painful Apple’s app-submission process is, there are plenty of iPhone devs looking for alternatives.

With Android, you can go straight from iPhone dev to Android dev. There’s a simple website dedicated to new developers (with some serious flaws and missing pages in the docs, but the experience is otherwise good). Nokia’s setup by contrast seems like they’re not really trying (yet).