Mac Daddy World

To quote from the immortal words of They Might Be Giants:

“Where’s my hovercraft?
Where’s my jet pack?
Where’s the font of acquired wisdom that eludes me now?”

Sometimes it seems like we really are stuck in a World Before Later On, but then, when you least expect it, you realize that it’s the future. The future, suddenly, is now.

Secure Future

Take this comment from deep in the Security framework for example:

/*
... You need to aquire [sic] this right to be able to perform a AuthorizationExecuteWithPrivileges() operation. In addtion [sic] to this right you should obtain whatever rights the tool you are executing with privileges need to perform it's [sic] operation on your behalf. Currently no options are supported but you should pass in the full path of the tool you wish to execute in the value and valueLength fields. In the future we will limit the right to only execute the requested path, and we will display this information to the user.
*/


I was in the process of debugging something that used to work but had stopped working on a new version of OS X. Suddenly I realized that the future was here, now. It sent shivers down my Spine.

Corrupt Future

Remember floppy disks? Remember colorful 800kb floppy disks? I clearly remember them, and will admit to having boxes full of hundreds of them. They’re filled with everything Glen and I did on a computer for 10 years: From 1988 when we got our first Mac, up until when floppy disks went the way of ADB, built-in modems, trackballs, Netscape, and the Palm Pilot. In fact, as early as 1998, the very first iMac boldly omitted a floppy disk drive. So it’s been nearly 10 years since Apple began phasing out the little suckers.

To get back to my point: I also clearly remember conversations to the effect of, “Someday in the future we won’t be able to use these disks. We won’t have a computer that reads them or even programs that will open the files. Also, aren’t these things only supposed to last about 15 years before going bad?”

Well, I do still have a computer that can read the disks… but all of the word processing files are in Microsoft Works 2.0 format. Guess what? Nothing reads that format anymore. Most of the drawings I did when I was 10 are in SuperPaint 1.0 or CricketPaint. Not sure how I’ll look at those again. You might be interested to know that Preview.app will open MacPaint files. Maybe a running inside joke at Apple?

Oh yeah, guess what else. Most of the disks that date from before 1992 have bad blocks… Yeah… they’re dropping like flies.

The future is now.

Unexpected Futures

With OS X 10.5 due out next month, and likely a team in Cupertino already hard at work on OS X 10.6, somebody in Apple marketing is tossing and turning in their sleep: “How long can we keep raising the number? How many big cat varieties are there anyways? What if we run out of cool sounding species? What happens when we get past 10.9? 10.10? I just don’t think that sounds right. I still can’t even believe they went with 10.4.10. Oh god I think I’m going to be fired.”

Certain Future

If there’s one thing we can be sure of, it’s that the future will arrive.

And I’ll close with some more They Might Be Giants:
You’re older than you’ve ever been.
And now you’re even older.
And now you’re older still.

Antone Gonsalves posted a great article to Information Week on Friday titled Renegade Developers Zero In On Apple iPhone OS. It includes some hilarious and informative quotes from yours truly. Here’s my favorite quote:

But so-called “native” applications are not for mainstream consumers. “There’s no easy way to get applications on the iPhone,” Aspeslagh said. “You have to make changes to your iPhone, and that really freaks people out. It’s a procedure that could turn your iPhone into a paperweight, if it’s not done correctly.”

Fun stuff. Let’s just hope it all has a happy ending.

After a very long development cycle, we released iGlasses 2 on August 27th. The new version has so many exciting new features; my favorite being the ability to digitally pan and zoom your camera (and even cooler, this can be accomplished using the Apple Remote!). Another really nice feature is the precise control over the built-in iSight’s brightness and the ability to lock the iSight’s auto exposure.

Amazingly, we’ve had only a few bug reports and they are very minor problems. With software, major updates are usually followed by a point release udpate in less than 48 hours. (I’m looking at you iTunes.) Not so with iGlasses 2. However, iGlasses 2.0.1 will be coming at some point to fix those minor issues.

Probably the worst bug is that iGlasses 2 causes a crash for 10.3.9 users when they run the Bruji apps (DVDPedia, BookPedia, etc.) We always feel terrible when our plugins cause pain to other developers. We do try to test every situation and we do run a beta progam but somehow we missed this one. The cause of the crash is interesting:

Watch out for duplicate class names

It’s a rare problem, but you can run into duplicate Objective-C class names when the dynamic linker is loading bundles at run-time. It turns out that iGlasses and __Pedia both used the excellent and free AppleRemote library by Martin Kahr. It’s an Obj-C class wrapper around the Apple Remote, which makes it really simple to use a remote in your app. Since neither Bruji nor iGlasses changed the name of the class, the dynamic linker gets an error when trying to load iGlasses.

Now, typically, this won’t cause a crash. The linker will print an error message and then continue, using only one of the two available classes. (This would cause immediate problems if the two classes were actually different internally.) Even though these two classes were probably identical, in this case 10.3.9 doesn’t deal with it so well. This is what we found in the system.log (absolute pathnames and other nonsense removed for readability):

Bookpedia: objc: Both Pediabase and iGlasses have implementations of class AppleRemote.
Bookpedia: objc: Using implementation from iGlasses.
Bookpedia: objc: thread is already initializing this class!
crashdump: Started writing crash report to: Bookpedia.crash.log

Yikes! The lesson? NEVER use simple class names! Always use some unique company or library prefix, even for classes you’re borrowing!
The easiest thing to do in this case is to just use a macro in your prefix file like this:

#define AppleRemote ECAppleRemote