xinsight

Youtube version:

http://youtu.be/d7kJdFGH-WI

Reversing engineering apps is always educational. You can see a lot just with a class-dump of an unencrypted binary.

Update: If you add "www" to the URL, you get a 404.

I'm having a hard time believing that this is run by Apple. The appear to be the registrar in the domain records - and the technical note clearly indicates they control appstore.com

https://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#qa/qa1633/_index.ht...

But it seems off-brand for the following reasons:

* requests to the main domain uses an HTML redirect instead of an HTTP redirect (as if they didn't have permissions to configure the webserver properly)

* the webserver name is hidden on normal requests (see above), but visible on 404 requests. The servers are "Apache/2.2.3 (PU_IAS)" and "Apache/2.2.15 (Oracle)"

* the message on a request to appstore.com is infantile (and unstyled) "Bye Bye You shouldn't be here."

Odd.

I only see redirects to an itunes search.

  curl -I http://appstore.com/startrekapp
  HTTP/1.1 302 Found
  Server: somethingNice.
  Date: Tue Jun  1 12:48:03 PDT 1999 PDT
  Referer: http://appstore.com/
  Location:   http://search.itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZContentLink.woa/wa/link?mt=8&path=apps%2fstartrekapp
  Content-type: text/html
  Content-length: 470

If you don't launch iTunes, it results in a bland/useless page in the browser. Lot more work to do before this could be considered a "vanity URL".

Same in Germany if you want to file your taxes online.

However, using a java applet to login is slow and painful. Maybe this move my Apple will increase support costs and encourage these govt agencies to drop the java requirement.

Yes. And as an added bonus: If you're sitting, you have two hands free to read hacker news on your phone. (Pinch to zoom with one hand is damn near impossible.)

I've tries using pixelmator as an alternative to photoshop. The main problems: No layer effects, no pattern fill, no paths. Good for simple stuff though.

Great work and a fantastic writeup. One crucial interaction missing for the native scrollview feel is tapping the time in the status bar to quickly scroll back to the top. Does mobile safari expose that event?

Edit: it scrolls to top if you tap the navbar. The anim is a bit wonky, but it works.

It's actually an iPhone 4S. I just updated to iBooks 2.0.1 and it works! Thanks for the follow up.

fyi - Trying to read the epub file in ibooks and i get this error:

This page contains the following errors:

error on line 1 at column 1: Document is empty error on line 1 at column 1: Encoding error

Update: PDF works, but requires a lot of scrolling on the iphone.

Also, it's a 40 page "book".

clickable link: http://www.photohackday.com

I think you're missing the OP's point. He isn't suggesting ending postal service, but coming up with new and better services instead of trying to scare people away from email.

For many people, the post office is just an incredibly slow, junk mail delivery system. If you care about the USPS, I'm surprised you don't agree with the OP that new ideas are needed.

(One idea i'd like to see is a registered email service, so you know an email was received. The post office has the public's trust to pull this off.)

No matter how environmental the paper is, sending paper to people who don't want it is a huge waste of resources.

I'm fond of skeleton as well. The only drawback I've found is that it uses a 16-column layout. I find I often want to divide the screen in thirds and 12-columns would be much handier.

In case any one else wants to follow him on twitter (only RSS is linked on his site): http://twitter.com/swombat

So people can be jailed for copyright violations now? What happens to a corporation when it violates copyright? Seems we should all become corporations simply as insurance.

How do you know if music is RIAA music? (That could be a useful web service.)

My solution to the problem of studying the animated radar images was to ditch the VCR metaphor to control the animation and use the mouse or finger position. Example (Toronto):

http://radar.xinsight.ca/

Seems like people with their own domains who use google apps should have been be the ideal lead users to seed google+. A missed opportunity.

Agreed. It's frustrating that I can pay money to larger companies online (phone, cable, internet, etc.) but I can't send money to another person. Clearly it's technically possible, but the banks don't want to enable this for normal people, so North American's are stuck mailing IOUs (cheques) around.

Totally agree. There is so much to hate about the DVD watching experience - the menus, unskippable ads/trailers, poor image quality, getting stuck on a scratch - I can't wait for them to disappear.

But, i'm guessing the DVD fans are actually arguing for the larger catalog, not for plastic discs.

I used to love the Singleton (anti-)pattern. It's a huge improvement from using your AppDelegate as a global storage area, but it still encourages sloppy code. I find it the code much cleaner when you pass in the objects a class needs instead of calling up the singleton from all over the place.

There are some legitimate uses for singletons, but if you need a singleton macro, you're probably over using it.

My concern with the wordpress cacheing plugins I've looked at is that they require the webserver to have write access to the webserver directory. This is particularly dangerous on shared webhosts, as a malicious customer on the same server could write php files in your cache directory.

Agreed, I wouldn't want to backup my entire laptop on s3. But since the first 5GB on Amazon's s3 are free, I find it's a great way to keep an extra backup of my current projects.

I agree - it's best to not let your enemy frame the debate. And agreeing to points is certainly not going to help your case.

That said, there is lots you can say. This is my favorite example of a great smackdown response from a small cable manufacturer to Monster cable who claimed design infringement. Turns out the owner of the cable company was a retired lawyer. It's long - but educational. Here's a sample of what's inside:

"If you sue me, the case will go to judgment, and I will hold the court's attention upon the merits of your claims--or, to speak more precisely, the absence of merit from your claims--from start to finish. Not only am I unintimidated by litigation; I sometimes rather miss it."

http://www.audioholics.com/news/industry-news/blue-jeans-str...

It's funny that you mention Settlers, since every time I've played it's always been quite obvious after the initial pieces are laid who will win hours later. If you don't have the good spots, it's a painful, slow grind to defeat.

However, it is a hugely popular game, and I'd love to know why.

That's how I always used Wordpress, but it's not exactly elegant. You always have to make little edits in a small textarea box. No syntax highlighting. Need to submit the entire article to save (instead of command-s). You lose your cursor position when you save (super-annoying with longer posts). Wordpress doesn't support markdown natively. etc.

As a kid in Canada, I had this radio shack battery club card, where I could get a free battery every month. I always got the 9V size, which was perfect for little projects, handheld games or just sticking on your tongue. Sad to see what the shack became, but that little promo bought them a ton of goodwill.

I try to read as much as I can about design - try out the latest tricks (e.g. grids, golden ratios) and pay attention to what works and why - but somehow that's not enough. To get to the next level, web app developers need proper design critiques -- where good (or amazing) designers weigh in on designs that are still in their early stages. I wonder if such a service or community exists...

Yes it's painful. I find it's best to use safari to browse netflix and then when a video plays it launches the app.

Funny how netflix constantly sends surveys about picture quality (which is always fine) and their website ui is so clunky and broken.