twitter - Mike Cohen

Sandboxing revisited

May 20, 2012 by Mike Cohen

When I submitted an update to Detective, I discovered a few tricky things related to sandboxing and embedded helper apps.

In order to support ‘start at login’ in a sandboxed app, you need to embed a helper app that launches the main app (the entire process is described here). What I didn’t realize is that the helper app also has to be signed, or it will fail to let you start it at login. However, when you sign the helper app, it will include its own embedded provisioning profile, so when you try to submit your app, it will be rejected with the following message:

Invalid Provisioning Profile Location – The provisioning profile for your Mac OS X app must be located in the Contents directory of the main app bundle. A provisioning profile is optional, but you cannot submit more than one.

One of the suggestions in Apple’s developer forum is to remove the embedded profile from the helper app. Note that deleting the embedded profile doesn’t affect the actual code signing. After some experimentation, I found that the easiest way to do it is to add a Run Script build phase to the main application that deletes the profile from the helper app:


#!/bin/sh
rm ${BUILT_PRODUCTS_DIR}/${PRODUCT_NAME}.app/Contents/Library/LoginItems/DetectiveLoginHelper.app/Contents/embedded.provisionprofile

After doing this, I was able to submit the app successfully.

Detective

April 1, 2012 by Mike Cohen

Detective is a new Mac application that notifies you of new Twitter followers and people who unfollow you. It lives in the menu bar and posts Growl notifications.

Links for 2011-6-2 through 2011-6-4

June 4, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-6-2 through 2011-6-4:

mikeash.com: Friday Q&A 2011-06-03: Objective-C Blocks vs. C++0x Lambdas: Fight! Blocks are perhaps the most significant new language feature introduced by Apple in years.
Tweetmarks Tweetmarks is a web service for setting and getting the "last read" tweet for a given Twitter user. It can be used to "sync" the reading position between multiple Twitter clients and platforms. It was created by Riverfold Software.
[objc explain]: Classes and metaclasses Good explanation of classes & metaclasses
Pilky.me – Dynamic Tips & Tricks with Objective-C Great article about the Objective C runtime & dynamically creating & overriding methods,
Why You Hate Comic Sans Everyone loves to hate Comic Sans. The child-like handwriting font is so infamous, there is a movement to try to ban it. Mention its name to the common layman (aside from a preschool teacher), and you will likely get a chuckle, mention it to a trained designer, and you’ll get a look of disgust. But what exactly makes Comic Sans so horrible?

Posted by Postilicious

Spam is killing Twitter

March 10, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Twitter’s spam problem has been getting steadily worse, despite claims that they’re taking steps to stop the spam. It has reach the point where any time I mention a device whose name begins with ‘i’, I get as many as 10 spam replies. These spammers all follow a typical pattern and are very easy to identify.

These spammers almost always have a generic icon, no followers, aren’t following anyone, and almost all of their tweets are @replies.

Twitter should be able to identify them and automatically block them. Until they do that, Twitter’s usefulness is severely limited.

Links for 2011-01-03 through 2011-01-05

January 5, 2011 by Mike Cohen

Links for 2011-01-03 through 2011-01-05:

Is This the End of the World? [Bad Things] – The new year has arrived and it is awful, what with bird/fish/crab death, floods, freezing temperatures, and zombie ex-Vice Presidents.
Squaring the Triangle: Secure, Decentralized, Human-Readable Names (Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought) – When using computers, we like to refer to things with names. For example, this website is known as “www.aaronsw.com”. You can type that into your browser and read these words. There are three big properties we might want from such names:
secure: that when you type the name in you actually get my website and not the website of an imposter
decentralized: that no central authority controls all the names
human-readable: that the name is something you can actually remember instead of some long string of randomness
In a classic paper, Zooko argued that you can get at most two of these properties at any one time.
How the Tea Party’s fetish for the Constitution as written may get it in trouble. – By Dahlia Lithwick – Slate Magazine – Read It And Weep – (@Dahlialithwick riffs on the latest round of Constitutional Fetishism)
MacTech Labs: Virtualization Benchmarks | MacTech – #mac users want to run W7 on your Mac? Feast your eyes on this head-to-head benchmark comparison via #mactech
Do CES vendors fear Apple? – Do CES vendors fear Apple? [The Loop Links]
Defining and Managing Contexts in OmniFocus « Simplicity Is Bliss – Not sure how to put contexts to use in your workflow? @Simplicitybliss has some great advice here:
Reverse Engineering the MOS 6502 CPU –
How does the Twitter iPhone App implement a custom tab bar? –
RSS War! (As Fought On Twitter, Naturally) –
Fonts In Use – Type at work in the real world. –

Posted by Postilicious

TwitterFavs

March 8, 2010 by Mike Cohen

Spencer Schoeben created a great new twitter utility, TwitterFavs, which lets you set up a second Twitter account that automatically retweets your favorites from your primary Twitter account.

You can follow my Twitter favorites at @mike3kfavs.

Tweetie comes to the Mac

April 20, 2009 by Mike Cohen

My favorite iPhone twitter application, Tweetie, is now available for the Mac. It’s replaced Twhirl & Nambu as my favorite Twitter client.

Tweetie’s user interface is clean & gorgeous. It has the features I want in a Twitter client: separate views for friend’s tweets, replies, and direct messages, and makes it easy to track new tweets by maintaining the proper scroll position to show current tweets until you explicitly scroll.

Atebits paid a lot of attention to detail. Animation effects are a nice touch, without being annoying. Double clicking brings up the user’s profile or all tweets in the reply threads. Most importantly, Tweetie doesn’t get in your face, so you can concentrate on work without being distracted, unlike many other twitter clients that demand your attention, yet you can easily see when new tweets arrive.

The only features Tweetie is missing are groups, saved searches, and trends.

Twitter FAIL

February 4, 2009 by Mike Cohen

I’ve been locked out of my Twitter account all night due to “too many unsuccessful login attempts”, thanks to Yoono. I haven’t used Firefox in several months, and before that I was using 3.1 betas, which aren’t compatible with Yoono, I had changed my Twitter password since the last time I had used Yoono, so it still had my old password. I haven’t been able to change my password in Yoono without it trying to log in first and locking me out once again. This is very frustrating.

Plurk is not Twitter

June 2, 2008 by Mike Cohen

Plurk is yet another site attempting to compete with Twitter. Although it has some interesting features, like the timeline view and the ability to share pictures & videos, it still seems lacking. Plurk doesn’t support SMS or IM, and the lack of an API means there’s no desktop client.

Twitter’s main problem is scalability and not being able to handle the user load. There’s no indication that Plurk or other systems can handle that load either. I’m more confident in Twitter’s ability to redesign, re-architect and scale their service, since they have the funding and bandwidth to support their growth.