Unfortunately, if you have not jailbroken your phone, this fix does not work for you — rather, it is rather impossible to delete the folder. You need to reset the phone. Since these settings are saved by iTunes’ backup procedure, they should be someplace on your filesystem, and theoretically you should be able to change them there and restore from that backup, but I have not attempted to do this.

1. Setting iPhone up as a ‘new phone’ instead of restoring from a backup

• fixing edge on pwned iphone 2.0
• case of the missing files
• gmail imap

1. Install OpenSSH from Cydia.
2. Login via an SFTP client into your phone (first time takes longer than subsequent attempts).
3. Navigate to /var/preferences/SystemConfiguration/preferences.plist and copy this file to your system.
4. Open with “Property List Editor” , if you have XCode installed, or even TextEdit.
5. In the plist, under NetworkServices expand each key. Wherever you see that the only children of a key are Interface and com.apple.CommCenter, expand the latter. Make sure AllowNetworkAccess and Available are both set to 1, and that the APN/user/pass under Setup are correct. Repeat this for all the keys (I had two entries, not sure why but made them both have these values.
6. Obviously, you could turn the flags to 0 (OFF) to disable EDGE completely, if that’s what you want.

And there you have it. Sure, you could just reset the phone, but that doesn’t strike me as a fun thing to do. Plus, it would mean I would lose my custom carrier string, and for some reason I am quite attached to it.

NOTE: If you have issues with Mail on the iPhone, check the next post.

UPDATE: BossPrefs for iPhone 2.0 is now out, and you can enable/disable EDGE from there. Not sure if it will fix all problems, but give it a shot. You can grab it from Cydia.

1. You can also simply set-up the phone as a ‘new phone’ after restore, and you should get the same result

• fixing repeated mail.app crashes on iphone 2.0
• unlocking a passcoded iphone
• gmail imap

My microwave only has one button to open the door, and one dial to set the time, and because of this I love it. No “Start” button, no useless keypad or electronic display. A microwave does not need all of that bullshit. The features have been added by manufacturers to somehow make their wares seem better than the rest, while in effect it was just feature creep detracting from the real purpose that a microwave serves. To heat things up. And for that, ideally, you would only need one button; alas, having a button and a dial is something I can live with. In this case, the dial is both input and output, as it winds down to show the time left. It is an effective way of representing the only piece of information one really wants to know when they are using the microwave: How much till the chow is ready? And this dial does everything that a keypad could, only far more elegantly because of its simplicity.

It is easy for designers of interfaces or of software to get sidetracked. It happens, lots of times because of upper echelons, sometimes because we forget we are not the typical user. So we have feature bloat, design that needs a user manual to operate, software that has a lot of features and all broken, keypads on microwaves. In all these ways, we show how much we forget our purpose and our goals.

• why user interfaces lack consistency and feel out-of-place on my [platform]
• the impact of simple changes in a software user interface — short case study
• user interface consistency, cross platform

My son has been greatly enjoying Postal, so I’m sure he’ll like the zombies and the midgets, but can I somehow remove the nudity scenes? And how exactly nude are they?

Is it just me, or are people far more concerned with keeping kids away from nudity than from extreme violence? I can understand that both can he harmful, but I would like for someone to explain to me in what way is sexuality (partial nudity, references etc) more damaging to a child’s psyche than violence? After all, sex is something we all discover and enjoy at some point, whereas violence could be considered more… unnatural¹.

This comes up in video games repeatedly, but movies and other forms of entertainment also meet with the problem. Why is it that sex is so much less tolerable than violence²?

1. I do not consider something like a self-defence kill to be violent, but more of an expression of the survival instinct
2. Is religious pressure/dogma the only reason for this?

• school threats (fear tactics)
• free software is bad
• what’s wrong with us?

• ferret *nix port
• code
• OPML2MRSS

Plugins

For Safari I do not need as many plugins as I used to have on Firefox, partly because I can get most of that functionality with fewer things installed.

1. SIMBL is the way to add functionality to Safari, as it provides 3rd party software with a (kind of) plugin loader interface. You need to install it first if you see anything you like in this list.
2. SafariStand allows me to use quick search keys and the excellent History Flow (screenshot). It is much faster to remember “what site that was” if you can see a general outline of what it looked like, not just the URL. As for quick search, they are equivalent to Firefox’s keymarks and work in the very same way. Very fast browsing.
3. SafariBlock does for Safari what AdBlock does for Firefox. It even uses pretty much the same lists and makes it trivial to add entries and block even more things. Have the Internet as you want it.²

Browsing Style

My browsing habits are pretty much the same now as they were when I wrote about supercharging Firefox, thanks to the quick search feature provided by SafariStand. Type in
w jeux d'enfants
to search Wikipedia for “Jeux d’Enfants”³ Cmd + L to jump to the address bar, Cmd + T for a new tab, Cmd + W to close the current tab. Cmd + Shift + ←/→ to switch between tabs. Three-finger swipe left to go to the previous page⁴.

Another important feature for me is automatic categorization of downloads, and I use Leech for that, as it comes with a Safari plugin to do just that. Leech will intercept downloads from Safari and put them where you tell it to, or you can configure Hazel to get you almost the same functionality, sans Safari plugin.

May Also Want to Try…

I don’t use everything that’s under the sun. Depending on your very own browsing style, the plugins below may also be useful to you:

1. Saft has some overlap with SafariStand, though it does do quite a few other useful things (kiosk mode, bad site warnings). It is a highly-acclaimed extension to Safari.
2. Inquisitor gives Safari’s searchbar the same “Suggestion” feature that comes by default in Firefox. I don’t use it since I have a keymark for searches, but it would be quite useful otherwise.

Last and not least, if you don’t mind the occasional memory leak or browser crash, I suggest using WebKit nightlies. These will give you the ‘bleeding edge’, complete with new JavaScript engine and all the features you are most likely to see once Safari 4 is launched. All the above still holds if you use the nightlies.

1. DISCLAIMER: Safari does not have an official plugin mechanism, the way Firefox does. While all the things I am recommending here have served me flawlessly over time, you should be aware that they may stop working after browser updates — albeit if only for a short period of time
2. Unfortunately, it is not as easy to unblock items on pages where you may want to actually see the ads
3. Where there are no disambiguations, Wikipedia will take you straight to the page you are looking for, so this is a very fast way of finding information.
4. Only on the new MBP or the MBA

• Firefox Supercharged
• pictures versus words (viewzi and image-based searching)
• unblock firefox

I would like, then, to award Rogers a prize for performance in excess of the minimums outlined above, for a truly piss-poor customer experience system. Congratulations!

• more crap from Rogers ISP
• terminology primer
• somebody has a memory leak

Enjoy my list and let me know what really makes your day.

1. I have left out some of the development, design or music apps that I use. If you think I should include those as well, let me know

• mac apps
• music applications review (itunes alternatives for mac os x)
• blogo — mac desktop blogging software

Granted, we are glad to have all these switchers. Or Apple is, anyway. But in no way do I think there is any responsibility insofar as Apple or Mac developers are concerned to accomodate the new wave of users at the cost of corrupting the platform. Sure, marketshare is important, but cloning the ways in which Windows functions is not the way to establish that marketshare. Why have an annoying installer that puts files all over the place when you could just drag and drop the application wherever you want¹? Yeah, it takes some getting used to - do it once and you are used to it. I find it a bizarre ‘problem’ to have, considering that most switchers move away from Windows and all its problems. Wouldn’t an installer be just as much a reminder of the bad old days as, say, random BSODs?

I am surprised that people would even turn this into an issue. Simpler is not better, apparently, if the simpler approach is taking you out of your comfort zone for 2.01 seconds. It’s every reboot on Windows after I have installed some moderately complicated piece of software that reminds me just how much better Macs and Linuces are at these sorts of things. And while installing on Linux may be a bit impenetrable for some people (though we have come a long way in recent years) I simply cannot understand what’s the big problem.

1. Yes, I am aware there are installers for OS X as well, but they are few and far between

• would modularized windows really suck?
• the safari-on-windows debacle
• user interface consistency, cross platform

Sure, it sounds quite obvious that they are, if you think about it. After all, you have to make some changes to the code to get things working, package differently, market it, have a support model etcetera. Why is it, then, that some of these applications fail so miserably to integrate with the operating system, while others get most of the things right, though not everything?

Developers forget that platform distinctions do not stop at the code; the most obvious differences for customers/consumers are in the UI.

Java applications are the first culprit and probably the most oft-found. While the UI integration is mostly there¹, subtleties in interaction paradigms are often wrong and follow just one of the platforms’ principles, if even that (sometimes developers take liberties with pop-up dialogs, menus etcetera). The result is a piece of software that feels out-of-place on some platforms, only just “fitting-in”. By extension, most applications written in interpreted languages are prone to falling into that trap because of the “write once, run everywhere” concept.

The subtleties I speak of can be found in OK/Cancel dialogs, the organization of items in menus, button layout and even typography. Any one of these things by itself does not sound like much, but screw a few of them up and you have a different story. It all boils down to the misconception that, after the code is ported, your job as far as cross-platform work goes is done. I have been part of projects where the lead architects believed just that, and no amount of complaining could convince them to task someone with studying the target platform’s UI paradigms and then refine the application accordingly.

With the code working, you are still far from done. Look at your application on the new platform and open up something that critics recongise as a good example insofar as UI and interaction/usability goes. And start tweaking. Think not in terms of a cross-platform application, or rather do not imagine the different platform implementations to be twins, because at least one of them will be restrained from achieving its full potential if you do. Try to look at your application the way your users do, without knowledge of or care for its cross-platform nature. For them, it is a piece of software running on their machine. So their machine, with its UI paradigms that they are accustomed to and the interaction expectations that they have learnt, is the one in control, not you. You change code so that the new platform understands it — why stop short of changing the user interface so that your new users do, too?

1. Apple controls the distribution of the Java runtime on the Mac, so they also integrate the graphical widgets properly

• user interface consistency, cross platform
• axis of interaction
• the impact of simple changes in a software user interface — short case study

Daniel Robbins, founder of the Gentoo Linux Project, has previously worked at Microsoft, but moved on as he was feeling that his skills were not used to their fullest. After that, more and more commentators began speculating that Microsoft might simply be interested in acquiring a lot of open-source leaders more as a way of undermining their projects — as well as, on a larger scale, future projects that might never be founded if the would-be leaders decide to join Microsoft instead. While the view may be quite left-field, Microsoft’s generally poor reputation certainly does not help. Microsoft may be interested in undermining various OSS projects, though they may as well be on the lookout for talented developers and software designers, and the open-source community is a good training ground. After all, more and more interviewers ask candidates whether they have been involved with open-source at any time.

I have been contacted, once, by a Microsoft recruiter. Both his e-mail and the in-person sales pitch played on the fact that my blog was quite critical of Microsoft. I agree that, as much as we may like to bash Microsoft (and, rest assured, I still have enough to rant about them), we need to be part of the change that we want to see. For some, that means pushing OSS further into different markets, to completely undermine and cause the eventual fall of proprietary, closed software systems — like Microsoft and Apple are. For others, the vision focuses on the users, on making their lives better, so working at Microsoft on a piece of software that many will use has a real impact.

I am not one to judge the path one takes. If you become part of the ‘problem’¹ I do hope you help improve their reputation by offering good software and driving for honest business practices. If you work on OSS, I hope you see your software more than just a ‘rebel yell’ against the corporations: remember that your software has users.

1. Microsoft

• will open-source eventually run programmers in the ground?
• would modularized windows really suck?
• standards versus bad designs

• Trying to sign up for meetup.com is not as easy as I would like, especially since they do not allow valid e-mail addresses.

  

• Trying to save the previous screenshot, using an invalid filename on Windows (due to the ‘?’ character) gives an error.

  

  Well, in my case it simply refused to save, with absolutely no indication as to why.

I hope none of these things are done on purpose (although the e-mail address bit happens in many places) but please, if the work you do is in anyway tangent to similar system, make sure the people in charge of testing the logic and the usability understand what the problems are. Someone said that “usability is predictability”, that if the user knows what’s going to happen after they click a button, your system is usable¹.

P.S. Yes, in Gmail you are free to use user+tag@gmail.com where user@gmail.com would be your normal e-mail address. The +tag is useful to filter easily on incoming mail, and potentially a giveaway in case some service decides to sell your e-mail address to spammers (although I suppose spammers are at least sophisticated enough to remove whatever is between + and @, but who knows?)

1. Caveat: this is about application design, where action should equal reaction and the interface should always provide some feedback. Games thrive on unpredictability, as do other systems

• user interface consistency, cross platform
• designing software for people who do not use computers
• why user interfaces lack consistency and feel out-of-place on my [platform]

• No new major features
• Intel-only
• Pure Cocoa

I doubt it. Sure, the developer seed might be Leopardesque in feel, as most of the hard work goes into the underpinnings of the OS at this stage in the development cycle. I just do not see Apple releasing a 10.5.4 update as an operating system, completely devoid of new features, and for-pay. To further Duane Storey’s thoughts, I think it would make Apple look even more like Microsoft, vis-à-vis business practices, and even though Cupertino is big on customer lock-in, they have managed to offer sufficiently many good things that make that lock-in an acceptable trade-off. We are not all fanboys and the RDF is not a magic veil that makes us completely blind to things like these.

The Intel-only situation is something that, yes, will happen at some point. It seems to be a bit fast, but if Apple’s numbers indicate a lot of users have moved to Intel, by all means. I do not want Apple to suffer from the issues that ensuring backwards compatibility brings — Microsoft can have all of that. It would be hard to drop support for an entire platform with just a revision update (say, 10.5.4) so, 10.6 would give Apple that opportunity. I know many will be angry and annoyed — a lot of professional shops use high-end G5 rigs that are quite up to their needs — but everybody knew, the day Intel was announced, that this day would come. If it comes 3 years later (by the time that 10.6 would actually be released) I think there should not be too much uproar.

Cocoa only? Sure, why not. Most indie developers are Cocoa anyway as far as I can tell and Carbon is, at this point, an old and inadequate framework. I am sure somebody, somewhere will contradict me, so please enlighten me.

I am eager to see what happens at WWDC and how the AppStore launch goes. And I don’t mind not getting 10.6 soon. I would much rather have Apple work on Leopard and make it stable, then turn around and bring us something cool in 10.6, whenever that happens. There is still some time before Windows 7 turns up.

1. Not yet an Apple official codename

• stupid data interoperability argumentation
• apple soapbox; pwn2own
• the brief

The applications under the microscope are Whamb, VLC, ToolPlayer and Cog. The review is quite focused, so for a full feature list, look at the software’s site (linked in every case) or download any of these applications — after all, they are free — and give them a spin. Then come back and tell me about your experience.

Whamb first caught my eye with its stream-ripping capability and the sharing of playlists over Bonjour. Not that I encourage you to rip streams, since that is probably infringing on something. Unfortunately, Whamb did not actually play streams. Although the application window indicates that something is happening, no sound comes out.

Another feature is skinning, though the default set was not that great. This might be important for some people, though I am not one of them.

The biggest problem for me was that files are added via a normal Finder browse window. If you do make playlists and always use them, that’s fine. Otherwise it becomes quite tedious to manage your music. As far as playlists are concerned, the m3u file I had used in my tests was not opened in Whamb, and I suspect the terminology might be a problem: Whamb cannot save playlists from itself, so it might be using the name loosely.

ToolPlayer is, basically, a HUD window with sound effects. It is the kind of player that you throw some music at and let it do its thing in the background. It does not even show a playlist, only the current song name and at what track you are. The UI is very simple, though in the usage scenario that I am understanding for it — throw music, let it play — it is more than adequate. I am surprised that the application even has a dock icon, since it seems that it would fit naturally in the OS X menubar and only there, completely out of your way. I am a bit skeptic about the use of the effects, since I generally do not play my music distorted through phasers and reverbs. Playlist import worked, but there is no Internet radio support.

VLC I assume is an application that more users are familiar with. I would go as far as to say it is one of the best video players available, able to handle pretty much everything thrown at it. Well, anything video thrown at it. I did not have such a pleasant experience listening to music in VLC as you might expect.

VLC is the only viable choice when it comes to listening to AAC+ streams. iTunes does not play them and neither does QuickTime, even with the excellent Perian plugin pack installed. So I have been recommending VLC for those that queried me about AAC+ streams. However, that is as far as I am going to go, from now on. VLC for music was the most painful thing to use, especially because of some UI peculiarities that I have encountered. When you load a playlist in VLC, it will not immediately render the file names or the track lengths, which makes it frustrating to use. Worse still, if you drop a folder in the playlist view, you need to first double-click it before VLC will show the files, but that stops the music playback.

I would guess that there may be an option to fix these issues, but VLC has a lot of options to go through. And, since I am the one most likely to answer questions, insofar as my friends are concerned, I would not want to recommend something like that. Video is what VLC is meant for, it does it well in the default mode, and we will leave it at that.

Cog was the first thing I tested and quickly became the standard that I held all others applications to. If I were to write some kind of replacement for iTunes, Cog is what it would most likely resemble. It has system-wide hotkey support, to play and pause music; it does Last.fm and Growl as well. You tell it the location of your music and it will show it all neatly in the drawer, the way that it resides on the filesystem — a big thing among the people that I know to be looking for iTunes replacements. If you drag a folder from the drawer it will add all its contents to the current playlist, as you would expect (and unlike VLC). Unfortunately, I was not able to open streams, although the option exists in the menu; hopefully newer versions will fix/implement/better the option, but for the (AAC+) stream that I have used in testing, it did nothing.

Bottom Line: I will start recommending Cog to those looking for iTunes alternatives and I will definitely keep an eye out on its future development. It looks like the most promising application from those that I have tested, although ToolPlayer’s UI does help it gain followers, I am sure.

• case of the missing files
• itunes 7.0
• the safari-on-windows debacle

• making twitterrific secure
• “passworded folders” app for mac os x - snakeoil
• iphone apps = no more web apps?

Please, revision3, sue the crap out of these guys. Considering MediaDefender’s track-record and previous behaviour, the only way the world can be rid of them is for a judge to order their ISP to pull the plug completely.

• the brief
• e-publishing and the law
• how pushing ISPs will backfire

The user interface design of any application is hard. But once that design is more or less agreed upon, many developers do not bother fine-tuning it for the end-platforms and just go for the wholesale approach. They argue that consistency in the application itself is the most important thing. This assumes that the original design is completely clean and uninspired by any of the target platforms, which in real life turns out not to be quite true. Even for software that is aimed at multiple platforms from the start, the UI paradigms of some platform slip into the design by virtue of designer preference. Or, worse, the paradigms from multiple target platforms get mashed together, and more is definitely worse in this case¹.

Jakob Nielsen summed this up eloquently in regard to the OK/Cancel button pairing, one of the most wide-spread errors in cross-platform UI design:

• Windows puts OK first
• Apple puts OK last
If you’re designing a desktop application for one of these two personal computer platforms, your choice is easy: Do what the platform owner tells you to do.

I would think this advice is obvious enough that it would not need to be brought up, yet both as a developer and as a user I know how often it is ignored. The feeling I get, at the bottom-line, is that the application I am using thinks of me as a second-class citizen. Because it is all about respecting your users — the people that pay for your product — and making them feel comfortable in your application, and ignoring the basics comes off as arrogance. On the premise of Keeping It Simple, the last thing I want to do is remember that your application reverses the order of OK/Cancel when all the other 100+ applications on my system do it right. Let us not even begin to think about keyboard shortcuts. Follow the damned Interface Guidelines that the platform designers have put out for this very reason.

There is cost associated with researching these guidelines, just as there is cost in developing an application on platform X that does not feel like it belongs there and thus will not sell as well as it could. Almost certainly, one of your competitors has paid attention to the details and will succeed in attracting users to their product. Maybe in some cases utility trumps usability, though in others the two are tightly coupled and ignoring either is fatal.

This does not mean your application cannot have a distinctive feel to it². It is a matter of making your application usable by people that are on the platform you are targeting. Even multi-platform users will appreciate it. To ignore this is to say that “our application is the only one you are using so why should we care how you, the user are used to things?”

1. Linux is a particular and, sadly, unfortunate example, where applications often borrow from different UI toolkits altogether, throwing out completely any sense of consistency with the platform
2. Take a look at Firefox 3 beta on the Mac and on Windows

• why user interfaces lack consistency and feel out-of-place on my [platform]
• the impact of simple changes in a software user interface — short case study
• designing software for people who do not use computers

Blogo is a relatively new Mac desktop blogging software application from Brainjuice. It has support for all the major platforms and set-up was a breeze for WordPress. The interface is just the way I like it — minimal and out of your way. I really recommend taking a look at the screenshots on Brainjuice’s site to get a good feel for it.

Unfortunately, you can tell that Blogo is the newer kid on the block. Without trying to be negative, there are a few things just jumping out at you when you try the program, making you want to wait for version 1.2.

First, the time it took the program to load on my MacBook Pro was unacceptable. I counted 86 bounces in the dock as it was starting up, which is more than any application I have ever opened on this system. Ever. Blogo will not work without an Internet connection, which I hope is merely a limitation of the trial, as it complains about not being able to verify the trial information. If the same thing happens when the application has been paid for and licensed, I would say do not bother with it at all. I use desktop clients almost exclusively when I do not have an Internet connection, and if I cannot start it up², why pay for it? Maybe some other people simply do not like the admin interface of their respective platform, but I think offline writing would still be a pretty big deal with this kind of software.

The interface, again, is superb as far as I’m concerned, but it does not entirely save the application. There are almost no text labels to see, so everything is visual, which, while it might take a quick mouse hover and tooltip to understand, will have the user respond much more quickly to controls. The icons are pretty intuitive anyway so it should not be hard to pick it up and just get to work. The fullscreen mode is useful for certain kinds of posts, but depending on the kind of blog you have, you might settle for the windowed view to be able to quickly parse links and quotations. I wrote most of this post in full screen, but I was reviewing the application itself, so it was a rare case where it made sense.

The text entry area does not have the Mac OS X system-wide spell checker enabled by default, which is quite surprising, almost making me think it was not available. This kind of integration should be de-facto for any application that involves heavy writing, so I do not understand why it was disabled.

The <!--more--> tag used in WordPress to split the post is represented by three pound (#) signs³, which is not immediately obvious nor necessarily safe. I did not find any obvious way of switching to code view, which will definitely disappoint some of the more power-users out there, myself included.

I have not tried media support extensively. Looking at my previous post, Blogo did not import any text, only the picture. Other posts were properly brought in, and displaying media items in a list is probably a good idea, though the body of the post does not render them⁴. If you tend to use a lot of pictures, this might be a bit distracting.

The post preview was also very, very slow. Brainjuice says that Blogo will actually look at a real blog post, to give you a proper preview, unlike other blogging clients that will usually use a simple preview template. While it is true that Blogo did fetch my blog layout and rendered an actual preview, it seems it does that every time you hit preview, which is both overkill and an issue of usability. Not to mention the fact that it looks like crap if you are not connected to the Internet. I would think that just caching the blog layout at start-up and using that would be enough, and if none is available, a fallback preview scheme (or maybe the previous layout, if one exists) could be used. Twitter Tools did actually help me identify the fact that Blogo posts the entry to your blog and then shows you the post as a preview. Not the best idea.

One thing that I was going to consider a flaw but found myself liking it is the “save as draft” functionality. While it saves the draft to your blog, it also displays it in the sidebar of the “Edit” view. Quite a good choice, in my opinion, since I have found myself saving local drafts of posts and wishing to be able to save them online. You never know where you are when inspiration hits, and if it is at work, far away from your trusty computer… so be it! No multiple local drafts though, which could be a problem for some people. Growl integration for the draft upload could actually use the draft name, if one exists, instead of just a notice, but maybe I’m just nitpicking at this point. I guess once multiple local drafts will be supported, so will a better Growl alert come.

However: Blogo’s FAQ page shows that the developers are quite aware of these issues, and future versions will have most of the things I have written about. Which is great to hear and I will definitely pay close attention to its development.

As a quick note, the Twitter client is quite nice, having tabs for the various types of messages and making Twitter feel even more like the microblogging service that it is. I do not see myself switching away from Twitterrific anytime soon because of its unobtrusiveness and great hotkey support, but Blogo is a worthy alternative.

In conclusion, I want Blogo to improve, because I could see myself using it more. But, the $5 extra that MarsEdit costs you gives miles and miles of extra functionality that Blogo, with its better interface, cannot yet offset. It seems to be thought out with a certain blogging workflow in mind, one that does not work for me and, I suppose, would work even less for most of the ‘professional bloggers’ out there. I will keep watching its development and hope the issues listed above — and in their FAQ — get addressed quickly.

1. NetNewsWire and MarsEdit
2. If you lose connectivity when the application is open you will still be able to use it
3. From what I can tell looking at some of my older posts Blogo imported
4. Pictures show up in a separate pane and only a marker shows up in the body itself

• music applications review (itunes alternatives for mac os x)
• iphone apps = no more web apps?
• safari supercharged

The first method comes from Iconfactory via the PaulDotCom security podcast #107. Open a Terminal window (from /Applications/Utilities) and type:

defaults write com.iconfactory.Twitterrific protocol -string "https://"

then hit return.

The more user-friendly way, however, would be through Secrets¹, Blacktree’s excellent “hidden feature” enabler. If you have Leopard, install Secrets, have it update its database then select Twitterrific from the sidebar. Change the “protocol handler” string as shown in the picture below to say “https://”

Whichever your choice, restart Twitterrific and you should be much more secure. Little Snitch has confirmed that connections to Twitter are now HTTPS².

P.S. Look through Secrets some more, there may be other things you find useful as well.

1. Grab from MacUpdate if the dev site is down
2. Technical jargon meaning that the above has worked and you are now secure

• samuco renames “passworded folders” to “secret folders”, still not secure, now for pay
• fixing edge on pwned iphone 2.0
• twurling script for quicksilver

There are a lot of great, customized web interfaces for the iPhone. All services that require the user to be connected to the Internet would live much better in Safari (caveats to follow) because, let us not forget, sanctioned iPhone apps will not be free, even if the developer would want otherwise.

Caveats on the Internet connection claim above :

1. Bank applications might require a level of security different from what Safari is able to provide.
2. A RSS reader with offline storage would make flying, roaming and living in countries where data plans are prohibitively priced more bearable.

1. Oh yes, how happy I would be!

• iPhone SDK
• netnewswire/feeddemon syncing free as well
• unlocking a passcoded iphone