iPhone / iPod Touch Backup Extractor
This may come as a surprise to some of you, but debugging applications on the iPhone is no picnic. I know, crazy, isn’t it! It’s next to impossible to get the information you need from a customer’s device without building in some method to send the user’s preferences, data, etc. right into your application, which just seems messy.
Luckily another developer has created the iPhone / iPod Touch Backup Extractor, which extracts all of the data for an application from the backups made by iTunes when you sync your device.
What a wonderful thing. Thank you, Pádraig.
MyGarden (or “Is There an App for My iPhone to Track the Things I’ve Planted?”)
My first app for the Apple AppStore is finally in the queue waiting approval to appear in the AppStore. It’s called MyGarden, and keeps track of the things that you plant in your garden.
Apple OS X WebDAV doesn’t work right (or “How To Redirect Carefully”)
I have a WebDAV server that I store all of my personal documents on, and after upgrading to Tiger awhile back I had problems with folders disappearing in the directory listing, and things just not working quite right.
It turns out that the Apple WebDAVFS (and some other WebDAV client implementations) have problems with the Apache WebDAV. Just a minor incompatibility, but annoying nonetheless. There is a configuration change that needs to be made in the httpd.conf to fix this problem:
BrowserMatch "^WebDAVFS/1.+" redirect-carefully
This should work for all future 1.x versions of WebDAVFS on OS X. I limited it to 1.x assuming that maybe, just maybe, they might fix this “problem” in version 2.0.
It’s a simple change, and will make Apache “redirect carefully”. For those interested, Apache says:
This forces the server to be more careful when sending a redirect to the client. This is typically used when a client has a known problem handling redirects. This was originally implemented as a result of a problem with Microsoft’s WebFolders software which has a problem handling redirects on directory resources via DAV methods.
If course, I would think it should always be “careful” about redirecting, but that’s just me. Maybe redirecting carelessly is the best default.
An Idea to Change Driving Habits (or “Hardware we will never see”)
I had an idea. Some cars come with a feature that allows the user to see the current MPG (or KPL if you’re across the pond). I think this hardware should be enhanced, so that when you put gas in your tank, you also put let the car know how much you just paid per gallon (or Liter). Rather than showing you how many miles you get per gallon, it would show you how much money per mile your current driving habits are costing you.
I bet people wouldn’t slam the gas pedal down when the light turns green if they had something telling them that it was costing them $2.00/mile to drive like that.
Contents May Settle During Shipping (or “Why Apple Updates are Different Sizes on Different Computers”)
Updating a MacBook and a Mac Mini to 10.5.3. One is downloading over 400MB, the other is about 198MB. So I was obviously wondering why the difference. Apple has an article about it. Apparently the smaller one is just a patch, the larger is the full thing. What’s curious is that the MacBook has next to nothing on it, and the Mac Mini is loaded with stuff. Seems to me that the Mini should have downloaded the large one, not the path, and the MacBook should have downloaded the patch. So there you have it.