Craig Hockenberry

Interestingly I learnt recently that macOS includes a ``jsc'' command, which provides a built-in JavaScript REPL and interpreter [0]. It is part of the JavaScriptCore framework. I can find it at: /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaScriptCore.framework/Versions/Current/Helpers/jsc But a Stack Overflow comment says it moves around between releases, so you may want to find it first using: $ find /System/Library/Frameworks/JavaScriptCore.framework -iname jsc It doesn't support web-specific APIs such as window. But it includes extras such as a print function and a readline function. $ cat greet.js print("What is your name?") const name = readline() print(`Hello, $ {name}!`) $ jsc greet.js What is your name? ns Hello, ns! $ Have fun :) [0]: https://furbo.org/2021/08/25/jsc-my-new-best-friend/

For what it's worth there's an article[1] from Craig Hockenberry. His servers were hit by massive amounts of traffic from China earlier this year, targeted (randomly?) at Iconfactory's website. The charts are quite impressive. [1] http://furbo.org/2015/01/22/fear-china/

Well, that sucks. That effectively makes HTTPS worthless there doesn't it? Also on the other link I have seen another relevant article [0] on how BitTorrent could be used for attacks from China. Scary stuff. [0] http://furbo.org/2015/01/22/fear-china/

No Particular order but these blogs are worth following http://www.raywenderlich.com/ http://www.cocoanetics.com/ http://maniacdev.com/ http://furbo.org/ http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/ http://idevblogaday.com/ http://cocoawithlove.com/ http://idevrecipes.com/ Im sure I have missed loads of really good ones, so looking forward to discovering some more via this ask!

For those unfamiliar with Craig Hockenberry, he is a talented developer with high standing in the Mac and iOS developer communities. He writes at http://furbo.org and wrote the book, “iPhone App Development: The Missing Manual” (http://appdevmanual.com/).

> and all their other "new paradigm" platforms also initially shipped with no software (Mac, iPhone, iPad). The mainstream usage of these devices is really based on what developers built for them in the first couple years after release... Unless AVP is an exception to the rule... what about Apple Watch, AppleTV and HomePod? Those don't have the app success story of the Mac, iPhone and iPad. There's two paths that lead to a passionate developer base popularizing your platform via their apps: 1) build a platform that developers love to use i.e. Mac and iPhone to a certain extent 2) offer access to a product with a lot of users i.e. iPhone and iPad The AVP is more like the first HomePod (quite expensive compared to its 'competition' and irrelevant long before the mini arrived) than the iPhone and iPad which launched at competitive/accessible prices so we're not expecting a product with lots of users. Could the AVP be a platform that developers love to use? The mostly likely use case from a developer perspective appears to be as a portable big screen monitor for your Mac albeit with limitations*. Would that be compelling enough? Craig Hockenberry https://furbo.org/2024/01/29/the-next-40/ : "Apple Vision Pro is a technical marvel, but ultimately falls short in ways that satisfy the natural curiosity of developers." *p.s. there are other headsets with similar display specs to AVP rumored for later this year. It might be worth waiting if you primarily want virtual monitors…

Are you running any electron apps that have not yet been updated to use the most recent upstream electron? https://furbo.org/2025/10/06/tahoe-electron-detector/ I've got a couple things that I use which aren't yet up-to-date, and are blocking my upgrade.

Exactly. What I want is only security updates and no feature updates unless I explicitly consent. It's simply in vogue for designers to redesign the software interface every once a while and they invariably fuck up niche use cases. The recent watchOS update from Apple is incredibly disappointing https://furbo.org/2023/09/28/the-timer-in-watchos-10/

The Twitter API doesn’t give them the ads. They literally can’t display them. As for the UX thing — Twitter owes a huge amount of its own UX to third-party clients. Hell, Twitter’s own iOS client was originally a third-party client they acquired called Tweetie. The developer of Twitteriffic made a list of all the things they pioneered for Twitter: https://furbo.org/2011/03/11/twitterrific-firsts/

Tweet dates to 1851, myriad examples: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/377843 Chaucer came up with twitter: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2012/10/chaucer-coin… Craig Hockenberry applied the one to the other: http://furbo.org/2013/06/28/the-origin-of-tweet/

Many things that make Twitter special were invented by the developers you mention: http://furbo.org/2011/03/11/twitterrific-firsts/ > First use of “tweet” to describe an update > First use of a bird icon. > First to support replies and conversations (in collaboration with Twitter engineering.) I think that's why this discussion thread is so negative, Twitter benefited immensely from the work of third party developers and then told them to go pound sand.

Craig Hockenberry noted the problems with cert caching two years ago[1]. [1] http://furbo.org/2013/10/21/mac-app-store-receipts-and-mavericks/

Here's more information about this: http://furbo.org/2015/07/09/i-left-my-system-fonts-in-san-francisco/

MITM proof of concept on iOS - http://furbo.org/2014/09/24/in-app-browsers-considered-harmful/

It only really ramped up this year. http://furbo.org/2015/01/22/fear-china/

This isn't the first time [0] China has been accused of using it's filtering to DDoS enemies. It's not a secret weapon really, it's an obvious capability of being able to redirect a large majority of your country's internet traffic at will. [0] http://furbo.org/2015/01/22/fear-china/

Generating a 301 is likely more work. Profile pages are simple database hits, and they may be dynamically or even statically cached (for popular pages). You're probably severely underestimating how much traffic China can produce [1]. 1. http://furbo.org/2015/01/22/fear-china/

Meanwhile China's new upgraded Great Firewall is DDoSing many websites in the west because of the randomness of their DNS Cache Poisoning. For example see our post about it on http://dvps.me/ddos-attack-by-torrent and many more posts like http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?p=9351951, http://furbo.org/2015/01/22/fear-china/, http://serverfault.com/questions/656093, http://serverfault.com/questions/658433, http://www.jwz.org/blog/2015/01/chinese-bittorrent-the-gift-that-keeps… https://isc.sans.edu/forums/diary/Are+You+Piratebay+thepiratebayorg+Re… and more.

I hesitate entering my credentials because of http://furbo.org/2014/09/24/in-app-browsers-considered-harmful/

I'm surprised by this. To me, it makes a lot of sense that Nike, as a fitness company, produces a wearable device for exercising. It must be a failure of my imagination, but I don't see a smart watch (in the next couple years) being both attractive to the general consumer and solving the same problems as the FuelBand does. That's partly because I can't imagine what features would make me want to buy an iWatch. So I expect that Nike's going to be forced to compromise functionality to fit the limited capabilities of general-purpose devices. For example, Craig's proposed iRing doesn't even mention tracking motion activity: http://furbo.org/2014/03/13/wearing-apple/ Also, maybe it's the specific app I use, but using the M7 kills battery life on my 5S.

Why are third parties important in the Twitter ecosystem? Let Twitterrific count the ways: First use of “tweet” to describe an update (see page 86 of Dom Sagolla’s book.) First use of a bird icon. First native client on Macintosh. First character counter as you type. First to support replies and conversations (in collaboration with Twitter engineering.) First native client on iPhone. And more. http://furbo.org/2011/03/11/twitterrific-firsts/

http://netlimiter.com/ http://tmurgent.com/Tools.aspx http://furbo.org/2009/03/24/slow-ride-make-it-easy/ http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2009/10/a_engineers_gui.html

It's 256MB, apparently. The article says 2Gb(256MB) per die, for a total of 512MB, but http://furbo.org/2010/04/03/benchmarking-in-your-lap/ tested it and it's 256MB. I'm not sure where iFixit gets the idea there would be two dies.

> Yes, and as I already wrote: "Apple has done that for both platforms." Yes I saw it the first time. They certainly did it. But we're talking about how well they did it, aren't we? Usability and polish? > I'm not particularly fond of Snow Leopard over other releases, nor I see much "regression since then". You clearly aren't and clearly don't, but quite a few macOS users are, and do. Here's a sampling of regressions for your perusal: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/11/macos-bug-lets-… https://furbo.org/2015/05/05/discoveryd-clusterfuck/ > Uglier is pretty subjective if not downright wrong. If you like the new looks, good for you I guess. > Slower is easy: it's 100% wrong. In fact, can you show any number of it? I don't have any numbers. What I do have, is the experience running these successive releases on the same laptop. And it has definitely not been positive.

Taking a step makes it worse than doing nothing? How would you go about it? iOS defaults to rendering sRGB (and Apple's devices do it pretty accurately [1][2]) so nothing changes for legacy images, unless your content or code specifically asks for P3. Xcode and the App Store also handles thinning/slicing so that wide color content is only delivered to and stored on devices that can display it. [3] Pretty much all of the leading content creation apps support the matching and embedding of color profiles. ---- > Changing image encoding from sRGB is change for the sake of change - the vast majority of real world image content fits in sRGB. That's a terrible argument. Holding technology back for the sake of, what? There were times when the vast majority of "real world" content and applications fit perfectly fine in 640 Kilobytes, 640×480, 256 colors, 2 audio channels and so on. 1920×1080 is still "good enough" and covers the vast majority of content so why bother with 4K? Many people are happy with consoles yet why do PC owners resent it when a game's graphics are dumbed down? In any case, wide color can make a considerable difference [4][5][6][7] (to be viewed on capable devices of course, but you can still see comparisons) and the cameras on the new iPads, iPhones and other devices take photos in wide color and do embed that information in the images. [1] http://www.displaymate.com/iPad_Pro9_ShootOut_1.htm [2] http://www.displaymate.com/iPhone7_ShootOut_1.htm [3]…

No mention of the fact that CSS actually has a mechanism to use OS system fonts? 'caption', 'menu', 'message-box' are all, for example, available system fonts. This is actually a bit of a quirk in the syntax of the CSS 'font' property - http://www.w3.org/TR/CSS21/fonts.html#font-shorthand - in that it's not strictly only a shorthand for size/style/family properties, because you can use 'message-box' as a complete font specification, but you can't use '20pt bold message-box'. On the other hand, you can stack 'font: message-box; font-weight: bold; font-size:20px;', so thats not actually a limitation. Not sure what the browser support situation is, as 'caniuse' and 'quirksmode' haven't dug into the details of support for the CSS 'font' property, but it looks to be doing what you'd expect in chrome on OS X. YMMV. Looks like this isn't the first time someone's missed this? http://furbo.org/2015/07/09/i-left-my-system-fonts-in-san-francisco/

Craig Hockenberry, a well known iOS developer, has been hit by this along with lodsys. He works for the Icon Factory, a small design and app firm. He wrote Twitterrific for the iPhone before the SDK had been released. Craig wrote the much linked to article about the fall of the independent developer yesterday: http://furbo.org/2011/07/13/the-rise-and-fall-of-the-independent-devel… and today has been tweeting about how he feels like his ability to control his own products has been taken from him: http://twitter.com/#!/chockenberry/status/91904807748640770 http://twitter.com/#!/chockenberry/status/91905256870510593 http://twitter.com/#!/chockenberry/status/91940943183347712 http://twitter.com/#!/chockenberry/status/91972743561613312 It is depressing. And enraging.