At the first ever CodingSerbia conference in Novi Sad, Serbia, I did an introductory talk about how iOS development works in general, with a focus on Java developers who did not have any experience with either the tools, frameworks or even Objective-C as a language.

The slides can be viewed here:


A recording has been made and published on YouTube:

After speaking about the topic the Developer Week 2013 in Nürnberg this week, due to some scheduling coincide I repeated it today for our codecentric "Dev-Friday" in which internal or external speakers present some topic to the whole company.

For a while we have been recording these for colleagues on vacation or otherwise occupied during the talk to watch it later. Several of them are available on codecentric's YouTube channel publicly. As of a few moments ago, so is my "Man in the Middle? – No, thank you!" talk on the possibility of – and countermeasures against – man in the middle attacks against SSL connections.

For your convenience, here is the video:



The …

I have been meaning to write this down for quite some time, but it always eluded me. When you are using Time Machine to back up your Mac, you get the chance of password-protecting your backups.

Whenever the machine is restarted you will have to unlock the disk by entering the password, unless you store the password for the backup disk in your keychain. For paranoia's sake (and to keep the password fresh in my memory, just in case) I do not store the password in the keychain.

Now, what happens quite regularly to me is this: I reboot the machine for some reason or other, and while it is doing that, I leave the room and do something else. Before I know it, maybe an hour has passed before I come back. In the meantime, the external Time Machine drive has gone to sleep, because it was not used for an extended period of time. On the screen, there is the password dialog dutifully waiting for me to unlock the protected volume.

As …

Recent news that Microsoft and Barnes & Noble agreed to partner on the Nook e-reader line rather than keep fighting over intellectual property suggests the prospect of more settlement and fewer IP suits in the industry. However, the deal further obscures the blurry IP and patent landscape currently impacting both enterprise IT and consumer technology.

It is good to see settlement — something I’ve been calling for, while also warning against patent and IP aggression. However, this settlment comes from the one conflict in this ongoing war that was actually shedding some light on the matter, rather than further complicating it.

See the full article at TechNewsWorld.

This is about me getting a substantial amount of grey hair over the past couple of days, trying to hunt down a setting that would cause the current version of Xcode 4 to build my iOS projects to an unexpected, but not unfamiliar, taken over from Xcode 3, location, but not presenting any obvious way to revert that.


A little history
In Xcode3 you could use the preferences dialog to configure custom build output folders. This was necessary when you wanted to organize a somewhat more complex software into several cross-referencing Xcode projects and at the same time retain some sanity when linking and packaging it. Clint Harris Tutorial on shared libraries describes it in more detail.

The preferences dialog looked like this (image copied from Clint’s site, because I didn’t have any Xcode3 installation …

Previously, I’ve called out years for non-desktop Linux in 2008, Linux in both the low and high-ends of the market in 2009, ‘hidden’ Linux in 2010 and last year, cloud computing in 2011. For 2012, I see continued growth, prevalence, innovation and impact from Linux, thus leading to a 2012 that is dominated by Linux.

I expect to see nothing but continued strength for Linux and …

Fresh on the codecentric blog is my new post about using SOAP web services from an iOS client application.

It features a short comparison of the current state of frameworks and tools with the Java world, and then focusses on the sudzc open source library that takes a very interesting approach in generating web service client artifacts by transforming the service's WSDL into Objective-C classes using XSL transformations.

The post is available in German as well.

There has been no shortage of reaction to HP’s move to make the Linux-based WebOS open source software. Below, I offer some of my thoughts on the meaning for the different players affected.

*What’s it mean for WebOS?
Moving WebOS to open source was best option for HP. It retains some value in the software depending on its involvement. It is also the best fate for the code, rather then being sold or simmered to its IP and patent value or even used as another weapon in the ongoing mobile software patent wars. Still, the move comes amid huge developer and consumer uncertainty for WebOS. Nevertheless, at least WebOS was already in the market with a compelling products, the Palm the Pre, in the modern smartphone market. WebOS will hopefully have a faster path to open source than Symbian since the former is based on Linux. I still think the greatest opportunity for WebOS may be in serving as an …

Topics for this podcast:

*Opscode Chef extends to Windows for more enterprise devops
*Black Duck continues growth, gains new funding
*Cloudant expands NoSQL database focus, customers
*New open source Web server and vendor Nginx arrives
*The downside of Microsoft’s Android dollars

iTunes or direct download (27:35, 4.7MB)

OpenStack Foundation. New Pentaho CEO. And more.

# Rackspace announced its intention to form an independent OpenStack Foundation.

# HP has chosen Ubuntu as the lead host and guest operating system for its Public Cloud.

# Pentaho appointed Quentin Gallivan as its new CEO.

# Hortonworks continued the discussion about contributions to Apache Hadoop.

# Bob Bickel explained why CloudBees is not, itself, open …