best practices
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Facebook will change video ranking to prioritize original content
Facebook wants to make it easier for filmmakers to grow their audiences and for viewers to connect with content creators. To do so, over the coming months, Facebook will change how it ranks videos. It will give more weight to videos based on their originality, intent and viewing durations. In a press release, the company said this will affect how videos are distributed across platforms like News Feed, Facebook Watch and Facebook's video recommendations.
Tekserve CTO speaks out on the trouble with managing iPad business migrations
Macworld has a fascinating interview up with Aaron Freimark, the CTO of NYC's well-loved independent Apple retailer Tekserve. Freimark's current job is to help companies do something we've talked about here quite a few times before: implement iPhones and iPads into their business environments. When the iPad first arrived, any inclusion in a workplace was fairly novel, but these days, iPads are used in lots of various industries and workflows, and Freimark is helping companies figure out best practices and plans for how to implement Apple's products in their business. It turns out there are quite a few complications in deploying iPads on a large scale, which Freimark and his team continue to try and figure out. Each device needs to have an Apple ID connected to it, he says, but of course that ID can match up to one specific person, rather than the company at large, so coordinating those numbers can be a pain. (The alternative, having one Apple ID for all the deployed devices, would mean that employees would have a hard time customizing their iPads with apps they choose.) Just buying the apps as well can be an issue -- when a company wants to buy something like 50,000 copies of one app for distribution, it can be hard for both Apple and the company to get payment across in the right way. Even Apple's VPP program for business app buying is not a panacea. And Freimark says that even when companies decide to take the leap into iPad deployment and run a pilot program, that program can often end up being messier than it needs to be, and might convince the company that it shouldn't have tried to include Apple's device in the first place. Tekserve is doing its best to help companies smooth over that process, and I'm sure that as we see more and more large companies integrate the iPad in their businesses (and Apple makes even better tools for doing so), the whole process will become easier over time. Freimark also mentioned that he collaborated with Greg Moore on an AppleScript technique for creating those thousands of Apple IDs automatically, rather than manually. You can check out the script on the Enterprise iOS site.
Netflix, Foursquare, LinkedIn, and Square apps expose your data
Here's a little tip for app developers: encrypt everything, especially passwords. Security firm viaForensics fed some popular iPhone and Android apps through its appWatchdog tool and found that Netflix, LinkedIn, and Foursquare all stored account passwords unencrypted. Since the results were first published on the 6th, Foursquare has updated its app to obscure users' passwords, but other data (such as search history) is still vulnerable. While those three were the worst offenders, other apps also earned a big fat "fail," such as the iOS edition of Square which stores signatures, transaction amounts, and the last four digits of credit card numbers unencrypted. Most of this data would take some effort to steal, but it's not impossible for a bunch of ne'er-do-wells to create a piece malware that can harvest it. Let's just hope Netflix and LinkedIn patch this hole quickly -- last thing we need is someone discovering our secret obsession with Meg Ryan movies.
Apple offers Keynote for iPad advice
Several weeks ago, we described how Keynote for the iPad suffers from formatting and other issues when sharing presentations with a Mac. No support for custom fonts, disappearing presenter notes, and trouble with screen ratios were some of the problems we encountered. As if they were listening, Apple has published a support document on Keynote for iPad best practices. It's a nice overview. Apple suggests which theme to use (options include Black, Craft, Harmony and Parchment), the proper size (1024 x 768) and fonts available to both platforms. Fonts not available on the iPad will be replaced with Helvetica. As for images, Apple recommends scaling them to their intended size before adding them to a slideshow (kind of a hassle), and sticking with the PNG format. There are a few more tips listed, but we'll let you read for yourself. Hopefully these suggestions will improve the experience for those who wish to present from their iPads.
iPhone devsugar: Unit testing for iPhone view controllers
Unit testing refers to a software validation methodology that allows programmers to test individual program units for correctness. It's been an ongoing question in the iPhone developer community as to whether the iPhone's view controller class is testable or not. In response to these discussions, iPhone developer Jonah Williams has written up a view controller unit testing how-to over at the Carbon Five web blog. His write-up offers examples that show how to incorporate some best practices into your code. Williams points out how broken NIB bindings are a common problem for iPhone OS applications. To address these issues, he regularly adds simple assertions that test that each IB outlet and action are set properly from inside his view controller class implementations. These assertions check that IBOutlet instance variables are not set to nil and that IBAction targets have been assigned, adding a layer of protection against broken bindings. Another typical view controller issue involves responding to application memory warnings. To respond, he adds tests that ensure that each view-dependent property gets correctly released and re-created as views unload and then later reload. By building these into test methods, he can execute this behavior on demand, and ensure that the sequence will execute flawlessly in real world conditions. Finally, Williams discusses view controller interdependencies. Often instances are tightly intertwined, with objects acting as clients for each other. For example, a simple table view controller, living within a navigation controller, might present a detail view via yet another view controller when a row is selected. That's three separate controllers to account for, when you really only want to test one at a time. Williams suggests isolating these view controllers away from their interdependencies to test each component separately and provides examples of how you can do so. What made Williams' approach pop for me is how he carefully exposes and isolates dependencies for testing. These are features that can otherwise be hard to inspect and validate in the normal course of programming. His write-up is well worth reading through, and provides an excellent jumping off point for investigating view controller unit testing.
The Daily Grind: The best elements of an MMO podcast are...
There are MMO podcasts everywhere you look. VirginWorlds has a great collective pile of podcast love, and our very own Managing Editor, Shawn Schuster, knows a thing or three about them too. We have our very own shiny podcast, Massively Speaking, WoW Insider has one, and of course, there's the insanely popular Joystiq podcast too. You could load your iPod full of gaming podcasts and never run out of something to listen to - but that doesn't mean they're all worth listening to. It takes something special to draw listeners back from week to week. Aside from that whole 'publishing regularly' thing, which we'd all agree is important to keep an audience, you've got to have something more. This morning, we thought we'd ask you - what do you think are the most important elements in any good MMO podcast? Do you like a news-centric podcast? Or do you like more opinion in yours? Perhaps a bit of both, but with an extra added dose of snark? Do you like lore, or background on particular games? Maybe a quick run-down of new titles on the radar? Any segments you've heard in your favorite podcasts that you think are just awesome ideas? Is it all about the hosts for you? How about guests? What elements make the very best MMO podcasts something you come back to time and time again?
