Strings
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Strings is a messaging service that lets you delete those drunk texts
It's still early enough in January that if you promise not to drunkenly text pictures of your behind to your friends, it still counts as a New Year's Resolution. Still, in an age where everyone's off-hand conversations can be made public in a flash, it'd be nice to regain some control of where our words are shared. That's where Strings comes in, since the iOS app is a rival to Snapchat and WhatsApp that clearly hopes to foster a consent culture around mobile messaging.
DevJuice: Spellchecking short strings
A few years ago, xkcd created a crowd-sourced color survey to collected real-world hue descriptions. You'll find the hilarious results here. I've been working on updating my UIColor utilities as part of building a color-sampling app. Stumbling across this survey, I decided to add the xkcd colors to my repository, along with code that matched colors to their nearest xkcd equivalents. What I found is that as delightful as the sourced color descriptions are, that they were rather full of misspellings, for example "urple." So I put together a simple NSString category to find misspellings and "creatively" described colors. I found this approach to be useful enough that I decided to share it on a DevJuice. Normally, you use text checkers to find misspellings in text view and fields, and to present those items to the user. But you're certainly not limited to that scenario. This simple string category lets you test whether a misspelled word was found, enabling me to automate my inspection. I loaded up the xkcd names as an array and searched them to find any potential errors. Out of nearly a thousand color names, it quickly flagged about two dozen issues -- saving a huge amount of detail checking. This doesn't of course, guarantee the correctness of my results. I know I left in a few amusing misspellings: "Blurple," for example, plus if any misspellings ended up as a legal English word, they will not have been flagged. What's more, I had to bowdlerize some entries. Apple does not have any "offensive language" tester that I could find. (Know of one? Please ping me about it!) So I had to update those items by hand. In any case, I hope you'll find this useful. Happy coding!
Acoustic Alarm ditches the snooze button for strings
There's a long history of alarm clocks that promise a better way of waking you up in the morning, but few quite like this Acoustic Alarm built by designer Jamie McMahon. As you can see, it's not technically an alarm clock, but it does have an alarm of sorts: four tunable strings that are plucked using a spinning guitar pick. Unfortunately, this one's strictly one of a kind for the time being, but it does actually exist in prototype form -- made of birch plywood, walnut and stainless steel, no less -- and you can check it out in action in the video after the break.
New York subway schedule turned into a beautiful, musical visualization (video)
HTML5, JavaScript and a tiny pinch of Flash. Those are your ingredients for building one of the neatest, simplest websites we've come across in a long time. Conductor, as its maker Alexander Chen dubs it, is a visualization built on New York's publicly available subway schedule API. It shows the progress of the Big Apple's underground carriers throughout the day and garnishes the experience with a delightful musical trick every time two lines cross. You can see it on video after the break or just hit the source link and experience it for yourself.
Apple working on an "iSight HD"?
According to a recent MacRumors posting, Apple might be working on a "next generation" high definition iSight camera. This comes after a reference in the localization strings file for QuickTime shows "iSight HD" as one of the import devices. You can see the localization strings for "iSight HD" by opening the following file in either QuickLook (space bar) or by opening it in TextEdit: /System/Library/QuickTime/QuickTimeUSBVDCDigitizer.component/Contents/Resources/English.lproj/Localizable.strings Once you have the file opened, you can clearly see where Apple has placed the following bit of code: /* Next Generation USB iSight */"iSight HD" = "iSight HD";We should note that while this code has been found, it doesn't necessarily mean that Apple will release a new iSight product, but this does give us hope. [via World of Apple]
Yet even MORE evidence of upcoming iTunes rentals
Today's evidence comes to you courtesy of the Apple iPhone. iPhone Developer Pumpkin. He has discovered even more rental-specific information, this time in the iPhone's lockdown daemon file. Lockdown is responsible for authorizing your iPhone for services. For example the lockdown files are involved in authorizing phone service and is also responsible for communication between the device and the computer in generalA string search through the lockdownd executable in /usr/libexec produced the following hits when searched for "rental": pumpkin:~ pumpkin$ strings /usr/local/share/iphone-filesystem/usr/libexec/lockdownd | grep -i rental trigger_rental_bag_verification: Could not retrieve FairPlayID trigger_rental_bag_verification: Could not initialize FairPlay context trigger_rental_bag_verification: Could not verify the rental bag response: %d load_rental_bag_request: Could not retrieve FairPlayID load_rental_bag_request: Could not initialize FairPlay context load_rental_bag_request: Could not generate rental bag request load_rental_bag_request: Could not create mutable dictionary load_rental_bag_request: Could not create CFData from request message load_rental_bag_request: Could not create CFArray load_rental_bag_request: Could not create CFNumber from indice RentalBagResponse RentalBagRequest pumpkin:~ pumpkin$ As of last night, Apple still did not have a public rentalBag web objects interface the way it does for storeBag and secureBag, the two XML files it publishes on its Phobos server. Hopefully, once readers start occasionally pinging http://phobos.apple.com/rentalBag.xml.gz and http://phobos.apple.com/rentalBag.xml, you'll let us know via the Tip line if and when you see any life.Thanks PlanetBeing
Games coming to iPhone?
In response to the rumor of videos in to the iTunes UK store, our friends at Download Squad did a little poking around and found something else that might be imminent: games for the iPhone. (Official ones, that is-- there are already quite a few for the iPhone)Inside the iTunes localisation strings, is the following sequence:/* ===== iPhone Game Item Strings ===== */"4329.001" = "Are you sure you want to remove the selected game from your iPhone?";"4329.002" = "Are you sure you want to remove the selected games from your iPhone?";This basically confirms that Apple is bringing games to the iPhone. The only question, however, is: Which games? Are we going to get more Sims Bowling (ugh), or will Apple's new friends at id actually hook them up with something cool?I'll leave it at this: if Apple can get Doom on the iPhone faster than the hackers can, I'll finally cave in and pick one up. Of course, that's a win-win proposition-- no matter what happens, iPhone-owners will be playing Doom. But if Apple wants my money, I want some games worth playing in return.
Strings in iTunes 7.3 that make us go hmmmm
This morning, I had the opportunity to download and install iTunes 7.3. Of course, one of the first things I did was to head to the package contents to see what had changed between this version and the last. Here is a collection of about a half-dozen updated strings that leapt out at me regarding the new iPhone features. I've only gone through the files in a very cursory fashion, but I thought I'd share this collection of strings that made me go 'hmmmm.' "4320.071" = "Enabling the iPhone for disk use requires manually ejecting the iPhone before each disconnect, even when automatically syncing music." If the iPhone has disk use then maybe we'll be able to access the OS X data directly. I'm guessing, however, that they've set it up like Apple TV with the OS in a hidden part of the disk and the data itself on another, visible section. It would be lovely if secure shell access involved nothing more than enabling disk access and editing a few OS X files. More as we continue...
iPhone references in updated iTunes Protocol
Evan DiBiase has done a bit more detective work after having found YouTube strings in Apple's iTunes protocol. Now he's uncovered references to the iPhone in Apple's secureBag, specifically references to an iPhone Registration page. Unfortunately the page, which uses secure https, doesn't seem to work as yet. And the other references in storeBag and secureBag produce unhelpful responses such as the one shown here. Just for the sake of completion, I also searched through the strings in iTunes 7.2 but found nothing new to report.
