bestpractices
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The first global drone standards have been revealed
As drone use grows, rules and regulations remain in flux and vary among jurisdictions. Last month, for instance, the Federal Aviation Administration granted operators of certain drones approval to fly them in controlled airspace in the US, but the UK has an outright ban on using them within a kilometer of airports. To help establish best practices, the International Organization for Standardization has released the first draft set of global standards for drone use.
NHTSA advice aims to keep connected cars safe from hackers
Following a smattering of recent high-profile attacks, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is taking a hard look at vehicular cybersecurity. In a 22-page document (PDF), the NHTSA outlines its voluntary best practices for automakers going forward. Chief among the guidelines is using a layered approach to security, so that even in the event of a successful attack that "vehicle systems take appropriate and safe actions." Meaning, a car's computer shouldn't put the driver at risk just to fend off an intruder.
Oculus' best practices explains how to create a VR experience that doesn't make people sick
Couldn't make it out to Valve's Steam Dev Days to hear Palmer Luckey gab about how to build a good virtual reality experience? No worries - Oculus' new VR Best Practices guide will fill you in on the details. The 39-page document is designed to help combat simulator sickness, which can leave users of a poorly optimized virtual reality experience feeling nauseous, disoriented and uncomfortable. Inside it has guidelines for minimum framerates, graphics aliasing and response times, but most of it focuses on creating an experience that feels natural to the user. Seemingly simple things, like a player's walking speed or limitations in camera control, can have a major impact on how uncomfortable a player can feel in a virtual space. The user's awareness of their own presence in VR is also pretty important. "Looking down and having no body is disconcerting," the document reads. "A full character avatar can do a lot to ground the user in the virtual environment." The guide has health warnings too, suggesting that users take 10 to 15 minute breaks for every hour spent in the Oculus Rift and declaring its 3D technology potentially unsafe for children. Gee, that sounds familiar.
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.
Improving your AirPort reception, MacGeekery How-To
MacGeekry has just published a truly epic post discussing best practices for maintaining a strong and relatively interference free AirPort Network. The article, full of pretty graphs and shiny charts, explains how to use three free programs to check your network for issues, and how to fix any issues you might find. Although intended for owners of AirPort base stations, I imagine much of the information in the article applies globally for all wireless routers and access points. I haven't tried any of the suggestions yet, as I'm not at home, but I'd be interested to hear from you readers if this stuff really works.
