APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Author Archives: Graham
Configuring CruiseControl.rb in under an hour
One of the changes I decided to make straight after NSConf MINI yesterday was to enable continuous integration for my projects. I had used CI before based on BuildBot, but that had left me less than impressed: It was really … Continue reading
Posted in software-engineering, tool-support
3 Comments
On the extension of code signing
One of the public releases Apple has made this WWDC week is that of Safari 5, the latest version of their web browser. Safari 5 is the first version of the software to provide a public extensions API, and there … Continue reading
On NSNull as an anti-pattern
All this talk about type-safe collections may leave you thinking: but what about NSNull? Let’s say you have an array that only accepts objects conforming to MyProtocol. You can’t add +[NSNull null] to it, because it doesn’t implement the protocol. … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, iPad, iPhone, Mac
7 Comments
On type safety and making it harder to write buggy code
Objective-C’s duck typing system is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing, in that it’s amazingly flexible. A curse, in that such flexibility can lead to some awkward problems. Something that typically happens in dealing with data from a … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, iPad, iPhone, Mac
5 Comments
Careful how you define your properties
Spot the vulnerability in this Objective-C class interface: @interface SomeParser : NSObject { @private NSString *content; } @property (nonatomic, retain) NSString *content; – (void)beginParsing; //… @end Any idea? Let’s have a look at a use of this class in action: … Continue reading
Posted in iPad, iPhone, Mac, Vulnerability
2 Comments
Why OS X (almost) doesn’t need root any more
Note: this post was originally written for the Mac Developer Network. In the beginning, there was the super-user. And the super-user was root. When it comes to doling out responsibility for privileged work in an operating system, there are two … Continue reading
Posted in Authorization, Mac, PCAS
Comments Off on Why OS X (almost) doesn’t need root any more
On improved tool support for Cocoa developers
I started writing some tweets, that were clearly taking up too much room. They started like this: My own thoughts: tool support is very important to good software engineering. 3.3.1 is not a big inhibitor to novel tools. /cc @rentzsch … Continue reading
Posted in PCAS, threatmodel, tool-support
1 Comment
On localisation and security
Hot on the heels of Uli’s post on the problems of translation, I present another problem you might encounter while localising your code. This is a genuine bug (now fixed, of course) in code I have worked on in the … Continue reading
Posted in buffer-overflow, l10n, Mac, Vulnerability
2 Comments
Which vendor “is least secure”?
The people over at Intego have a blog post, Which big vendor is least secure? They discuss that because Microsoft have upped their game, malware authors have started to target other products, notably those produced by Adobe and Apple. That … Continue reading
Posted in Business, Responsibility, threatmodel, Vulnerability
2 Comments
Why passwords aren’t always the right answer.
I realised something yesterday. I don’t know my master password. Users of Mac OS X can use FileVault, a data protection feature that replaces the user’s home folder with an encrypted disk image. Encrypted disk images are protected by AES-128 … Continue reading
Posted in Encryption, Keychain, Mac, password
3 Comments
