APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Category Archives: PCAS
Illuminative-C
In addition to being a mildly accomplished software engineer, I’ve done some studying and armchair research in the field of ancient languages and palaeography. What happens if we smoosh those fields together? In a very slight way, art historian and … Continue reading
Posted in advancement of the self, books, code-level, documentation, PCAS, software-engineering, UI
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Test-Driven iOS Development
Here it is, after more than a year in the making, the book that they really did want you to read! Test-driven IOS Development (Developer’s Library) (affiliate link) has finally hit the stores[*]. I wrote this book for the simple … Continue reading
Posted in books, PCAS, software-engineering, TDD, TDiOSD
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On explaining stuff to people
An article that recently made the rounds, though it was written back in September, is called Apple’s Idioten Vektor. It’s a discussion of how the CCCrypt() function in Apple’s CommonCrypto library, when used in its default cipher block chaining mode, … Continue reading
Posted in books, Crypto, documentation, Encryption, iPad, iPhone, Mac, PCAS
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On the new Lion security things
This post will take a high-level view of some of Lion’s new security features, and examine how they fit (or don’t) in the general UNIX security model and with that of other platforms. App sandboxing The really big news for … Continue reading
Posted in Authentication, Authorization, Codesign, Mac, PCAS, sandbox
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Storing and testing credentials: Cocoa Touch Edition
This article introduces the concept of key stretching, using code examples to explain the ideas. For code you can use in an app that more closely resembles current practice, see Password checking with CommonCrypto. There’s been quite the media circus … Continue reading
Posted in Authentication, code-level, Crypto, iPad, iPhone, Mac, password, PCAS
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On free Mac Anti-Virus
On Tuesday, my pals at my old stomping ground Sophos launched their Free home edition Mac product. I’ve been asked by several people what makes it tick, so here’s Mac Anti-Virus In A Nutshell. What is the AV doing? So … Continue reading
Posted in antivirus, Business, Malware, PCAS
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On private methods
Let’s invent a hypothetical situation. You’re the software architect for an Objective-C application framework at a large company. This framework is used by many thousands of developers to create all sorts of applications for a particular platform. However, you have … Continue reading
Posted in code-level, iPad, iPhone, Mac, PCAS, software-engineering
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On authorization proxy objects
Authorization Services is quite a nice way to build in discretionary access controls to a Mac application. There’s a whole chapter in Professional Cocoa Application Security (Chapter 6) dedicated to the topic, if you’re interested in how it works. The … Continue reading
Posted in Authorization, code-level, Mac, PCAS, software-engineering
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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
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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
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