And off we go!

So Amazon shipped Aaron Hillegass's book across the Atlantic in record time and I'm already one chapter in. I took some time yesterday to watch the CocoaHeads Best of Both Worlds video before diving in.

What I take away from the video presentation is to always respect the user's space, to keep it simple and to put an extraordinary amount of thought into getting the GUI just right.

The book (Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X) so far seems to be just what the doctor ordered, but I'll withhold my recommendation until I'm at least half way in.

Summer reading

Scott Stevenson points out that the third edition of Aaron Hillegass' book Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X has been released. Since it appears to be a sort of Cocoa newbie bible I went ahead and ordered it immediately. The affordable price also helps of course.

Let's call this my first major step towards becoming proficient in Cocoa. Now I know what to do with my summer vacation after the Euro 2008 finals have played out.

Bought an iPhone, thinking about security

So I've been away for a week doing a presentation at a user conference in San Francisco. While there I dropped in at the Apple Store across the street from the hotel at least twice per day, attempting to purchase an iPhone. They were constantly sold out.

I even tried at the AT&T store, but they demanded I sign up for a contract in order to buy the unit.

On my third attempt on the day before leaving town lady luck gave me a break. The Apple Store had just gotten a small shipment of 16GB iPhones, and I managed to grab the second to last one in the pile! After running the spectacular Pwnage Tool from the iPhone Dev Team I was able to use the phone with my SIM card. Compared to my earlier cell phone, a Linux based Motorola A1200, it's like being transported five years into the future with the flick of a finger.

Now to my security concerns. I have installed the OpenSSH client and server package, and am somewhat worried about the root password of all iPhone's being public knowledge. (It is alpine by the way.) If someone is able to find my IP address they could easily ssh into the machine as root and totally wipe my phone!

I know I can change the password by logging in as root and running the passwd command, but I worry that changing it will screw up the functionality of the device in some unforeseen way, rendering it an iBrick. Maybe Apple have hardcoded the password into some of the functionality of the device.

I love my iPhone a little too much to risk trying to change the password at the moment, but once the first crush wears off maybe I'll build up the courage and give it a try.

(posted from my iPhone)