Thoughts and Ramblings

I’ve been using the mac long enough that I’ve gone through several of the package management systems for installing additional open source tools. I started off with Fink which I really liked since it was based on dpkg. Then it became clear that the community had switched to using Mac Ports (formerly Darwin Ports). I was a bit disappointed with this because the package management wasn’t as good as it was with Fink, but it kept pace with the newer OSs better than Fink. Now the community has shifted again, this time to Homebrew. Homebrew seems to have learned a lot of lessons from the previous. The most notable is that most of the Formulas are in binaries and they use git for the formula list rather than rsync for the port list. Also anyone wanting to make a formula would fork the repo on github, commit their formula, and initiate a pull request. Given this adds simplicity on the developers, hopefully homebrew will last longer than the others.

So, for those developers living under a rock for the past 2 weeks, Apple introduced their new programming language Swift. They stated that the language has been in development for 4 years, so it is safe to assume that the language’s definition is fairly stable. Since I wrote several posts on what Objective C can learn from java, such as this most recent one, along with what it has learned, I should at least look at Swift. I have not yet actually programmed anything yet in Swift, but I have read through it’s documentation. If I got anything wrong in this post, call me on it.

Lately there have been several Ars articles discussing passwords and online security. In today’s world, people generally use passwords which are completely inadequate for securing anything, much less private or financial data. Additionally, the “tricks” people are taught on securing their passwords are the wrong lessons (cue obligatory xkcd). So, one of the best solutions is to use a password management system, such as 1Password or LastPass. This solves the problem of weak passwords and the memorization factor, but that still leaves the creation of a strong password for the password manager. A great deal of attention has been given toward creating a strong password, but it is geared toward a computer and not a mobile device. So, how does one create a secure password on a mobile device, particularly in the context of an encryption key.

Anyone who uses multiple IDEs along with Xcode recognizes just how far behind Xcode is compared to others. I would even go as far as to argue it is at least half a decade behind Eclipse. Features which I have long grown use to having are completely absent in Xcode. Then, about a month ago, I discovered AppCode and started using it for my Obj-C development at work. I could repeat the feature set mentioned on their website, but instead I’ll assume you’ve read that and outline the crucial parts.