iPhone Adhoc Over-the-air install

It is always a tedious task to build an ad hoc IPA app for beta tester to try out your iPhone app. First you need to ask them the UDID, which they may helpfully give you a screenshot of iTunes... then you have to build an IPA, and prayed that they know how to do anything with the IPA.

Now, there is this "Hockey" framework (Announcing Hockey, an iOS developer framework) that can automate the process.

For integration sample, you might want to check out this PSiOSAppTemplate.

Find my iPhone "API"

Apple rolled out free "Find my iPhone" for those on iOS 4.2 with an iPhone 4.

The nicest part is, you can programmatically track your iPhone 4 now "with an unofficial API".... for free!!!!

Plenty of examples in Ruby and PHP.

Alpine on Mac OS X

I have been using "pine" since the old unix shell account time. Remember those free stuff like http://sdf.lonestar.org/?

Turns out using "alpine" (the modern version "pine") is pretty straight forward with GMail.





1. First, compile "alpine" using MacPorts by "port install alpine".

2. Then, run "alpine" for the first time, which should generate a nice .pinerc at your home directory.

3. Okay, just change these few lines accordingly:

# Over-rides your full name from Unix password file. Required for PC-Alpine.
personal-name=YOUR_NAME

# Sets domain part of From: and local addresses in outgoing mail.
user-domain=gmail.com

# List of SMTP servers for sending mail. If blank: Unix Alpine uses sendmail.
smtp-server=smtp.gmail.com:587/tls/novalidate-cert/user=YOUR_GMAIL_USERNAME@gmail.com

# Path of (local or remote) INBOX, e.g. ={mail.somewhere.edu}inbox
# Normal Unix default is the local INBOX (usually /usr/spool/mail/$USER).
inbox-path={imap.gmail.com/ssl/novalidate-cert/user=YOUR_GMAIL_USERNAME@gmail.com}inbox

That's it!!! Welcome to 2010.

Sounds Right 1.0 is now available on AppStore

Sounds Right 1.0 (iTunes AppStore link) / (British Council hosted page) has been available on the AppStore. I am glad that the reception is fairly good given this is one of my first iPad apps shipped.

ABC Nightline - IDEO Shopping

iPhone OS 3.1.3 enables Tethering

rdiff-backup with SSHFS

Very useful guide to setup remote backup with rdiff-backup from Linode:

My approach is to use a Snow Leopard machine with an External USB Harddrive to backup my servers. On my MacBook Pro:
1. Install MacFUSE
2. Install MacFusion
3. Then use macports to install rdiff-backup

Then, run MacFusion to mount the remote directory and run the rdiff-backup.

However, you need to remove the sshnodelay.so file in the MacFusion ssh plugin directory in order for sshfs-static to work.