If you haven't updated to iOS 7.0.6 and OS X 10.9.2 on all of your devices, drop everything and do it now.
Last week saw the release of iOS 6.1.6 and 7.0.6, which fix an incredibly simple and scary bug. The best writeup of it that I've seen so far comes from Adam Langley, a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google, who notes the presence of an aptly named, and horrifically unnecessary goto fail
statement in some SSL certificate verification code. For what it's worth (and as Gruber points out), the use of curly braces would've demonstrated the bug to anyone giving a cursory glance to the file, or rendered it entirely moot.
Meanwhile, Facebook this past week countered what they must have seen as an existential threat to their business with the announcement of a $19 billion acquisition of WhatsApp. WhatsApp, with 450 million users around the world, is apparently growing at more than 1 million users per day, and will probably end the year with as many users as Facebook itself has. $19 billion is a staggering amount of money, but it's worth noting that spending ~13% of the market cap of your business is worth it if the alternative is seeing the annihilation of your business. Think of this as being similar to the Instagram acquisition... The only real problem is that, ostensibly, Facebook can't buy out every potential rival.
Following up on my thoughts about Microsoft from last week is a report that the price of Windows will be slashed by 70% on cheaper (i.e. less than $250) portable devices. Apparently, the purpose of this is to protect the Windows ecosystem from the existential threat posed by Chromebooks. Yeah, I laughed at that too.
And, last but not least, it sounds like TestFlight may be going the way of the dodo in short order. I'm still baffled about why they never charged money for their product. Lately, I've been using HockeyApp, and I generally like it, not least because they charge money for their service.
Until next time,
Aaron
Control of the Week
SimpleFormatLanguage
An intuitive and powerful replacement for Cocoa Auto Layout visual format language Custom licensed. |
Weekly Roundup
M13OrderedDictionary
NTMonthYearPicker
RMDownloadIndicator
IQDatabaseManager
PinPad
A lock screen view controller styled to look like iOS 7's. Dynamic count of numbers. Control includes shake and error view. License unspecified. |
MRCircularProgressView
Custom circular UIView that allow set progress similar to AppStore control. MIT licensed. |
InstagramKit
CCKFNavDrawer
CCKFNavDrawer is a custom navigation controller that provides an Android-style navigation drawer. MIT licensed. |
ValidateIt
IOS Form Validation Library MIT licensed. |
IQURLConnection
A replacement of sendAsynchronousRequest of NSURLConnection with ResponseBlock, ProgressBlock & CompletionBlock MIT licensed. |
WMGaugeView
Highly customizable gauge control for iOS. MIT licensed. |
DCOAboutWindow
A replacement for the standard Mac app About dialog. Easily link to your apps website and display acknowledgements separately from your credits. BSD licensed. |
ARObjectCollectionViewController
UIViewController that can present a JSON NSString, JSON NSData, JSON URL, XML NSData, XML URL, RSS NSData, RSS URL, NSDictionary, NSArray, NSSet, UIImage EXIF Metadata... MIT licensed. |
DBCamera
DBCamera is a simple custom photo camera with AVFoundation MIT licensed. |
DropboxBrowser
GameCenterManager
MHVideoPhotoGallery
Gallery for iOS 7 Devices. A mix of the iOS Gallery and the Facebook Gallery. I took the best from the best. Have Fun. MIT licensed. |
WishlistAnimation
iOS App Store's "Add to Wish List" animation License unspecified. |
NVCalendar
NVCalendar is simply 2*2 view to display months,you can click on any date with beautiful animation. MIT licensed. |
SBPickerSelector
Easy framework to setup pickers in your app. -numerical, date and text pickers MIT licensed. |
HAPaperViewController
UICollectionView with layout transitions inspired by Facebook Paper App MIT licensed. |
XHPathCover
XHPathCover is pull down refresh and a parallax top view with real time blur effect to any UITableView, inspired by Path for iOS. MIT licensed. |
YUTableView
Subclass of UITableView which adds expandable sub-menu support to it. MIT licensed. |
RCCPeakableImageView
Implementation of a "peekable" thumbnail image as shown at the „Flag" Kickstarter Project https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1306413684/flag-the-app-that-prints-and-mails-your-photos-for MIT licensed. |
CRMotionView
A custom photo viewer that implements device motion scrolling, inspired by Facebook Paper. MIT licensed. |
UITextField-Shake
UITextField category that adds a shake animation like the password field of the OsX login screen. MIT licensed. |
MWWindow
SCAudioVideoRecorder
MXLMediaView
This is a class designed to show a UIImage and blur & shrink the background. Similar to the Facebook app. MIT licensed. |
JZRefreshControl
BKDateAndTimePickerView
Date and time picker are seperate pickers provided by iOS but with this custom control you can select both at the same time. MIT licensed. |
CardViewSample
Cards View Sample is simple app for creating cards and swipe them over each other. Custom licensed. |