Phodder Blog

I saw some news recently about an iPhone worm (more details here) making the rounds in Australia.  I have a brief response to those freaking out and making a big deal about this.  Ready for my quotable, official response?

It’s Complete and Utter NONSENSE!

No, really, let me explain.  This worm works against jailbroken phones ONLY.  What?  You mean phones that have been compromised to begin with?  Yes.  In order to jailbreak a phone, you have to essentially hack into it. Also, this worm propagates by using the default SSH password set within SSH, an application that can be installed after jailbreaking.  It’s not using some massively gaping hole left in by Apple when they wrote the iPhone OS.  It attacks an application, added by a few individuals.  That’s all.

Please understand, I’m not saying Apple is innocent of making stupid mistakes that lead to security vulnerabilities.  They do it all the time.  In this instance though, they didn’t.  This worm is a non-issue.

ps – On a geeky historical note, it’s method of propagation reminds me a little of the Morris Worm.  I guess everything old really is new again.

So they say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. And I had “intended” to post tab bar tuesday last week, but due to various unforseen circumstances (mowing the lawn, fixing the fence, hanging out with wife/kids) I find myself staring at 1 week gone by without a tab bar Tuesday. I’m ashamed of myself. Ok, not really.

Anyhow, on to the icons. By request, CaptCrunch asks

Any chance of getting a “Sharing”, or “Share”, or something along those lines?

Here you are sir.

Share

Also, here’s a “Add user” icon

Add User

Thanks again for reading, and keep those tab icon requests coming!

Hey phoddites, welcome to tab bar twosdays VI

Below you’ll find two icons. If I was clever, I would have done a pumpkin or something for halloween. Maybe next year. Oh well, they’re free, why are you complaining!? You’ll take the two I give you and like it! (I kid, I kid…)

Anyhow enough pseduo-witty banter. Here are the icons, free to use.

Flower

Preferences

Well there you go! Enjoy and see ya next week!

Hey peeples.

Here it is, 2 more tab icons, thrown into the wind, to land in whatever apps you may choose to use em in. Free of charge. You’re welcome.

Dollar Icon

Note

Well, till next week, happy coding! Cheers

Dave

Hello fellow travelers, iPhone devs and hackers. Welcome to this, the 4th installment of Tab Bar Twosdays. Here’s the drill. I pick two random tab bar icons from our vast archive of handy-dandy tab icons, and you get to use them. You’re welcome. As before, these icons are free to use in any of your iPhone dev projects, or wherever else you choose.

Someone asked about why these icons were black and white. Good question! Actually they’re black with an alpha channel for transparency. That’s due to their usage on an iPhone tab bar, where these suckers get stuck. Apple takes these images and applies its own fill effects for inactive and selected states (the grey and blue activated icons) you’ll find on most apps. As a designer, it’s a fun challenge to use this limited pallette to create unique icons that complement an app’s overall look and feel.

Anyhow on to the icons. We’ve gone with a building theme today.

Home

Church

Hello again

Dave here, with the latest installment of Tab Bar Twosdays. Not sure how this works? Basically, I splat 2 incredibly amazing absolutely free tab bar icons. Use them in your own xcode projects if the spirit moves you, or wherever else you so choose.

Anyway, onto the icons.

Potion

Beer Mug

Enjoy! I hope you like them. After looking at those icons again, I think I must be thirsty. See ya next week, I’m gonna go grab a coke.

Hi and welcome to this, the second installment of Tab Bar Twosdays. If you saw last week’s post then you know the drill. These icons are free to use, however you please, in whatever iphone app project you have. You can use em in other stuff, too. Regardless, if you do use em, let us know where!

Anyhow, on with the icons.

Camera Icon

Chat Icon

Enjoy! If you’ve got any requests for future icons, let us know!

Hey guys/gals

Dave here, and welcome to our newest gig with our blog. Me being the resident design-guy at our nifty little iphone dev shop, I spend quite a bit of time developing (drumroll) iphone tab bar icons! I know! Shocking eh?

Anyhoo, we’ve decided to kick off a new feature as a help to the rest of the dev community; Tab Bar Twosdays. Here’s the deal:

1) I’ll release 2 iphone tab icons each week (hopefully on tuesday, that’s kind of the deal, right?). They’re optimized with alpha transparency and should be simple, plug-and-play-easy for you to drop in your xcode project.

2) You can download and use it free and shamelessly in any of your iphone projects. No payment necessary, though tweet and blog mentions are always cool.

3) Profit. Make millions on your app. ALL because of those nifty icons. You’re welcome.

That being said, here are the introductory two icons.

Spyglass

Folder Icon

Thanks again for reading, and happy coding!

Hey, what’s this? Who put that there?

More info coming soon!

This will be a quick post with a bit of code.  I wanted to share this since I had an awful time finding some working code snippets to communicate with Urban Airship to do Push notifications to Apple for  iPhones.

This code snippet will register a new device with Urban Airship that can then receive Push notifications.

import urllib2
from simplejson import dumps as json_dumps

user   = UAPUSH_USER
passwd = UAPUSH_PASS
base_url = UAPUSH_BASE_URL

# push_payload = {
    # 'aps': { 'badge': 2 },
    # 'device_tokens': [ 'devToken01', 'devToken02', etc ]
    # }

def _http_request(url,payload,is_put=False):
    headers = {"Content-type": "application/json" }
    authinfo = urllib2.HTTPBasicAuthHandler()
    authinfo.add_password("API", url, user, passwd )
    opener = urllib2.build_opener(authinfo)
    req  = urllib2.Request(url, payload, headers)
    if is_put: req.get_method = lambda: 'PUT'
    data = opener.open(req)
    return data.read()

def register_device(dev_token, tags):
    # dev_token is a string of hex returned from
    #     registerForRemoteNotificationTypes:
    # tags is a list of string based tags
    content = {"tags": tags}
    url = "%sdevice_tokens/%s" % (base_url, dev_token)
    print _http_request(url, json_dumps(content), is_put=True)

There’s nothing magical here. I just found it a bit interesting to have an HTTP base authenticated PUT request to a restful service and figured I’d show how to tie these all together.