Apple and Adobe

My response to Steve Jobs' mostly well-written reasons for not allowing Flash on his mobile devices.

Jobs is spot-on that Flash is a closed, proprietary system. It renders video (and other content) in software, not hardware; he claims that all mobile devices decode H.264 in hardware, and can play 10 hours of H.264 video content vs. 5 hours of software-decoded video. I haven't tested his claim, but specialized hardware seems like it ought to do the job better.

The part that really bothers me is where he attacks Adobe's iPhone programming interface: "We know from painful experience that letting a third party layer of software come between the platform and the developer ultimately results in sub-standard apps and hinders the enhancement and progress of the platform."
The "progress of the platform" is nonsense. It is up to the developers to use whatever tools they chose to create the products they desire. It is not relevant to Apple what methods we, the developers, use to create our content.

Furthermore, Steve Jobs has no right to complain that Flash is a closed system when his App Store is even more restrictive. It would be better to have an Open app store and allow developers to use whatever tools we want!

Jobs complains that "[t]he third party may not adopt enhancements from one platform unless they are available on all of their supported platforms. Hence developers only have access to the lowest common denominator set of features. Again, we cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our innovations and enhancements because they are not available on our competitor’s platforms."
Again, this is better than Apple's practice of changing the APIs out from under developers. Their attitude is one of "We're so very glad that you used our APIs, but we've deprecated them all, so you'll have to rewrite your code, at least to have dynamic OS-testing," but they say it differently (from the article): "We want to continually enhance the platform so developers can create even more amazing, powerful, fun and useful applications. "
This is a terrible methodology, and it's a terrible way to treat programmers.

Creating a DMG with an icon and background image

[Posted with permission from my client.]

Our Release mode build is designed to package up the final app bundle into a dmg. We wanted to make a nice user experience, similar to the images of Google Chrome and Firefox, so we added an alias to /Applications and set the alias' name to " ".
We use an applescript to set the position and size of the icons in icon view, and also to set the background image. However, we could not figure out how to set the icon for the mounted volume in Finder's sidebar. I knew that it involed .VolumeIcon.icns, but that was insufficient.
After much searching, we realized that we had to set extended Finder attributes for the volume's root directory, but couldn't figure out how to do so from the shell / applescript. Finally, we found xattr, but there was no documentation to indicate what names or attributes to use. However, Google Chrome and Firefox both had the same set of 32 4-byte hex flags, so we simply copied them.

Solution: with read/write dmg mounted (and a disk name of VOLUME_NAME), use the following command from the Terminal (or shell script):

xattr -wx com.apple.FinderInfo 00000000000000000400FFFFFFFF000000000000000000000000000000000000 "/Volumes/${VOLUME_NAME}"


UPDATE:
There is a much more intuitive interface: SetFile -a C "/Volumes/${VOLUME_NAME}".