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Erica Sadun

Biography

Erica Sadun holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. She has written, co-written, and contributed to almost two dozen books about technology, particularly in the areas of programming, digital video, and digital photography. An unrepentant geek, Sadun has never met a gadget she didn't need. Her checkered past includes run-ins with NeXT, Newton, and a vast myriad of both successful and unsuccessful technologies. When not writing, she and her geek husband parent three adorable geeks-in-training, who regard their parents with restrained bemusement.

Books

Articles

Blog

A proposal for SDK-compliant copy & paste

October 03 2008

This morning, I had one of my d'oh moments: finally figuring out exactly how to do inter-app copy and paste without breaking SDK rules. It basically goes like this, in a similar fashion to the Core Location service I wrote about a few months ago: read more

Creating an iPhone-based Web Service: Part 3

October 03 2008

Over the last two weeks, I've shown you how to create a socket to listen for web requests and how to produce an artificial index.html file that advertises the files you're willing to serve from your iPhone. Today, I'll wrap things up by adding error pages and the actual file… read more

Goodbye NDA

October 02 2008

Goodbye NDA and welcome to the age of open collaboration. Yay. read more

Creating an iPhone-based Web Service: Part 2

September 26 2008

The iPhone's "no disk access" policy shouldn't bar you from sharing your application's files with the world at large. Last week, I showed you how to build a listening socket that polled for requests on a random port. This week, it's time to parse those requests. read more

Creating an iPhone-based Web Service: Part 1

September 19 2008

The iPhone provides no disk access. The backup mechanism hides your files into mdbackup archives. Apple disabled attachments for email. So what do you do when you want to share your data with the world. Creating your own web server is one way to provide a connection between your iPhone… read more

Sandbox: Think like Apple

September 12 2008

Apple allows read access to nearly the entire iPhone file system. This is a mixed blessing. Your Application can read that data -- but it shouldn't. Apple has been rejecting apps that stray outside their sandbox. From the various rejection letters that I've seen, Apple cites non-specific "violations". These violations have… read more

Uncovering Notifications at Run Time

September 05 2008

Quite a while back, I posted about uncovering selectors at runtime. Detecting selectors allows you to reverse engineer the way Apple uses delegation calls to communicate between objects and clients. Delegation is a key way that objects communicate. Another way is intra-application notification. As with selectors, you can uncover notifications at… read more

Scraping AppStore Reviews

August 29 2008

I know I promised last week to post about intra-app notification, and I'm still planning to but after chatting with Øivind Kjellnø over email, I decided to change directions for a little while. I'll get back to notifications but for today, I'm going to show you how to access your… read more

SDK Code Samples at iDevKit

August 28 2008

iPhone developer Mxweas (author of mxtube) writes "I made a forum for iPhone SDK and Toolchain development called idevkit.com. There are tons of code samples already up and it currently has about 460 members. Feel free to check it out." read more

Finding iPhone inter-app notification names

August 22 2008

A few weeks ago, I wrote about listening to iPhone inter-application notifications. Several readers contacted me, through the post comments and through private mail, asking if I could explain how to create the list of notifications that was omitted from the original post. So today, I'm going to walk you… read more

Retrieving Device Information

August 15 2008

As the open iPhone toolchain reveals, Apple has supplied a limited device-specific information class. You can retrieve far more information from your iPhone through its IO Registry. As on the Macintosh, the IO Registry provides a great deal of hardware specific information, which can be queried and used by your… read more

Tweeting

August 08 2008

So today, keeping in the theme of posting useful code snippets that do not rely on privileged SDK calls, let me show you how to Tweet. The API itself is really simple: you provide a user name, password and a Twitter message. What complicates this from an iPhone point of… read more

Forensics Seminar/Workshop

August 05 2008

"Hey Erica, I was hoping you could help get the word out about a forensics seminar and workshop I am giving in Boston this fall." read more

iPhone Notifications

August 01 2008

Listening to notifications isn't hard. Just call CFNotificationCenterAddObserver and add your application as a listener. Unfortunately, unlike standard notification centers, the Darwin forbids eavesdropping. You must specify exactly which notification token you want to listen for. read more

Pwnage, Jailbreak and now...what?

July 25 2008

Now that the iPhone has been jailbroken, may people are asking "So now what?" What use has the jailbreak been, especially considering the easy advantages of App Store distribution. The answer to that depends on how you use your iPhone. read more
Erica Sadun