Allyson Kazmucha for iMore on the WD-40 home button “fix”:
>WD-40 may be non-conductive but the solvent in it will break down plastic. Your home button is plastic as well as some of the internal parts. Your speaker assembly is plastic and sits directly below your home button.
[Exactly](https://brooksreview.net/2012/01/wd-40-trick/).
David Sparks on speculative developers:
>Don’t make 60 crappy apps: Make one really good one.
These types of developers along with those that simply copy other developers are really ruining the experience for geeks and non-geeks alike.
At least, it seems, Apple is [starting to crack down](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/40101/Apple_removes_several_iOS_copycat_games_from_one_offending_developer.php) on some the more obvious copycat offenders in the App Store.
That’s the key line in Samsung’s Super Bowl ad for it’s new pen based tablet/phone thing.
I didn’t comment when the ad came on, but here’s roughly what I heard in the room I was standing in:
– “Bwahahaahahah, is that a tablet or a phone?”
– “My old Palm Pilot had a pen…”
– “Mine too, do you still have your Palm?”
Two thoughts about this:
1. If your brand new product is being compared to a Palm Pilot, then you have already lost.
2. If the first feature of a new touchscreen device that you want to tout is a stylus — perhaps you need to rethink that device.
Jacqui Cheng:
>In the meantime, photos that users thought they “deleted” from the social network months or even years ago remain accessible via direct link.
I think it is safest to assume that once a photo, or anything really, is online it is out there permanently.
Lori Andrews:
>The term Weblining describes the practice of denying people opportunities based on their digital selves. You might be refused health insurance based on a Google search you did about a medical condition. You might be shown a credit card with a lower credit limit, not because of your credit history, but because of your race, sex or ZIP code or the types of Web sites you visit.
If you use Google, or any social network, then this is a must read.
Leanna Lofte:
>Both iMove and Avid Studio can do the basics that you would expect from any video editor. You can insert videos, photos, and music, trim clips, add titles, and export to YouTube. Unfortunately for iMovie, this is where the similarities end.
Glad she wrote this up — I have been really curious how the two stack up. Sounds like Avid is the real deal and should only get better.
That’s clever. I rarely see the need for the split keyboard, but I’m glad to see it wasn’t as much as of an afterthought as it first seemed the keyboard was.
David Karp on the Tumblr Staff blog:
>For one dollar, your post will stand out in the Dashboard with a customizable sticker to make sure your followers take notice!
I am reminded of [this quote from Art Webb](http://quotesondesign.com/art-webb/):
>If you make everything bold, nothing is bold.
According to this support document (you need to be logged in to view it) Apple says that 10.7.2 and Security Update 2011-006 did the following:
>Impact: A person with physical access may be able to access the user’s password
>Description: A logic error in the kernel’s DMA protection permitted firewire DMA at loginwindow, boot, and shutdown, although not at screen lock. This update addresses the issue by preventing firewire DMA at all states where the user is not logged in.
>CVE-ID
>CVE-2011-3215 : Passware, Inc.
That sounds an awful lot like it patched the [previously report security vulnerability of FileVault 2](https://brooksreview.net/2012/02/filevault-hack/).
Vincent Messina:
>That’s right, Ice Cream Sandwich now occupies 1% of Android devices according to this month’s Android Platform Distribution chart.
He does note that Gingerbread is on 58.6% of Android devices. For those not familiar with the ridiculous naming system in Android, Gingerbread is versions 2.3-2.3.7 and Ice Cream Sandwich (the newest) is version 4.0-4.0.3.
In other words it is big news that software that is two versions old is now on the majority of devices and that three months in 1% of devices are using the latest version of Android.
What a mess.
I’d be pissed if I bought a new Android phone on a two year contract and was still stuck on Gingerbread.
Florian Mueller reports that Apple had to pull the iPhone 3G, 3GS, 4 (not 4S) and the 3G iPad models from its online store to comply with a Motorola injunction. I’d be pissed at Motorola if I lived in Germany.
This is something I have been thinking about for quite a while now. Say you are a diehard Apple fan and you also love Google, just not Android phones. Google wins a patent spat against Apple and now, all of a sudden, the Apple products that you can buy are restricted. Maybe you can’t get the latest tech when you want it.
Does this kind of result make you more or less an Apple fan? Does this make you more or less willing to buy Android or Google products, knowing that they are the cause of these restrictions?
I find it interesting the damage that can come from protecting your own intellectual property.
[In other news](http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2012/02/motorola-wins-german-injunction-against.html): Germans can’t use the push feature of iCloud email anymore.
**Update**: [That was short lived.](http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2012/02/appeals-court-grants-apple-temporary.html)
Since we are on the topic of linkbait, here is a post from Teambox. The general idea of this post is this: they have a horizontally scrolling web app, but because of the way that Lion implements (by default) horizontal scrolling some users end up moving backwards in their web history instead of scrolling the Teambox web app.
After they did (I am sure) copious amounts of research, the people at Teambox have decided that Lion:
>[…] breaks the web with a non-standard behavior, and gives you no JS API to prevent it.
The funny thing is, does it really “break the web”? Nope, just checked and I could still use “the web”. What about the non-standard part? Well it comes *standard* on all new Macs this way, so I am going to go ahead and say that this is 100% a standard feature for most all Mac users.
What this article is really about is a web app that doesn’t work well with Lion’s new default behavior, thus breaking this one particular web app. What this isn’t about is “breaking the web”.
Topher Kessler writing about the [same FileVault 2 vulnerability that I just posted a Macworld link to](https://brooksreview.net/2012/02/filevault-hack/), writes about the sensationalist headline, but not the information that readers need to know. Macworld specified the conditions under which the hack can happen: FireWire port and user needs to be logged in.
Kessler just says that anyone with this $995 software can crack a FileVault 2 disk in no more than 40 minutes using a FireWire port. Which is a line of bullshit. The most important part is that the user must already be logged in — that gives every FileVault 2 user an easy way around the security hole: logging out.
It’s one thing to write a craptastic-linkbaiting headline, but it’s an entirely worse offense to not even give readers the full details of the story you are writing about.
Pathetic.
John E Dunn for Macworld on a new “forensic” piece of software that can crack into Apple’s FileVault 2 encrypted systems:
>Put another way, the product cannot extract encryption keys on static data or before the keys have been summoned as part of the logging-in process. As long as the login is not automatic users should be safe.
>In the case of FireVault, hackers also need to get to the memory contents through a working FireWire port so remote access is not possible.
I am guessing that a locked screen will still count as “logged in”. So if traveling it might actually be a fantastic idea to actually turn your laptop off so that this software cannot be used to hack into it.
One other interesting thing is that FireWire must be used. I am assuming you could use Thunderbolt to get a FireWire port, but what about on my 2010 MacBook Air that has only USB?
**Update**: [Thomas Brand](http://eggfreckles.net/) chimed in to confirm my suspicions about Thunderbolt:
@BenjaminBrooks After looking at the FireWire FileVault 2 exploit it looks like that Thunderbolt would provide the same bus level access.
— Thomas Brand (@ThomasBrand) February 3, 2012
and:
@BenjaminBrooks Thunderbolt and FireWire access data directly from the system bus allowing the exploit. USB goes through the CPU.
— Thomas Brand (@ThomasBrand) February 3, 2012
[PDFPen for iPad](http://www.smilesoftware.com/PDFpen/iOS/index.html) was released just before I hopped on a plane to head down to Macworld|iWorld in San Francisco. [I read a quick review of it](http://www.macstories.net/reviews/smiles-pdfpen-for-ipad-is-a-powerful-1-0-version/) and then purchased the app, closed down my iPad, and jumped on a plane.
While airborne I got an email from my real estate agent saying that he needed some paperwork signed for the home my wife and I are purchasing. I used iMessage to tell my wife to sign the paperwork on her Mac and then send me the file. At this point I could have pulled out my MacBook Air and paid another Wi-Fi fee to connect it, but I had PDFPen on my iPad — why not give it a go?
I did and it worked fantastically well.
You might be thinking that there are hundreds of apps on the App Store that can do this same thing, and there likely are, but PDFPen has some really great things that made me love it.
A few of those things are:
– iCloud Sync
– Stored Signatures
– Email a “Printed” PDF
### iCloud
If you have PDFPen on your Mac, then PDFPen for the iPad will sync the files between the two applications over iCloud. Unless you are a heavy PDF user this likely doesn’t seem to be all that life-changing of a feature, but it still is pretty great.
The iCloud support in iOS and Mac applications has become a fantastic Dropbox like utility, but unlike Dropbox it is something that is built-in at the system level.
You don’t have to think about it and that is key.
So when I sent out 4-5 signed PDFs from PDFPen on my iPad and a few days later was sitting at my MacBook Air with a need to resend a couple of those documents — I didn’t need to go find my iPad. All I had to do was grab those PDFs in PDFPen and resend them. They were just there.
It’s these really small moments that add up to a product that just fits in your life. More developers need to add iCloud syncing — it really is great — and I am glad PDFPen has it.
### Stored Signatures
I didn’t know this when I was signing all those PDFs, but there is a fantastic feature of PDFPen that allows you to store your own signatures and other scribbles so that they can be added to any document with one tap. Here’s how you do that (from a Smile newsletter):
I love that feature and have already added not just my signature, but my initials as well. It’s a nice little touch and I can imagine there being some really great uses for this (including storing company logos).
### Emailing a “Printed” PDF
One of the most annoying problems that I run into on a weekly basis is filling out a PDF, sending it to a Windows user only to get an email back saying that the document isn’t filled out. I don’t know why this is a problem on Windows, but the layered approach that Preview seems to take on the Mac is not compatible in a universal manner.
The solution has always been to fill out the PDF and then print the file to a PDF — thus flattening the document. The fine folks at Smile must have had this problem too because when sending out the PDF in PDFPen you can choose to send it as a flattened file (printed PDF) if you want.
This *is* fantastic.
### Two Criticisms
There are two things about this app that I don’t care for:
1. The icon. I have never been a fan of the styling that Smile uses for its icons and PDFPen is no exception. I know that I pick on icons a lot, but a good icon is a good icon. A bad icon is one that I never want on my home screen — so if my home screen is your goal, you better make your icon good.
2. Highlighting PDFs is a bit awkward. I could see this being pretty good with a Cosmonaut, but with my finger I felt like I never learned how to highlight before. If some sort of tracking could be built-in so that you can make relatively straight lines then we would really have something here. Until then, if your primary use case is highlighting, you might want to look elsewhere. ((Also, why are you highlighting so many PDFs?))
### One Step Closer ###
Like I said before, I am not a PDF guru. However I am a real estate professional and PDFs are a norm in my business. There’s nothing missing from PDFPen for my needs, which takes me just one step closer to not needing my Mac at all.
In fact, I didn’t even need my MacBook Air at Macworld until I recorded a podcast — a large part of not needing the Air was because of PDFPen for iPad.
Paul Thurrott:
>Windows Phone 8, codenamed Apollo, will be based on the Windows 8 kernel and not on Windows CE as are current versions. This will not impact app compatibility: Microsoft expects to have over 100,000 Windows Phone 7.5-compatible apps available by the time WP8 launches, and they will all work fine on this new OS.
That’s interesting and in reading his post it sounds more and more like Windows Phone 8 will be very similar to Windows 8. That is: it will be a sibling to Windows instead of a cousin to Windows.
I am not sure if this will be good or bad, but if they can pull it off while maintaining app compatibility (even while adding more screen resolutions) it should be a win.
Marco Arment on Google’s position in social networking and thwarting competitive threats:
>It’s easy not to “be evil” when you’re ahead. But when you’re backed into a corner and your usual strategies aren’t working, it’s easy to get frustrated, scared, and angry, and throw previously held morals and standards out the window.
Be sure to also read his footnote, as it is a great summary of the interesting wording chosen for Google’s mantra.
Great video with music from the technology that surrounds us.
Brian Stelter:
>By creating in-house content, social Web sites can increase the amount of time that users spend on their sites, thereby increasing their value to advertisers.
Sounds an awful lot like blogging about blogging. Which sounds boring as crap.