17 Jun
   Filed Under: Personal Work   

I have been struggling to get out a few more blog updates in my busy schedule lately. I am wrapping up this term at the Academy the 20th (that’s in a few days, yes) and after that, I’m going to have a lot to consider.

Anyway, I’m up to stuff, as you might have figured out by now. Apart from having some social obligations and things to do, I’ve got quite some client work rounded up lately and I’ve also gotten a few new requests for proposals. So, naturally, a new Icon Designer is in the works!

icon_designer.jpg

This and much more fancy graphics in the next few days. I might even get around to posting a preview of the new Cocoia website, which is really… well, the concept left me speechless, but as it’s looking now, it’s going to be incredible.

Also: taking some requests on what icons need replacement in the ‘military’ icon set. Let me know what icon you’d like to have a new look most (can be any icon, preferably not of a third-party)

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13 Jun
   Filed Under: Announcement   

Dear people. In the last few weeks, I’ve seen yet another step in the growth of Cocoia and I have decided to outline it’s growth and the upcoming projects in a presentation. There are some big things coming up, and so, it’s now official. See how far Cocoia has come and what we’re quickly approaching.

If this is in any way unusable to you, let me know. It’s a Quicktime slideshow.

Click here to download and view fullsreen.

13 Jun
   Filed Under: Unfiled   

I really, really can’t stay behind if even the Finder decides to use Coverflow. So I decided to add a coverflow interface to a project; Randleaf, the OpenGL abstract graphics generator has been command-line for a while, so I am working on getting it a bit fancy enough for public demo’ing. This really clicks into the great announcement I will be making today, so stay tuned.

13 Jun
   Filed Under: Personal Work   

Stay tuned for a lot of Cocoia news later today. Current local time is 11:25, in the morning. In the next 12 hours, a selection of things will unwrap.

11 Jun
   Filed Under: Apple, Design, Popular   

Just a treat. Enjoy this Leopard wallpaper as a gift from Icon Designer ;).

leopreview.jpg

Thanks for the downloads! This image has seen about 6000 downloads since it’s inception two days ago, and I’ll make a version without the ‘mess’ behind it for release soon.

11 Jun
   Filed Under: Apple   

The new Apple Leopard page lists a specific tab under “Technology” about security. Some interesting points are there, and I must say, some promising developments on this front.

We’ve seen the sandbox daemon in the Leopard preview builds, but while I pointed out that there were some default services running that were subject to exploitation, it seems Leopard will have some protection to these ‘problems’. From the Apple site:

Helper applications in Leopard — including the network time daemon and the Spotlight indexer — are sandboxed to guard against attackers.

Now that’s a good improvement. But there’s more.


“…files downloaded using Safari, Mail, and iChat are screened to determine if they contain applications. If they do, Leopard alerts you, then warns you the first time you open one.”

There’s one less avenue for malicious content being automatically opened. Given the track record of Mac users buying the upgrade of their favorite OS, we’ll see a lot more secure population in October. But wait, there is, indeed, one more thing.

“Leopard can use digital signatures to verify that an application hasn’t been changed since it was created.”

Why of course it can! After all, didn’t it use ZFS? Which does has the ability to checksum everything. We can also use Filevault, which isn’t really discussed on the Apple site, but uses a new encryption scheme, of which details are unknown at the time of writing. Fortunately;

“The Disk Utility tool in Leopard helps you create encrypted disk images using 128-bit or even stronger 256-bit AES encryption.”

And Apple Mail already supports signing certificates and authorities. This is getting a great OS for using the many facilities of securing your digital life. Strong new encryption possibilities are great. On Apple’s security page, they underline their commitment to keeping the kernel open-source, which, in my opinion, is also a critical part of the security and integrity of OS X.

That was it for now. If some of my fellow developers come back, I’ll have the penetration tests on the beta ready for everyone.