Category: Uncategorized

Japan is big on both weirdness and mobile phone culture, so it’s not surprising that they occasionally combine the two. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…Kitan Club phone stands!

They’re adorable and odd in that way that only the Japanese can make them. The cat stands attach to the back of your mobile phone — or keitai in Japanese — with a suction cup, holding it upright on a table or some other handy level surface.

If you’d rather have a stand with the cat holding up your phone with its back, Atlas-style, Kitan Club’s got you covered too…

You can find Kitan Club stands on sale on eBay, where you’ll be treated to oddball photos of Kitan Club stands posed in “action shots”, like the one below:

I received BlackBerry’s open “We’re Not Dead Yet!” email this morning. Two notable things distinguish it from the consumer-focused open letter for which they bought ad space in several major newspapers in October (see and click on the photo to the right):

1. This open letter, is aimed squarely at enterprise decision-makers who may have been influenced by recommendations like Gartner’s to ditch the platform, because any hope of recovery was exhausted long ago.
2. Unlike the previous letter, which was signed by “The BlackBerry Team”, this one was signed by BlackBerry interim CEO John S. Chen, a man in a very unenviable position. I’d normally say “I hope he’s getting danger pay”, but based on the deals these guys typically get — remember Thorsten’s golden parachute? — it’s not necessary.

The main points called out in the letter in “heading 2” text are:

• “We are very much alive, thank you”: They reassure readers that Fairfax’s strategic investment is a vote of confidence in the company, which is going to back its enterprise roots in four specific areas: “handsets, EMM solutions, cross-platform messaging, and embedded systems”. They end with “In short, reports of our death are greatly exaggerated.”
• They manage all devices, not just BlackBerry: The notable points they put forth are that “Our EMM customer base is much larger than any of the other vendors in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Mobile Device Management” and more tellingly, “We have substantial cash and are not a small VC-backed “pure play” MDM player seeking additional funds every year.”
• “Security is not debatable – regardless of the device”: Government agencies and armed forces trust their security.
• They’re more than devices: they’re enterprise mobility. What a difference six years make: the final section of the open letter begins with “We know that BlackBerry devices are not for everyone. That’s OK”, and reinforces the fact that they also sell an MDM solution that you can use with any device.

I’ve been doing a fair bit of work with a company specializing in helping enterprises manage their employees’ mobile devices, both corporate- and employee-liable, and they’ve all been saying the same thing: that 2014 will be all about ditching BlackBerry and BES for some combination of Android, iOS, and Windows Phone, along one or more third-party MDM solutions. BlackBerry’s open letter is clearly meant to help quell that exodus. The message is clear — we’re now an MDM company that just happens to make smartphones — but it’s likely to be drowned out by MDM vendors and support businesses hoping to cash in on those lucrative migrate-us-the-hell-away-from-BlackBerry contracts.

In honor of BlackBerry’s “Not Dead” messaging, here are two Monty Python skits that immediately came to mind when I read the open letter — the “Bring Out Your Dead” bit from Monty Python and the Holy Grail…

…and the “Dead Parrot” sketch from the TV show:

For the completists, here’s the text of the open letter:

An Open Letter to Customers

To our valued enterprise customers and partners,

You’re hearing a lot of noise in the market about BlackBerry®. MDM vendors are undoubtedly inviting you to webinars and enticing you to switch off your BES.

We want to set the story straight about BlackBerry in the Enterprise, both for our existing customers and for those about to implement BYOD and MDM.

We are very much alive, thank you

Our “for sale” sign has been taken down and we are here to stay. BlackBerry recently announced it has entered into an agreement to receive a strategic investment from Fairfax Financial and other institutional investors, which represents a vote of confidence in the future of BlackBerry.

The investments you’ve made in BlackBerry infrastructure and solutions are secure.
I will keep the lines of communication open as we navigate through this transition.

We’re going back to our heritage and roots – delivering enterprise-grade, end-to-end mobile solutions. As we refocus back to our roots, BlackBerry will target four areas: handsets, EMM solutions, cross-platform messaging, and embedded systems. And, just as important, we will continue to invest in enterprise and security related R&D during our restructuring period.

In short, reports of our death are greatly exaggerated.

Setting the record straight: We will manage all devices

We’re serious about multi-platform MDM and even more serious about multi-platform EMM. We deliberately moved to a new platform with BES10 last year. Making this change enables us to manage all devices, turbo-charge BYOD initiatives, and provide the very best management experience.

Our competitors want you to think that BES only manages BlackBerry devices, and that we are somehow more expensive than other MDMs. This is false.

We understand the realities of the enterprise mobility market better than anyone, and we’re in the game for the long term. We’ve been investing in enterprise mobility management – for any device – and thanks to customers like you, we’re doing very well. Here’s the proof:
Our EMM customer base is much larger than any of the other vendors in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Mobile Device Management – and is growing.
We manage more mobile devices than any other vendor. Period.
We move more secure mobile data than anyone else.
We have substantial cash and are not a small VC-backed “pure play” MDM player seeking additional funds every year.

Security is not debatable – regardless of the device

BYOD users may be able to bring any device to work, but it’s our job to ensure the risk doesn’t follow them in. Whether you’re deploying corporate-owned iPads or allowing BYOD Android™ devices, security is paramount.

We have more certifications from government agencies than any other vendor and we’re the only EMM vendor and handset maker to receive the Department of Defense “Authority to Operate” certification.

Governments, global corporations and organizations that will not compromise on security continue to choose and trust BlackBerry.

BES10 is your future Enterprise Mobility Solution

We know that BlackBerry devices are not for everyone. That’s OK.

As we committed to earlier – we are more than just a device company. Today, BES10 supports multi-platform MDM, mobile application management and security. We have also made it as easy and low cost as possible for you to trial and deploy BES10.

In the coming weeks, we will continue to have an open conversation with you. Keep an eye out for an EMM Realities webcast series where we will drill down into the key areas in this letter. In the meantime, I want your feedback on how we can better serve your EMM needs.

I believe in BlackBerry and I’m confident in our future in enterprise, our technology and our ability to adapt to changing market needs.

Sincerely,

John S. Chen
Executive Chair and CEO

Found via Loading Artist.

Sir Patrick Stewart has but one rule for using Twitter, and it’s a good one. In this video, he explains how he uses it, and how he came up with the rule.

This article also appears in The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century.

The iOS Apprentice: Second edition for iOS 7 and Xcode 5 now available!

If you want to learn iOS development and need a little structure to help you get started, I strongly recommend RayWenderlich.com’s iOS Apprentice, a set of four excellent tutorials written by Matthijs Hollemans. Each tutorial walks you through the construction and completion of a full-functional iOS app. The tutorials are:

1. Bullseye: A simple game app. Building it, you’ll learn about iOS’ UI controls and using them to get input from and present results to the user.
2. Checklists: Learn how to make use of table views and store user data by building a “to-do list” app.
3. MyLocations: Build a location-aware app, and learn more about iOS’ object model and Core Data.
4. StoreSearch: An app that lets you search the iTunes Store for music. Along the way, you’ll learn how to write apps that call web services, support multiple languages, create pop-up detail screens, and build universal apps that run on both the iPhone and iPad.

RayWenderlich.com says that you don’t need any prior development experience to use these tutorials, but even a experienced developer will find them useful (you can just skip the basic programming parts, and there’ll still be a lot of info you can use). Each app builds on the lessons of the previous one. By the time you’re done building the final app, you should be able to write your own App Store-worthy apps. I can’t recommend the iOS Apprentice highly enough; I’ve found it so incredibly helpful as I learned iOS development.

The latest edition has been updated for iOS 7 and Xcode 5, and it spans over 900 pages. If you haven’t bought any of the previous editions, you can buy the iOS Apprentice for US$54, which entitles you to free updates. If you have bought an earlier edition, you can download it for free.

TSValidatedTextField: A text field that you can validate with regex patterns

TSValidatedTextField is a subclass of UITextField that lets you use an NSRegularExpression to specify valid and invalid input.

Typhoon: A dependency injection framework for Objective-C

Dependency injection is a fancy-pants way of describing a design pattern that removes hard-coded dependencies on collaborating objects, making code that’s easier to modify, test, and update. You can do dependency injection on your own, but it’s much easier to use a framework. Typhoon is one such framework for Objective-C, it’s ready for us right now, and their site goes into greater detail on why you might want to use dependency injection and why you might want to use their particular framework.

All sorts of basic algorithms implemented in Objective-C

And finally, if you want to see what you might have forgotten from your second-year algorithms class implemented in Objective-C, take a look at Evgeny Karkan’s EKAlgorithms. In this still-evolving GitHub repo, you’ll see these classic hits from computer science:

Array

1. Index of maximum element in array.
2. Find longest string in array of strings.
3. Find shortest string in array of strings.
4. Array reverse.
5. Intersection of two arrays.
6. Union of two arrays (with remove duplicates).
7. Find duplicates.
8. Array with N unique/not unique random objects.

Search

1. Linear search.
2. Binary search.

Sort

1. Bubble sort.
2. Shell sort.
3. Merge sort.
4. Quick sort.
5. Insertion sort.

String

1. Palindrome or not.
2. String reverse.
3. Words count.
4. Permutations of string.
5. Occurrences of each character (a – z).
6. Count needles in a haystack.
7. Random string.

Number

1. Sieve of Eratosthenes.
2. Great common divisor (GCD).
3. Least common multiple (LCM).
4. Factorial.
5. Fibonacci numbers.
6. Sum of digits.
7. Binary to decimal conversion.
8. Decimal to binary conversion.
9. Fast exponentiation.

Data structures

1. Stack (LIFO).
2. Queue (FIFO).
3. Deque.
4. Linked list.
5. Graph
   • DFS (depth-first search);
   • BFS (breadth-first search).
6. Binary search tree (BST).

Click the photo to see the repair at full size.

Remember Weinberg’s Second Law:

If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization.

Yesterday, I posted the #GetItDone infographic produced as an ad for Office 365, which seemed to be aimed at CIOs, CTOs, and other tech decision-makers who wanted to squeeze free unpaid work from employees outside of office hours. I called it The saddest infographic in the land. Here’s a snippet:

37signals caught wind of this and create their response, a similar-looking infographic with the hashtag #WorkCanWait, which takes some well-aimed potshots at every info-nugget from the original. There’s even a feature that lets you create your own parody!

It’s part of their promotion for their book on remote work, simply titled Remote: