smcFanControl 2.4 Released

UICallOutView is a private class in UIKit that produces “annotation views” as pictured on the left. These can be very useful (even outside MapKit). Unfortunately as UICallOutView is private Apple rejects applications using this class. Searching for a replacement I found this thread on stackoverflow. Ed Anuff programmed a nice replacement class that is free of any private Apple Stuff. Unfortunately he programmed it in Mono Touch (C#), which is not so useful for many iPhone programmers.
I ported it over to Objective C/Cocoa Touch.

You can download the port here: Download

smcFanControl 2.2.2 should be fully compatible with the final release of OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). There are no known issues.

I ran into a pesky problem after I installed the iPhone SDK (before that I installed XCode 3.2 from the Installer DVD) under Snow Leopard: My iPhone/iPod Touch was neither detected by Xcode nor by iTunes anymore. It seems that the iPhone SDK for Snow Leopard (downloadable at developer.apple.com/iphone and released in June 2009) installs outdated MobileDevice Extensions that are incompabile with the final release of OS X 10.6

Here is what I did to fix that problem:

1. Delete AppleMobileDevice.kext  and AppleUSBEthernetHost.kext from /System/Library
2. Delete DeviceLink.framework, MobileDevice.framework and iTunesAccess.framework and iTunesAccess.framework from /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks
3. Delete com.apple.usbmuxd.plist from /System/Library/LaunchDaemons
4. Delete any iTunes and MobileDevice related pkgs from /Library/Receipts
5. Reinstall the iTunes.pkg from your Snow Leopard DVD, located at
   /Volumes/Mac OS X Install DVD/System/Installation/Packages/

After these steps my iPhone was found again by Xcode and iTunes

While developing an iPhone App I ran accross Pinch Media. This company is offering free “application usage statistic tools” for iPhone developers. All you have to do is register and integrate a library provided by Pinch Media into your iPhone app and you get live statistics of your application’s usage (sorted by country, time of usage, iphone/ipod type…) on the Pinch Media Website. Sounds pretty good, huh?

I tested Pinch Media’s offerings and found out:

• Every time you quit an application that integrates Pinch Media, the following data gets transferred to Pinch Media: iPhone UUID (the unique ID of your iPhone), Iphone Software release, iPod/iPhone version, a timestamp when application usage started, a timestamp when application usage ended and (if you allowed it) the longitude and lattitude values of your position. You can see the detailed data that gets send out to Pinch Media in the graphic to the left.
• If no active internet connection is detected, the usage data gets saved to an sqlite database for every  session. The next time there is an internet connection available all that data gets send out to Pinch Media servers (beacons.pinchmedia.com).
• This all happens in the background. The user has no clue that data is send out to Pinch Media.

I got curious how many applications in the App Store already integrate Pinch Media. I did a quick check on my iPhone (such a check works only on jailbroken-phones, look for the pinchmedia subfolder in Documents of each applications)  I have currently 30 3rd party applications installed. 9 of them integrated Pinch Media. Your mileage may vary, but it just shows that a lot of applications seem to use Pinch Meda already. Just to note: None of these apps mention anywhere that they are sending out data to 3rd parties (Pinch Media).

While I can see the huge benefit of Pinch Media for me as an application developer, I decided not to integrate it.

Here is why: I have a problem with applications sending out private data to 3rd parties in the background, while the user has no clue that this is happening. Whatever Pinch Media uses this data for (I guess advertising-their other  service), I think its not good practice. While many people are afraid that Google is collecting lots of data, it seems regarding iPhone Applications Usage statistics there is already some other “Big Brother”. The “Pinch Media Analytics Tools” for iPhone Applications are comparable what “Google Analytics” is for Websites. But there is a big difference: You can easily find out, if a website uses Google Analytics by just looking at the HTML source; but thats hard to do with iPhone applications.

While people are critical about what’s going on on their desktop computers (applications phoning home etc.) and can block those activites with firewalls, this awareness seems to be missing when it comes to SmartPhones until now. If you are on a celluar network you have no control to block (e.g. by a firewall) what the application is doing and which servers it is sending data to. You have to trust the application developer, that the application is doing what was announced. As 3rd party applications on smartphones have just started to emerge, this is for sure some problem that has to be solved in the future. Until then developers should explicitly announce somewhere in the application description, if they send out data to 3rd parties and give the user an option to turn this behaviour off.