For apps the iPhone OS will look at the app name that you see under it’s icon. So typing ‘bird’ would find the Birdfeed app.

But the OS also looks at the name of the app as it appears in iTunes. Birdfeed’s name in the app store is “Birdfeed - A very nice Twitter client”, which is why Birdfeed shows up when you type ‘twitter’.

When you download an app to your phone the .ipa file includes the actual app binary as well as an iTunesMetadata.plist file. This plist file contains the app’s name as it appears in iTunes.

Tweetie on the other hand doesn’t show up in the screen-shot above even though it is installed on the phone. Tweetie’s name in the app store is “Tweetie 2″ which doesn’t include the word ‘twitter’.

Problem: An iMac plugged directly to a Netegear router via Ethernet connected to the Internet just fine, but a wireless connection from a MacBook didn’t work.

First we figured out that the router was a Netgear WPN824v3 and the devices we are trying to connect are an iMac, a MacBook and an iPhone.

The problem was that the MacBook was connected to the wireless network but wasn’t properly getting an IP address via DHCP.

We verified that plugging the Ethernet cable into the Macbook worked, so we knew that the Internet connection to the ISP worked fine, and the problem was only for wireless.

First we tried temporarily turning off all wireless security but that made no difference.

Next I found a simulation of the UI for that unit here. This made it a lot easier to see what options were available for that router.

We changed the default password for the router and enabled Remote Management. Now I could log in to the router and see the router’s actual settings.

The first thing I noticed was that the Mode for the wireless network was set to “Auto 108Mbps”. Did this router support 802.11n? And did it work with the built-in Airport card? A couple of Google searches turned up no answer.

So next I decided to try to get things working with just 802.11g.
First I set the Mode to “g and b” and set the Channel to “Auto”. That didn’t change anything. The MacBook could still connect to the wireless network, but not get an IP address.

Under Advanced/Wireless Settings I noticed an “108Mbps Settings” area. I checked “Disable Advanced 108Mbps Features” and un-checked “Enable eXtended Range(XR) Feature”

Success! The Macbook could now successfully get a DHCP IP address!

Before finishing, we made sure that the bottom of the router had a piece of paper with the router’s password and we disabled the router’s Remote Management feature and re-enabled the WPA2 password and re-verified that everything was still working as expected. We also made sure that the iPhone could also connect without any problems.

Happy Troubleshooting!

Perhaps you’re debugging a problem in one of your views or trying to understand the inner workings of one of the built in views.

You can simply iterate over a view’s subviews, but then you won’t see subviews deeper than one level. You need a method that recursively walks the hierarchy.

Luckily Apple has already done this with an undocumented UIDebugging category on UIView that makes this very easy: recursiveDescription

At the gdb prompt in the Xcode debugger you can say:

p [[self view] recursiveDescription]

and instantly see a description of the entire view hierarchy.

Normally when you visit your list of followers these are the options available to you:

But after you protect your twitter account and mark it private, the options change to include the remove option:

Selecting “Remove” shows this alert and after you click OK, poof that user is no longer following you:

This nifty option is also available from the API, though it is undocumented:

curl -u user:password -d ” http://twitter.com/friendships/destroy/59648642.xml

Here is a patch to John Nunemaker’s Twitter gem that adds this functionality:

module Twitter
  class Base
    def friendship_remove(id)
      perform_post(”/friendships/remove/#{id}.xml”)
    end
  end

And here is a quick Ruby Script that removes all the followers of a user:

#!/usr/bin/ruby -rubygems
require ‘twitter’

module Twitter
  class Base
    def friendship_remove(id)
      perform_post(”/friendships/remove/#{id}.xml”)
    end
  end

auth = Twitter::HTTPAuth.new(’user’, ‘password’)
twitter = Twitter::Base.new(auth)

twitter.follower_ids.each do |follower_id|
  begin
    twitter.friendship_remove(follower_id)
  rescue => err
    puts “#{err} for follower #{follower_id}”
    next
  end
end

They’ve added new colorful default profile images,  rolled out some design tweaks and now they allow the @ symbol in URLs.

Previously if you tried twitter.com/@boctor or twitter.com/@tweetslounge you’d get an error. But now that link works just fine.

Handy for those times you’re copying and pasting and accidentally keep the  symbol

A welcome change from the brown!