Members of the Mac Developer Program got access to a so called GM seed on July 11th. While Gold Master (GM) seeds are supposed  to be exactly like their soon-to-follow market releases, this has not always been the case in the past. Apple did take the chance previously, to rush in some late-night patches between Gold Master and Release-to-Market (RTM) builds.

That is, why this year I resisted my natural temptation to immediately go for the GM seed.

The only way of finding out whether GM seed and RTM version are the same is to take a look at their respective build numbers, found in About this Mac > More Info > Software.

Oddly enough, it seems as if this year the RTM version is actually older than the GM seed. Mac OS X Lion GM Seed is Build 11A511 and today’s RTM 11A494.

What’s going on here? Did Apple in fact roll out a previous build and those who ran for the GM seed are one step ahead already? Or does Apple just not count as we humans do?

Even the App Store seems to recognize a newer version. If you try to download the release from a machine that runs the GM seed, you’ll get this:

Maybe Software Update will kick in after install and upgrade to 11A511. What do you think?

+++ Update +++

Turns out that if your Mac is connected to the Internet during setup, the installer will actually download an update and upgrade your build to 11A511.

Yesterday, the second iteration of Apple’s magic tablet launched in Germany and 24 additional countries.

And boy has it been a success for Apple!

A Google search for “iPad 2 sold out” yields 1.2 million results. I (successfully) queued in front of the Apple Store in Oberhausen where the staff had to send away more than 1.000 customers as they completely sold out within an hour and a half. Here is a short YouTube video showing the moments before the re-opening.

As many of my readers know, I’m one of the founders of Germany’s largest iOS development companies. I sort of have to always get the latest Apple gadgets. Not that I regret – of course.

Beautifully white

When I departed for the Apple Store, I planned to grab two black 64 GB WiFi + 3G models. Those sold out within the first 30 minutes. I was left with two white ones.

Prior to having the white model in my own hands, I was pretty biased that I wouldn’t like it. Many have stated the black bezel around the screen would make it feel larger to the human eye, so a white model would feel too small.

None of this is true.

I have to say that after spending a few hours with it, I even start to like the white model over the black one. As we expect from Cupertino, the white is a very elegant, glassy and stylish white. It’s not a cheap-crappy-plastic-white as we see it way too often in consumer electronics these days.

Now, I’m mostly using the device for media consumption.

Tons of US TV Series, kindle books and discovering stuff on the Web. As a consequence, I naturally use the iPad in many different living situations, places and even in bed. That’s where another advantage comes into play:

The white model simply blends in better.

It’s difficult to describe. It’s one of these subconscious subtle little differences that just feels better. But you have to experience it yourself.

All I can say is, if you’ve made your decision for a black model, make sure you play a while with the white one in an Apple Store nearby. As it happened to me, you might fall in love with white.

So speedy

I have to admit, I don’t care about the two cameras added to the iPad. FaceTiming with my family members is fun on the iPad 2 but I hardly ever FaceTime, anyway. You might wonder, if it’s not for the cameras, why go for an iPad 2 at all?

Well, almost two years after the iPhone 3GS I experienced a deja-vu:

Clearly, the performance boost is the key feature for me and the more I’ve used various apps on the iPad 2, the deeper the overall impact on my happiness. (I’ve written this exact last sentence two years ago, too, and today it is more true than ever.)

I am aware of folks who couldn’t wait to hooke the iPad 2 up to benchmark suites just to find out it’s not that much better in terms of pure technical specs. But I don’t care. There’s likely not a single consumer running benchmark apps anyway.

It’s the experience that counts. And the experience is dramatically better on the iPad 2.

Along with the new multitasking gestures introduces with iOS 4.3, the iPad 2 now switches between apps blisteringly fast. There’s hardly any recognizable moment anymore when you foreground your apps.

So lightweight

Another interesting area: Though the iPad 2 has only up to 100 grams less in weight (depending on the model), it feels significantly more lightweight. And I have to reiterate: It’s the experience that counts. Not tech specs. Consumers touch and feel – and decide.

I never had an issue with the weight of the original iPad, not even after hours of reading ebooks. But the much improved iPad 2 form factor is a very welcome addition.

Do I recommend an upgrade? Absolutely yes!

If you do use your iPad regularly, upgrade as soon as possible. You won’t regret it.

If you bought into the initial hype but found yourself not really being an ebook person, you don’t watch great movies and tv series while you’re traveling or love the many great social media apps available for the platform, you might stay with your original iPad.

There’s one more thing I generally like about Apple products:

Hardly any other consumer electronics product in the market, has such stable second market prices even after a successor has been announced. I was able to sell my used original iPad for 500 Euros, effectively bringing down the cost for the new one to 299 Euros.

My lady keeps her original iPad for a while until it moves to our own little Apple Museum and I will be forced to get a second white iPad 2.

Twitter and Facebook were full of German customers complaining that T-Mobile’s Service Centers didn’t have any up-to-date information on how to enable the feature. Being quite a heavy mobile user, I’m a member of T-Mobile’s Diamond customer group. I called them today and got an immediate response.

A minute after the call, I was able to start using Personal Hotspot.

Here is the deal: If you are on an “old” T-Mobile iPhone contract, tethering – which is the tech terminology for sharing your mobile Internet connection with other devices – was not included.

I was offered to switch from my old Complete XL contract into the new Complete Mobile XL version.

Now, when you do that, you gain tethering. But you also lose stuff. First your included monthly 3G bandwidth is reduced from 5 GB to 1 GB. Once you’ve used the 1 GB, the data connection speed gets throttled. Second, you no longer have free MMS included.

However, to circumvent the new limitation, you can add the Speed Option. This will bring back the monthly 5 GB data volume. At the same time, it’ll increase the speed to 21,6 Mbit/s as opposed to the 14,4 Mbit/s that your old Complete XL tariff gave you. The iPhone 4 hardware can only handle 7,2 Mbit/s anyway, but that might change with the iPhone 5.

The 3000 free SMS per month are included in the new contract, as well.

The Speed Option is available for 9,95 Euro per month. If you don’t want a new iPhone 4, Complete Mobile XL is available for 89,95 Euro in case you’re extending your contract.

You can change your tariff by giving a call to T-Mobile’s Service Center (2202 from your T-Mobile phone when you’re in Germany). Personal Hotspot will be available a few minutes after your call.

A couple of months ago, on the day Facebook introduced its new Groups, I’ve started the iOS Developers community over there.

For me, it has now become a very valuable source to get in touch with fellow iOS developer peers from all over the world. We’ve also started to craft a couple of documents, pointing to open source frameworks and other resources that make our daily Objective-C lives easier.

Some folks messaged me that they don’t consider Facebook anything serious and pointed me to Apple’s Developer Forums and other existing sources.

And while I appreciate those other places – and use many of them myself – I still think it’s a good thing to connect with other iOS devs via Facebook. Seeing new tricks as part of my Facebook timeline has proven valuable more than once.

As many of my friends, I don’t strictly separate my professional from my private life. I love what I do for a living and both worlds are pretty much intertwined. I consider this a great privilege!

So without further ado and in sort of a blunt self promotion, if you’re in iOS development, why don’t you join our great community on Facebook?

publ.me is a completely browser based iPad publishing platform, that makes it fast and easy to distribute high-value PDF based content to the iPad.

It provides companies of all sizes with a secure, fully hosted and entirely Web based editor’s desk.

Upload your existing Adobe PDF based brochures, catalogues, magazines, fanzines or product flyers and leverage the streamlined editor to add beautiful image galleries and highly engaging video content.

Pre-schedule publications, customize the appearance of your iPad application and within minutes – literally – you’re all set to distribute your digital edition to the App Store.

On top of this, publ.me adds reading statistics which provide you with valuable insights into which articles run best and where your audience is spending most of their time. The patent-pending single-tap-contact facilitates a seamless backchannel to your readers – without ever asking them for an email address.

The product is based on our industry proven platform, that already powers millions of mobile users and interactions.

publ.me is our most sophisticated platform service so far, and we can’t wait for you to try it!

“On December 22, 2010, the production Apple Push Notification service will begin to use a 2048-bit TLS/SSL certificate that provides a more secure connection between your provider server and the Apple Push Notification service.

To ensure you can continue to validate your server’s connection to the Apple Push Notification service, you will need to update your push notification server with a copy of the 2048-bit root certificate from Entrust’s website. This will not require a change to your iOS apps — this update only applies to provider servers.”

It’s pretty common for Apple to come up with relatively short term notices like these. Unfortunately, they also frequently lack any further technical documentation.

Based on discussions I’ve had with various other iOS devs during the last few days, I sense that there might be a little bit of confusion as to what exactly this announcement means.

Typical questions, I’ve seen:

• Do we have to recreate our certificates or .pem files?
• Do we have to install any additional certificate on our servers?
• We never installed anything else than the production and sandbox .pem files as outline in Apple’s documentation. Do we now have to install a third certificate and change our existing backend code?

Over at GrandCentrix, Germany’s largest iOS development shop, we use our own Rails based Push Notification provider service hosted with Engine Yard and deployed through Amazon EC2 instances.

We never installed anything else than two .pem files. We created those with Mac OS X Snow Leopard’s Keychain Utility, exported key and certificate as .p12 files and finally converted them to .pem files using OpenSSL from the command line.

We never downloaded any additional certificates from Entrust’s website, nor did we install any special third party stuff into our local keychains.

I’ve contacted Apple and received some clarifying statements. I thought sharing them with other iOS devs might shed some light on the topic.

In a nutshell you most likely don’t have to do anything!

If you’re hosting your Push Notification service on a Linux box, any SSL connection is very likely already using Entrust’s certificate, even though you never manually installed it.

You can easily check this by using the Sandbox environment, which has already been switched to the higher security mode in March 2010. Bottom line: If your service successfully sends out APNs via Apple’s Sandbox servers today, you’ve got everything in place.

A little bit of background

Take a quick look into the /etc/ssl/certs folder. The point is: Most Linux distributions come with the required certificates preinstalled. That is, why you never had to manually install anything but got Push Notification services working anyway.

Here is an excerpt of the information that I’ve received from Apple:

“This announcement does not involve the certificate you receive from the Provisioning Portal. You do not need to generate a new Production or Sandbox certificate from the Provisioning Portal. Your existing PEM file should continue to work just fine.

This announcement is regarding other certificates (involved after your Provisioning Profile certificate is used to connect) to further validate the connection. Depending on the version of your Operating System and push technology stack, these certificates may already be installed and you didn’t even know they were being used.

The location of these certificates will be dependent on the operating system and push technology you are using. Mac OS X for example, keeps all of its certificates in the Keychain where many of the built-in scripting languages such as PHP, Ruby, Perl, etc. will automatically find the appropriate certificate. Other operating systems and or languages may have specific installation paths. If you determine that you need the new 2048 certificate, check the docs for the appropriate installation location specific to your implementation.

If the server & technology you are using to push to the APNS Sandbox environment is the same as that in your Production environment, then you most likley already have the appropriate certificate since it was probably included in the standard installation of the operating system or push technology stack.  Perhaps the simplest test you can perform is to test in the APNS Sandbox environment then make sure that the Entrust certificates in your Production environment match those in your Test environment.”

And:

“When you connect to APNs to send notifications, that connection is a secure TLS/SSL connection. Part of the TLS/SSL protocol is the handshake where the system you’re connecting to sends its digital certificate to the TLS/SSL protocol software on your system (commonly OpenSSL or SecureTransport on Mac OS X systems). If you specify in your TLS/SSL options that you want to validate the connection to APNs, the TLS/SSL software on your system will check that the certificate was signed by a trusted certificate authority (CA). In the OpenSSL case, the verify_peer and cafile options are set in the stream_context.

With APNs, Entrust is the CA, so the APNs server certificate needs to be checked against the proper Entrust root certificate. There is a different root certificate for validating certificates with a 2048-bit public key vs. a 1024-bit public key, which is why the notice was sent out.

In the OpenSSL case, you’d add the new root certificate to the .pem file you specify in the cafile option. You can add that certificate at any time because all root certs in the cafile will be considered when the APNs certificate is validated.

The sandbox environment has been using a 2048-bit certificate since March, so you can test things in the sandbox to make sure you have the new root certificate installed properly.”

Hope this helps.

After all, WWDC is a Developer Conference. Innovating the essentials tools we all work with daily, is as big a part of what we should have come to expect, as new SDKs and updated operating systems. Unfortunately, I cannot post any details about Xcode 4, nor any screenshots, as the current preview is still under NDA.

A key feature, that has been leaked elsewhere, is Git (and GitHub) support. I heavily use Git as a Source Code Management solution, both in my company and for my private projects.

I was literally blown away by the level of support for Git, that Apple demoed during WWDC.

No wonder, that huge disappointment hit me, when I tried to clone my first Git repo with the Xcode 4 Developer Preview and did not find the “Git” repository type in the UI. The only type offered was Subversion.

Turns out, there’s a simple solution: Xcode 4 expects the git command line tool to be available in /usr/bin. A quick which git on my console revealed, that my git binary instead resided in /usr/local/git/bin/git.

After creating a symlink in /usr/bin pointing to /usr/local/git/bin/git and restarting Xcode 4, everythink worked perfect!

The full command: sudo ln -s /usr/local/git/bin/git /usr/bin/git

A couple of observations: Connecting to GitHub did not work via the native git protocol, so I had to paste in the https URI to the repo. Same with ssh key based authentication, which did not work. I had to use my GitHub registered email address (username did not work) and password.

Besides this, working with a GitHub hosted git repository from within Xcode 4 just got really fantastic!

One can do so via Settings > Wallpaper.

Unfortunately, the nice silver metal rain drops sprinkled default wallpaper that comes with iPhone OS 4.0 beta is not yet available as a photo in the 4.0′s library.

As a result, you cannot revert back to it if you changed the wallpaper just once.

At first, I did not find the original version in the wild but stumbled upon a really beautiful replacement. Download it from deviantART.

The original Apple wallpaper is available, too. Grab it.

Note: Do not sync wallpapers via iTunes!

iTunes tends to “optimize” images before sync, which makes them appear distorted when used as a wallpaper.

Instead email the image to yourself, open the email on your device, long press the image and save it to your camera roll.

Set it as your new home screen wallpaper and you’re done.

Snow Leopard ‘cold’ boot time is down to less than 7 seconds and applications start almost instantaneously. Even slow bootstrappers like Adobe’s Photoshop CS4 get ready within seconds. Running Windows 7 in Parallels 5 now really does feel native. Xcode compiles and builds with the speed of light.

Recently I noticed that ever since I got the MacBook Pro, I never ever inserted a CD/DVD into it’s optical drive – not even once. There had to be a way to leverage the space the optical drive occupied.

Intrigued by what I’ve read here and there about Solid State Drive performance, I set out on a journey to improve my mobile computing platform. I’m on pretty powerful iMacs at home and I did not want to experience a performance decrease while on the go anymore.

I finally ended up doing the following:

• Removing the optical drive and putting it into an external, USB powered case. This allows me to quickly hook the DVD drive up, should I ever really need it.
• Moving the built-in 500 GB SATA hard disk to where the optical drive bay.
• Installing the Solid State Drive where the hard disk was before.

What this gives me:

• I’ve now got a whooping 750 GB capacity on the go.
• Snow Leopard and my most important applications run from flash memory. Speed, speed, speed!
• Did I say Speed already?
• Multi-media files like iTunes music, etc. are stored on the traditional hard drive.
• Whenever I need a DVD drive to install stuff, I can simply connect it via USB.
• A slightly lower weight as the Solid State Drive is lighter than the optical drive.

Stuff I’ve used:

• The key to doing the migration is a product called OptiBay from MCE Technologies. I didn’t find any European distributor so I ordered it straight from their US website. While the site might look somewhat obscure to you, I can only say the best about MCE Technologies. I asked them to ship via overnight express. Ordered on a Thursday. Shipped on Monday. They also ship the external case which becomes the new home for your optical drive. Approx. cost excluding shipping etc.: US$ 99,00.
• Solid State Drives are still somewhat expensive. After conducting some research I decided to go for the Corsair 256 GB SATA II model. Ordered through Amazon Germany. Shipped within five business days. Approx. cost: US$ 729,00 (600 Euros).
• MCE’s package includes a screwdriver that works pretty well. Also included is a CD with detailed step-by-step PDF instructions on how to do the modification.
• In addition you do need a tiny Torx screwdriver, that is not included. Make sure you’ve got one before you start!

Time it took:

• The entire process took some 30 minutes.

Closing remarks:

• My MacBook Pro is a 15″ Unibody version, the one with 7 hours battery life. MCE does offer the kit for many models. Just check out their website.
• I’m not exactly a hardware guy. If you can handle a screwdriver, you can do this on your own within half an hour. No need to ask for external help.
• What about the warranty? Honestly, I’m not sure. I know that authorized Apple partners do offer this modification as a paid service. My relationship with the local retailer is pretty good, so I guess should I ever need to make use of Apple’s warranty, they’ll find a solution. At least they want to keep me as a good customer. :)
• I’m not encouraging you to do what I did. I’m also in no way affiliated with MCE or Corsair, nor do I endorse their products and services. Should you decide to do what I did, you do it at your own risk. Of course you do. :)

That said I’m running two Apple TVs in our house and love watching almost everything on demand and without commercials these days. (My wife and I just finished watching Season 2 and 3 of Heroes going for 4-5 episodes in a row each evening – it’s fantastic experiencing such a brilliant TV series like a full-length movie.)

A couple of weeks ago when trying to push new content to one of our Apple TVs we occasionally ran into this much hated much reported issue with iTunes stating:

“The Apple TV is not responding. Check that any firewall software running on this computer has been set to allow communication on port 3689.”

We are running iTunes 9.0.2 on Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.2 and the latest 3.0.1 Apple TV firmware.

With iTunes 9 Apple introduced Home sharing, allowing machines running iTunes to connect to each others and (automatically) sync content purchased from the iTunes Store.

The only thing that permanently solved the problem here was to disconnect all other machines, that connected to the iTunes instance which we used for syncing.

Whenever we ran into the above problem, which is wrongly reported as a possible firewall issue, we simply closed iTunes 9 on all other machines and the syncing worked like a charm. No reboot required!

As we got quite angry desperate with Apple, we thought we put our solution out here at the end of this year so it might be of help to others.

Neither is this an official fix, nor do we know whether it works in all cases. Should, however, it have helped you, we would love if you leave a note in the comments.