• Nov 9, 2015

    First week with the Apple TV 4th Generation

    Last Friday I received my new 4th Generation Apple TV (note to people living in Southern California…don't pay extra for rush shipping from Apple as products shipped from Apple tend to arrive quickly) and I've been playing with it on and off since. For years now, I've been looking for the best way to handle my family's video entertainment needs. I've played with a number of streaming boxes including the Apple TV 1st generation, Apple TV 2nd generation, Roku 3, and Fire TV 1st generation. With the exception of the 1st generation Apple TV, all the boxes have served some of our needs.

  • Oct 27, 2015

    When is zip not zip?

    Like most experienced iOS developers, I use an automated build system. A colleague of mine and I have spent portions of the last 2 years building up our system so what we do looks like magic to others! As part of this system, we've written tools and put together scripts to package our application as an .ipa (iPhone application). An .ipa file is simply a zip file with the extension changed.

  • Oct 23, 2015

    Fixing Missing Sound Output

    As I was trying to troubleshoot why my media center Mac Mini froze twice over the last 2 days, I discovered that the sound output didn't list the Built-in speaker. After a bunch of searches with different suggestions, I decided to reset the NVRAM. The problem is that the Apple support docs say to use Command-Option-P-R at startup and my Mac Mini doesn't have a monitor or keyboard hooked up to it. After some additional searching I found the following command:

  • Oct 20, 2015

    The best, underutilized and poorly implemented accessibility feature

    [Update - October 21, 2015: It looks like the issues with News have been fixed with the iOS 9.1 update. Yeah!]