☆ lindhorst.cc

Like most technologies, code signing itself is neutral, or ought to be. It can be used for good or evil. Code signing is basically a way to cryptographically prove the origin of a particular piece of code, nothing more.

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Apple currently uses these capabilities in a few beneficial ways. There are several pieces of Mac OS X which depend on knowing the identity of an application. For example, the keychain tracks per-application access privileges. The Leopard firewall can be set to only allow access to certain applications. Parental Controls allows a user to determine which apps another user is allowed to run.

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Let me repeat that: if Apple doesn’t sign your iPhone app, it does not run.

Even for local development, you need to get the code signed. The iPhone SDK is free, but by itself it won’t let you load apps onto an iPhone. When you pay Apple the $99 to enroll in the program, they send you a certificate which can be used to sign your applications. However, they will only work on iPhones which have been provisioned with this certificate.

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Ultimately I think the trend is bad. Code signing itself is a neutral technology, but it gives incredible power to the system vendor, and that power is just waiting to be exercised and abused. I believe that the iPhone is serving as a testbed to see how users and developers will react to an environment with ubiquitous code signing and control. [...]

[Under The Microscope » Blog Archive » Code Signing and You]

I happen to hold a hard-won minority opinion about code bases. In particular I believe, quite staunchly I might add, that the worst thing that can happen to a code base is size.

I say “size” as a placeholder for a reasonably well-formed thought for which I seem to have no better word in my vocabulary. I’ll have to talk around it until you can see what I mean, and perhaps provide me with a better word for it. The word “bloat” might be more accurate, since everyone knows that “bloat” is bad, but unfortunately most so-called experienced programmers do not know how to detect bloat, and they’ll point at severely bloated code bases and claim they’re skinny as a rail.

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My minority opinion is that a mountain of code is the worst thing that can befall a person, a team, a company. I believe that code weight wrecks projects and companies, that it forces rewrites after a certain size, and that smart teams will do everything in their power to keep their code base from becoming a mountain. Tools or no tools. That’s what I believe.

[Stevey's Blog Rants: Code's Worst Enemy]

Making your Java application look and feel like a native OS X application has until recently been one of those things that is hard to get right. There are various solutions floating around, but they tend to force you to build and package the application on a Mac and they often involve some manual steps.

[Making your Java app shine on OS X - simplericity]