Quantcast
Erica Sadun

Biography

Erica Sadun holds a PhD in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology. She has written, co-written, and contributed to almost two dozen books about technology, particularly in the areas of programming, digital video, and digital photography. An unrepentant geek, Sadun has never met a gadget she didn't need. Her checkered past includes run-ins with NeXT, Newton, and a vast myriad of both successful and unsuccessful technologies. When not writing, she and her geek husband parent three adorable geeks-in-training, who regard their parents with restrained bemusement.

Books

Articles

Blog

Uncovering Notifications at Run Time

September 05 2008

Quite a while back, I posted about uncovering selectors at runtime. Detecting selectors allows you to reverse engineer the way Apple uses delegation calls to communicate between objects and clients. Delegation is a key way that objects communicate. Another way is intra-application notification. As with selectors, you can uncover notifications at… read more

Scraping AppStore Reviews

August 29 2008

I know I promised last week to post about intra-app notification, and I'm still planning to but after chatting with Øivind Kjellnø over email, I decided to change directions for a little while. I'll get back to notifications but for today, I'm going to show you how to access your… read more

SDK Code Samples at iDevKit

August 28 2008

iPhone developer Mxweas (author of mxtube) writes "I made a forum for iPhone SDK and Toolchain development called idevkit.com. There are tons of code samples already up and it currently has about 460 members. Feel free to check it out." read more

Finding iPhone inter-app notification names

August 22 2008

A few weeks ago, I wrote about listening to iPhone inter-application notifications. Several readers contacted me, through the post comments and through private mail, asking if I could explain how to create the list of notifications that was omitted from the original post. So today, I'm going to walk you… read more

Retrieving Device Information

August 15 2008

As the open iPhone toolchain reveals, Apple has supplied a limited device-specific information class. You can retrieve far more information from your iPhone through its IO Registry. As on the Macintosh, the IO Registry provides a great deal of hardware specific information, which can be queried and used by your… read more

Tweeting

August 08 2008

So today, keeping in the theme of posting useful code snippets that do not rely on privileged SDK calls, let me show you how to Tweet. The API itself is really simple: you provide a user name, password and a Twitter message. What complicates this from an iPhone point of… read more

Forensics Seminar/Workshop

August 05 2008

"Hey Erica, I was hoping you could help get the word out about a forensics seminar and workshop I am giving in Boston this fall." read more

iPhone Notifications

August 01 2008

Listening to notifications isn't hard. Just call CFNotificationCenterAddObserver and add your application as a listener. Unfortunately, unlike standard notification centers, the Darwin forbids eavesdropping. You must specify exactly which notification token you want to listen for. read more

Pwnage, Jailbreak and now...what?

July 25 2008

Now that the iPhone has been jailbroken, may people are asking "So now what?" What use has the jailbreak been, especially considering the easy advantages of App Store distribution. The answer to that depends on how you use your iPhone. read more

iPhone 2.1 SDK goes live. Beta 2.1 firmware available

July 24 2008

Head on over to the iPhone developer site to get your fresh hot copy of the iPhone 2.1 sdk and beta firmware. It's unclear whether the SDK beta NDA agreement still applies to this new release. In other news: pwnage is now out of date. read more

iPhone Backups Part 5: Even more about Backups

July 18 2008

The past few days, I've returned to playing around with backup files. Among other things, I discovered that the name of each backup file is actually the SHA1 hash of its path. So there really is a logic between the mdbackup naming and the files they represent! read more

Waiting on Apple

July 11 2008

When it comes to the iPhone, supply and demand principles are surely in action. iPhone developers, who have been waiting for Apple to throw open the beta program to all comers may have to wait a little longer. As of today, Apple had made no announcement. Many developers have been… read more

Monetizing Location with GeoMarketing

July 04 2008

The iPhone's on-demand positioning may soon connect developers to an entirely new revenue stream: Geomarketing. New vendors are developing "location-aware ads" that leverage your user's location. Geomarketing bring offers for goods and services directly to the consumer, wherever he or she is, in a way that traditional ads cannot read more

iPhone as Pedometer

June 27 2008

A short while ago, I discovered that Wii Fit could be used to track my progress as I walked on a treadmill. Wii Fit has a game where you jog in place in front of your TV to travel through a virtual landscape. Instead of bouncing up and down on… read more

Accessing iPhone-Specific Data from Web Pages

June 20 2008

When Apple announced iPhone's Core Location a lot of people got really excited. Since then, I've heard from any number of developers who would like to use core location and other iPhone-specific features in web-based applications and were wondering how to approach this. This has got me to thinking for… read more
Erica Sadun