MacBook Tape on Built-in iSight Camera - Teaser

Do you cover your Mac’s Camera with Tape against Privacy Infringements? It’s not enough!

Tape on the camera may prevent somebody spying on you visually – but this does not prevent anybody hacking your computer and accessing it’s built-in microphone to listen to your conversations! And tape on the microphone spot is by far not making it completely “mute”. So tape is just not enough – you do need a software-based solution for full control: and there is one to do just that – OverSight.

OS X: launcher for iOS Simulator and bypassing Xcode

On OS X, the best way to almost natively test apps or websites is by using the so called “iOS Simulator” (now named simply “Simulator”) which is available as part of the installed Xcode Development Tools.
So to bypass Xcode for starting the Simulator, I wrote a simple Automator application which directly launches the Simulator.app – you can download it in this post or create it yourself following the instructions.

Reminders Application Icon

Did you know that the Reminders App in OS X has intelligent text interpretation? (example inside)

Apple’s very own Reminders.app, available on OS X, iOS and iCloud, comes with a very neat yet helpful feature: intelligent interpretation of a new reminder/to-do text. On iOS devices using Siri, you can not only tell it what and when to remind you about, but Siri is also intelligent enough to understand in which of your reminders lists that new reminder should go to!

iOS 7 on iPhone 4: my experiences so far

Since a couple days the new iOS 7 is available – and the iPhone 4 is the oldest generation of iPhones still supported for the new iOS. I do have an iPhone 4 and decided to take the chance to update from iOS 6 to iOS 7. Here is a brief summary of my experience during the last few days with iOS 7 on an iPhone 4.

iPhone Dock Connector closeup

iPhone not booting up anymore – Dock connector may be broken

If you end up in a situation where your iPhone just won’t boot up anymore (not even showing the empty battery icon nor the Apple logo) – or it is simply not recognized in iTunes anymore – it might be, that some of the pins in the Dock connector are be broken. Go to your local Apple Store and have the whole phone replaced with one of the same model.