The big tech news this week is that the FBI is trying to force Apple to unlock a suspect's iPhone. One of the interesting points around this story is that the iPhone in question is an older one, an iPhone 5c. Newer phones have what Apple calls the Secure Enclave, which some say protects against requests of this nature; even if Apple wanted to break into your phone, they couldn't. Which then brings up an interesting question I've seen a lot of people asking: what exactly is the Secure Enclave, and what role does it play here?

Apple introduced their News app at WWDC, and the other day they sent me an e-mail saying they want to include this blog in News.

I'm sure every iOS developer has seen the dreaded bootstrap error. "Couldn't register com.yourcompany.yourapp with the bootstrap server. Error: unknown error code. This generally means that another instance of this process was already running or is hung in the debugger." After nearly throwing my Mac out the window for the Nth time today, I finally managed to come up with a simple fix. Run this in the shell: launchctl list|grep UIKitApplication|awk '{print $3}'|xargs launchctl remove. And your bootstrap errors magically melt away.

Welcome back to another Friday Q&A. This week, Quentin Carnicelli (who is heavily involved in generating my paychecks) has suggested that I talk about things that every Apple programmer should know. In other words, common Cocoa design and implementation decisions that I'd prefer Apple not to make.

During a recent discussion on Twitter about Apple's draconion App Store policies, I mentioned that there's a long list of apps I want which Apple does not allow, and thus these restrictions directly hurt me not only as a developer, but as an iPhone user. This made @pbur curious, and he indicated he'd like to know what those apps are. So I sat down and came up with a list of apps that I really want for my iPhone but that Apple won't let me have. To the best of my knowledge, every single one of these ideas is completely feasible in a technical sense, wouldn't destroy the cell network, wouldn't make your phone's battery life unusably short, and are kept out of my hands solely because Apple thinks it knows what's best for me.

For those of you who don't read my employer's blog, I just made a post over there titled Mistakes and Chains of Events. It discusses the recent news about political cartoonist Mark Fiore's iPhone rejection, the bigger picture of Apple's system and policies, and my perception that Apple is not learning the right lessons from the various problems that they're encountering.

It's well known that every member of the official iPhone developer program is bound by Apple's iPhone SDK agreement. What seems to be much less well known is that the agreement also binds developers to follow Apple's "Copyright and Trademark Guidelines", which add a huge list of restrictions to what an iPhone developer can and cannot do.