Software

If you use Mail to access Gmail, you’ll definitely want to read this article. The rules have changed.

Spend some time with Activity Monitor to get a sense of the energy usage of your particular installation.

Apple’s new suite of energy saving settings, App Nap — not to be confused with Power Nap — doesn’t really have an interface. Which is fine! The whole idea behind App Nap is that it runs in the background, looking for apps that fit certain criteria like whether they’re maximized or currently downloading or playing media.

That doesn’t mean App Nap can’t benefit from some occasional monitoring. The venerable app, Activity Monitor, has a new tab labeled “Energy” that lets you do just that. It lists your currently running programs and daemons, their energy usage, and whether the application is App Nappin’. If you see an app that has a disproportionate energy impact, kill it, and consider uninstalling it.

Good article. Pass it along.

John Siracusa dives deep into Mavericks

Jay Freeman, better known as Saurik, has taken a closer look at what’s happening under the hood with iMessage Chat and he raises the concern that your information might not be secure as it passes through the app maker’s servers in China before it’s sent on to Apple. Fellow developer Adam Bell claims the app is circumventing Apple’s restrictions by spoofing chat requests as a Mac mini.

Scary.

Ever find yourself in a situation where a web site is loading on one device and not another? Or, perhaps, you just registered a new domain name and your browser is not finding it? One possibility is that your DNS cache needs to be flushed.

DNS is the phone book of the Internet, translating the human-friendly domain names (like loopinsight.com) into IP addresses, then back again. When domain names change, it takes some time for those changes to propagate through all the routers, devices, and browsers. Flushing your DNS cache gets rid of remembered DNS information and forces your device to retrieve new DNS.

The link above tells you how to flush the DNS on your computer. You’ll need to use Terminal, so ask a friend if you’ve not used it before. On your iOS device, turn on airplane mode, then turn it back off. That should do the trick.

Computer scientists say they found a way to sneak malicious programs into Apple’s exclusive app store without being detected by the mandatory review process that’s supposed to automatically flag such apps.

The researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology used the technique to create what appeared to be a harmless app that Apple reviewers accepted into the iOS app store. They were later able to update the app to carry out a variety of malicious actions without triggering any security alarms. The app, which the researchers titled “Jekyll,” worked by taking the binary code that had already been digitally signed by Apple and rearranging it in a way that gave it new and malicious behaviors.

My two cents: As a developer, I am not alarmed by this, as much as surprised no one figured out a way to do this earlier. This is why Apple’s App Store model works. There’s a choke-point for this type of mechanism. It’ll be interesting to see Apple’s response.