No one likes limitations. Though Apple has been opening up more and more of their API with each software update, a good chunk of the functionality is still off limits to anyone outside of their own team of developers. Be it because they’re unstable, unproven, or just outright blacklisted, a number of methods exist that no one but Apple is supposed to use.
Of course, people try to use them anyway. Some (like Google) succeed. Others don’t. The practice of playing with verboten methods is heavily frowned upon – but if a newly discovered private method is any indication, Apple’s at least got a sense of humor about it.
A bit of background, first: As with any good SDK, the iPhone OS has a big huge bundle of documents that outlines every method available to developers – well, besides the secret ones. If no one is supposed to be using them, why tease their existence?
That doesn’t mean that they can’t be found, however. Developers can run a tool called “classdump” while running an application, and it’ll spill the beans on any private methods being used in the application. When Erica Sadun ran a dump on the iPhone 3.0 OS, this little gem popped up:
00009 @interface UIViewController (UIViewControllerClassDumpWarning)
00010 – (void)attentionClassDumpUser:(id)fp8 yesItsUsAgain:(id)fp12 althoughSwizzlingAndOverridingPrivateMethodsIsFun:(id)fp16 itWasntMuchFunWhenYourAppStoppedWorking:(id)fp20 pleaseRefrainFromDoingSoInTheFutureOkayThanksBye:(id)fp24;
00011 @end
Sans all the extraneous characters, that method reads, “Yes, it’s us again. Although swizzling and overriding private methods is fun, it wasn’t much fun when your app stopped working. Please refrain from doing so in the future. Okay thanks bye.”
Yeah, it’s silly – but it’s a little easter-egg shout out to anyone looking for the next hush-hush way to give their app that little extra (and totally unauthorized) sparkle. 5 e-points to anyone who manages to work this method into an App-Store-Approved app.
[Via Daring Fireball]
Photo by: 2493™ on Flickr
I also claim that Someone at Apple has 2 Nipples!
Don’t you know programmers are divine creatures?
besides, objectiveC is notorious for its very verbose and long function names
No. Only one person at Apple has a sense of humor.
One.
And it’s a rather mild sense of humour, if i might add
And they killed him for that.
It was Steve Jobs! He’s the code monkey at AAPL
00010 @interface chromeWillEatUpOSXNotWindows
Sorry, the only thing that chrome will ever eat is its own butt.
Where are Lessig and his fellow self righteous zelots? according to their logic, this should land google in the supreme court. That’s funny, I said lessig and logic together.
- (money)weWillMakeMoneyBy:(id) a replacingOsxWithChrome:(id) b andChargeForIt:(id) c besidesWeAreKnownForCapitalizingOnPreexistingOpenSourceSoftware(true) d
I found out the other day that Automattic also has a sense of humor – they do something similar. I was messing around with headers, and discovered wordpress.com sending out a header that says “If you’re reading this, you should visit automattic.com/jobs and apply to join the fun, mention this header”.
One of my coworkers blogged about it here: http://bonzobox.com/blog/2009/06/wordpress-tricky-tricky/ (sorry, the screenshot is kind of borked).
Hah! Awesome.
Not hard to find if you have Firebug. Not that you’d be looking for this kind of thing…
It’s lightly amusing, and that’s about it.
“The practice of playing with verboten methods is heavily frowned upon”
Please use “forbidden” and not “verboten”!
Ah, but it doesn’t have the same connotations, something like “Ve haff vays of keeping you from using der zekret methods, dey are VERBOTEN!” (Read in a Colonel Klink accent for optimum effect.)
There’s nothing wrong with verboten.
Yeah, whats wrong with verboten?
When the person with the sense of humor at Apple is discovered I am sure they’ll be fired!
They fired him when he re-designed iMovie.
Ha ha ha! :P
That, and the guy foolishly used a definite article when referring to (an) iPod.
The only thing I find funny about Apple is iTunes. It’s a joke to think that in the 21st century you can only purchase some content/installs through a single provider for a device, much like there was only one place you could buy butter in Stalingrad.
i hope so.. why dont u try it out
That method doesn’t sound very funny. It sounds more like someone being a douche.
Just sayin’.
Note however that said person has a nice job at Apple, and you don’t.
Just sayin’.
You just proved st’s point.
Actually, this particular class-dump comment has been around in Mac OS X for quite some time, even going back to NeXTStep days.
It can be surprisingly amusing at 3am.
At first i thought “your app stopped working” referred to the fact that Apple rejects iphone apps that use undocumented apis, but come to think of it, it’s a generic cautionary comment not to override unofficial apis.
ooh 5 e-points! What can I do with them?
Slow news day, I guess.
You are the first person to ever write this comment on any story ever on the Internet.
Congratulations on your originality.
Also checkout a recent patent filing from apple, notice the text included as example
The url did not come through in prev comment:
checkout http://www.unwiredview.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/iPhone-text-filtering.jpg
I like Apple because they are open mind
Its an old-school type of humor that very few will appreciate. Nowadays easter-egg means a 3D game pops up after a combination of painless keystrokes leaked out through media. Anyone remember Infocom’s text adventure? Gosh. Luckily I am old enough to be amused.
stop wasting my time with this shit.
Only you can waste your time. No one can do that for you.
the banter is funnier than the article….