By the end of this article, here is what you will learn 

a. You will learn how to do HTTP level debugging of your mobile app, using an actual mobile phone. A sample use-case to help you understand would be – “hey, is the app actually making a call to my server or not”.

b. You will learn some stuff about tools like Charles as well as a bit about Wireshark.

and for this article am going to assume that you know about HTTP (and status codes) and you know how DNS resolution works, so am not going to dig into those topics. All am going to focus on is, how you can setup these tools and get started with debugging your mobile app using an actual device for any HTTP / DNS specific issues.

am also assuming that you have a wifi router at home or work which you will be connected to when following the instructions on this tutorial. You will need your computer and the phone to be connected to the same wifi network.

last admin note, before we get to the meat of the article – You can click on any image below to see a larger version of the image. 

Getting started with iOS HTTP Debugging using Charles

1. First thing you need to do is download and install Charles (Download page link). Charles is a HTTP Proxy / Reverse Proxy that enables a developer to view all of the HTTP and SSL / HTTPS traffic between their machine and the Internet. This includes requests, responses and the HTTP headers (which contain the cookies and caching information).

Download Charles version specific to your Operating System. For the purpose of this tutorial, am going to download a Mac edition.

Just a note on licensing - Charles is available as a shareware and will work as you expect it to, for 30 days. After 30 days it will ask you to purchase a license, which is usually available for $50 at the time of writing this article (for upto 4 users). You can ignore purchasing the license, but then you will often see Charles stopping and delaying you for 30s before resuming.. not too pleasant an experience, if you are going to use the software very regularly.

2. Once you have downloaded and installed Charles, next step is to Launch the application on your computer.

Charles listens by default on 8888. For this tutorial, am not going to change the port – but in case if 8888 is busy on your computer (you might have a development webserver or an app server running on that port), then you can do a quick google search on how to change listening port of Charles.

If you are on a mac you can type ifconfig to get the ip address of the interface attached to your wireless network. (see screenshot below on how i have got the address on my mac)

for those on windows, you can get your “internal” ip address by typing iconfig at the command prompt

3. Next step is to make the iOS Device (it can either be an iPhone, iPad or an iPod Touch) and Charles (which is running on your computer) talk to each other. For the purpose of the tutorial, am configuring an iPad.

4. With the above step completed, now your iOS Device and Charles are able to talk to each other.

5. Open any app or a browser and all the HTTP traffic originating from the app should be proxied through Charles and therefore visible on Charles.

Let me walk you through an example here (check the pictures below)

Let’s say you are the developer of the NDTV app and you want to be sure that the ad call at the bottom of the page (see green arrow in the image below) is indeed happening. To confirm that you can open Charles and start browsing NDTV app. All the HTTP requests will get logged by Charles.

Screen below shows how Charles’ interface looks. You can note that there are two tabs

Structure and Sequence. Structure will log all the requests as per the domain and sequence will list them in a way that you can see the actual sequence in which the app fires the HTTP requests.

Structure is good if your goal is to ensure that the requests to a domain are indeed happening in the way that the domain / service expects, i.e. you are following the contract of the API / service or not.

Sequence is good if you wish to make an HTTP request only after a specific HTTP request has been processed.

The red arrow in the image below shows that the ad call is indeed happening to InMobi (mobile ad network).

On the right hand side, you can see that there are various tabs to help you with request and response details.

There is another way of capturing packets and that is something i have done with Android in the past (as there was no way in Android to specify proxies for the wifi network earlier. Its available with Android 4.0.3 onwards)

Using Wireshark to capture Packets flowing through your Mobile App (Hotspot Method)

Theory – This method requires you to turn your computer into a hotspot (a.k.a access point). The phone / tablet can then connect to this hotspot, which will allow all packets from the mobile device to be routed through the computer. Your computer will be at the same time, running Wireshark to capture the packets for analysis.

Now lets get started with making this setup work. I will be using a Macbook Pro running Mountain Lion to explain the entire process. For those of you on Windows, you can do a quick google search on converting your Windows computer into a Hotspot (also worth trying for Windows users is Connectify)

Turning a Macbook Pro running Mountain Lion into a Hotspot

a. In order to turn your Mac running Mountain Lion (i am specifying the instructions for Mountain Lion, but they are largely the same for Mac OS X in general), you first need to head to the System Preferences.

b. Under System Preferences, look for the setting called “Sharing” (see screenshot below). Sharing is the larger control panel to enable or disable all types of sharing (file sharing, printer sharing, internet sharing and many more) on your Mac OS X (Mountain Lion in my case).

c. Look for the control titled “Internet Sharing”. You need to specify the connection you wish to share and also the connection method with which you will share connections. In my case, am sharing my ethernet connection using the Wifi interface.

Do note that you would be alerted to start internet sharing, in case its not turned on. In my case as Internet Sharing was On, i didn’t get that alert.

At the end of the step, ensure that your screen looks similar to the image above. The core points to note are:

- you have selected internet sharing (checked the checkbox as shown by the red arrow)

- specified a connection to share (as shown in my case with the blue arrow)

- specified the interface that you would like to use to share the connection (as shown using green arrow).

d. Once you are done with the above step, you will be able to share your Mac’s internet connection with other computers using the interface you have specified (in my case Wifi).  (see image below)

See the arrow has turned UP, indicating its acting as a host.

So now that your computer is acting as a Hotspot, the next step is to make the Android or iOS Phone (i usually follow this step for Android, but conceptually its the same for Android and iOS) connect to this hotspot and launch Wireshark.

I am assuming that you have connected your phone to the SSID broadcasted by your Mac and now your phone or tablet is sending all internet requests to the mac sharing its internet connection.

On this Mac, we will now run Wireshark. Wireshark is an amazing tool for packet sniffing and analysis which i have been using since a very long time (when it was called Ethereal) and it allows for capturing packets flowing through an interface. You can select the interface for which you wish to capture traffic and it will do so.

Do note that on Mac, you will need X11 to run Wireshark and X11 is not part of the Mountain Lion, so you should first download it from xQuartz page.

e. When you launch Wireshark and start the capture (Wireshark should also be part of your hacking toolkit, just in case you didn’t know) , it will ask you to select the interface to capture. This essentially means that Wireshark wants to know which network interface it should listen to and capture the packets flowing through the interface.

You can see that there are all the interface listed on the left (i have annotated it using a red rectangle) and on the right hand side, there is a Start button, which when clicked will start capturing traffic for that particular interface. Press the Start button for the interface relevant to you. If you are on the wireless network, it will be en1.

f. In parallel, we have also launched an app. I am browsing through the Flipboard app on my iPhone and will show you relevant requests flowing through Wireshark for this app.

g. Here in the screenshot below, you can see that we have specified a filter to be able to capture only the requests which match certain pattern and reduce the noise. The filter that i have specified will capture all requests which have flipboard in URL.

You can see that the host of the request was cdn.flipboard.com and the requesting method was a GET and then there are multiple other details, which i am not going to cover right now (possibly another post in future).

Similarly, you can capture different requests and then do a detailed packet level analysis of the request and response received from the server.

So this bring us to the end of this tutorial. Do comment and let me know if you liked it or not and if you have any other feedback.

For those of you who are wondering, as to what an Apple TV is – well, hold your breath; its not the mysterious HDTV product which Apple is supposedly working on and gets rumored every few days on leading technology blogs.

Infact, Apple TV has been in existence for a few years now and is essentially a small set top box type product which runs a custom firmware (yes, you read it right, it doesn’t run iOS).

While the stores were not yet aware of the launch, Apple’s official Apple TV page on India site is live. You can check it out at www.apple.com/in/appletv/

So what is that you can do with an Apple TV in India?

In India, the fun is a bit limited but still totally worth every paisa. You get the following features in general

• You can buy or rent from a large collection of HD movies from the iTunes Store. iTunes Store is now also available in India.

• You can also buy TV shows (not available in India iTunes Store though). There are over 90,000 TV episodes available in iTunes Store (US).

• Netflix won’t work in India, unless you are using a DNS + VPN kind of service which will map you to a US server and then proxy all your requests through that server. But if you are able to do all that, then you can enjoy Netflix from India.

• Youtube and Vimeo and Flickr are available directly from Apple TV. So that will allow you to watch some really cool stuff from the internet directly on your large screen HDTV.

• Using Airplay, you can also wirelessly stream content from your iPhone, iPad, iPod Touch to your HDTV. If you have Mountain Lion, you can even stream your Mac’s screen directly to your HDTV.

• As Apple TV (latest generation) supports iCloud, you can view your most recent photos taken from an iOS device directly on your large screen TV.

• If you have an iTunes Match subscription, you can also listen to your songs directly from your iCloud library.

So what do you think about Apple TV and India launch?

Personally, i think if you are someone who owns an iPad (or an iPhone or both) and a HDTV, you should definitely buy an Apple TV. Its totally worth the money.

via BGR

In the last quarter of 2012, Apple shipped 252,000 iPhone to India, which is around three times its previous three months number.

Apple products have always been sold at a premium in India and come at a hefty cost, which is a reason for the low volume sales in the country. To help you get a perspective, iPhone 4 in India is priced at Rs. 26,500 (which is around $530) and the latest iPhone 5 costs Rs. 45,500 (which is around $910). If you take on the other hand, smartphones from Samsung are available from $180 – $750 price range.

So what has worked for Apple in India over the last quarter?

• Partnership with Ingram Micro and Reddington, which gives Apple access to 10,000 stores in India. 

• EMI schemes (which are also available on e-commerce players like Flipkart) which allows a customer to buy an iPhone for 0% interest by just paying a downpayment of around 16,500 Rs.

• An uptick in Advertisement spend, which helped create more awareness.

• iPhone 5 sales almost at the same time as the global launch. (With iPhone 5, Indians didn’t have to wait for the phone for too long)

• INR based billing for Apps, Music and Movies on iTunes Store.

What more can Apple do to Increase Sales in India?

• Bring in carrier based contracts – However, it might not work out that well in India as the country is heavily skewed towards prepaid. 

• Do more media promotion about their products, especially with Indian context in mind. They have definitely upped their advertisement budgets in India, as we see Apple ads regularly in newspapers and national television.

• Increase more outlets – Apple seems to be able to move things their way by having Reddington and Ingram Micro than just relying on specific telecom outlets. Well, why not add more distribution partners?

• Reduce the price – haha.. well this one will take the cake of all, if it indeed happens (*wink*)

• Bring in more content partners for TV, Music and Movies (in iTunes Store) – this one is a bit tangential, but i think if Apple is able to bring in more content partners, this will help the ecosystem and thereby help them sell more products (iPhone included). For those of you unaware of the fact – Apple now has an iTunes store for India (with Movies, but they are not updated too regularly, unfortunately)

What’s your take about Apple and India? Share your voice in our comments section.

via ET

Data access works through an app that you download on your device (Android or iOS Device only).

In order to get started you need to follow the steps below

a. First charge your wireless drive. The power indicator shown above in the picture is a green led which will blink when the device is charging. Once the Wi-Drive is fully charged, this green light will stop blinking.

When i first got the Kingston Wi-Drive, i directly plugged it to my computer and found that the computer was not recognizing the drive. It was because the drive had no charge, so i had to put it up for charging and then only it was recognized by the computer. Therefore, as a first step its important that you charge the drive completely.

b.Once you have charged the drive, you can connect it to your computer using the mini USB cable which comes with the drive. Your computer should recognize the drive as “Wi Drive” or “KINGSTON” (in my case it was KINGSTON, however the manual says it should be Wi Drive”) in Finder or Explorer. This is the drive in which you should copy your data. (see image below)

c. Now that you have your data on the Wi-Drive, you should download and install the Wi-Drive App from iTunes App Store or Google Play Store. (do a search for Wi-Drive on your relevant store and you should be able to get the app link for downloading and installing on the device). I have got the iOS App installed on my iPhone (and iPad).

d. Switch on the drive. When you switch it on (which you can do by pressing the power indicator for a few seconds), it will start underlying Apache server (which is the web server to which the app connects). When the drive is ready to share data, you will see the Wireless (Wifi) indicator on the drive blinking. (see image below)

The way this whole mechanism of extended data storage works is – Kingston has a small Apache server installed on the drive. Apache automatically starts whenever the drive is started. The app (on your iOS / Android device) talks to this apache server to expose the files stored and thereby allows for sharing.

e. Next you need to connect your phone to the wireless network of the Wi-Drive. On your iOS Device, you need to go to Settings –> Wi-Fi . Under Choose a Network, select Wi-Drive (see image below).

f. Next start the app that you downloaded in step c. You will see that the app lists down your Wi-Drive and the IP Address associated with it. (if you don’t see the Wi-Drive listed, ensure that you have followed all the instructions upto this point in the right order and that your Wi-Drive has the green led for wireless network “on”)

Tapping on the Wi-Drive listing above, you will be taken to the next screen which has sections for listing down your pictures, videos and music. The default tab is to all the files.

There is also a settings icon on the screen and if you tap on that you will see the screen as depicted in the image below. There are options to configure your Wi-Drive settings and network settings and an option to upgrade the firmware of the Drive.

Lets start by going through the various settings available under Wi-Drive settings menu. Using the Wi-Drive settings screen, you can do the following

• Set a Device name – this will be the name shown on your Wifi settings screen (on your phone) as specified in step e above.
• Visibility Status – this will broadcast the SSID to other devices. If this is set to Off, you will not see the SSID listed on your phone in step e above.
• Security – you can set a WEP / WPA key to login to the wireless network. If this is set, any wireless connection to the drive, will require you to login to the network (default is off and i have let it like that for now).

Next up, let’s talk about the Network Connection menu – this is an important menu and you should definitely configure it. If this is left un-configured, you will not be able to access internet while connected to this drive. The way it works is – your drive will connect to the Wifi network of your choice (which you configure) and act as a proxy for the internet traffic. Your phone or tablet will still be connected to the Wi-Drive, but all requests which require internet connection will be forwarded to the wireless router you configure in this section. Therefore, i would suggest definitely configuring this section.

Do note – that if you are connecting to a wireless network which requires a password, you will be presented with another screen to enter the password in order to join the network.

Key Features of Kingston Wi-Drive that make my purchase worth every penny

1. Allows you to virtually extend storage of your iOS device by adding a 32 / 64/ 128 GB wireless storage, which can be used to store your music, movies, pdf’s etc.

2. Kingston Wi-Drive is just 4.8 x 2.4 x 0.4 inches and weighs just 4 ounces, which makes it a perfect travel companion. Its thin and compact.

3. Battery is obviously rechargeable. Though, the charge does dissipate soon.

4. It allows upto 3 users simultaneously to access data stored. These users can be on any platform (iOS or Android only supported as per my knowledge at the time of writing this article).

5. The way to push data to the drive is by connecting the miniUSB to USB cable which comes included with the pack to the computer and then transferring the data.

6. You can also access the Internet by connecting the device with the outbound wireless network ( as already explained above)

Some features, I hope Kingston really works and Improves upon

a. The battery life – though advertised 4 hours, i have always got only around 3 hours max from this device.

b. I cannot write to the disc wirelessly from my iOS Device. I can only read from the Drive wirelessly.I wish there was some file explorer kind of interface which allowed me to read and write to the disc without needing an app.

c. Data transfer speed from my computer to the drive was quite slow.

d. I also found that the device gets very hot while in use. So ensure you have a well ventilated room / environment when using the drive.

What’s in the Box, Pricing and Warranty

At the time of writing this article, Kingston Wi-Drive is available for $89.99 from Amazon (US). You get the following as part of the box

• Kingston 32GB Wi-Drive Flash Storage for Apple iDevices
• mini USB to USB Cable

Kingston Wi-Drive comes with a 1-Year Limited Warranty.

Summary

Overall I am very pleased with the Kingston Wi-drive and use it on a daily basis. I have my audiobooks, my photos, some of my videos and other files on the drive. If you are in the market to buy a portable storage for your iOS or Android device, I will suggest you definitely give Kingston Wi-drive a serious thought.

First before we start, you can do the following

a. Open the terminal from your Applications folder. You can also open it by hitting Command and Spacebar (command + spacebar) combination and then typing out Terminal (command and space opens Spotlight search which can be used to search the apps directly without navigating to the applications / other folders on the mac)

b. Type at the prompt open and hit enter. This should list the usage directions for the command. I have pasted it below for your reference.

Usage: open [-e] [-t] [-f] [-W] [-R] [-n] [-g] [-h] [-b <bundle identifier>] [-a <application>] [filenames] [--args arguments]
Help: Open opens files from a shell.
By default, opens each file using the default application for that file.
If the file is in the form of a URL, the file will be opened as a URL.
Options:
-a Opens with the specified application.
-b Opens with the specified application bundle identifier.
-e Opens with TextEdit.
-t Opens with default text editor.
-f Reads input from standard input and opens with TextEdit.
-F –fresh Launches the app fresh, that is, without restoring windows. Saved persistent state is lost, excluding Untitled documents.
-R, –reveal Selects in the Finder instead of opening.
-W, –wait-apps Blocks until the used applications are closed (even if they were already running).
–args All remaining arguments are passed in argv to the application’s main() function instead of opened.
-n, –new Open a new instance of the application even if one is already running.
-j, –hide Launches the app hidden.
-g, –background Does not bring the application to the foreground.
-h, –header Searches header file locations for headers matching the given filenames, and opens them.

As you can note from the various options listed above, you can open the URL using Safari or another browser / application by specifying -a Option. Here is how i have done it (see screenshot below) . If you don’t specify -a and just type the name of the file, the file will be opened using the default application for the file type.

PROMPT> open -a Safari http://www.technofriends.in

This will open the URL specified in Safari. (see the address bar below).

In the command below – i have not typed “Safari”, this should open the URL in my default browser (which is chrome, just for the records).

and it opens the URL in Chrome, which as i mentioned earlier, is my default browser..

Now let me show you how you can open applications using Open command in terminal.

At the prompt, type as follows to open Finder.

PROMPT> open -a Finder

and you will find Finder opening (i wrote about another Finder hack, in an earlier article which had step by step instructions on how you can show complete path of file in Finder instead of Folder name)

If you instead type the following open . , Finder will open the current working directory.

PROMPT> open .

Checkout the screenshot below

So this was all, that i wanted to share with you on how to open a URL or an app directly using the Terminal app in Mac OS X. Do try out the different options available with the command and see for yourself what hidden gem you might find.

In order to enable Emoji keyboard on your iPhone / iPod touch / iPad for free, please follow the steps listed below. I am on iOS 6, and therefore the screenshots and instructions assume that you too are on the latest iOS 6 version.

1. Click on Settings icon on your iOS device.

2. Once inside Settings, you need to tap on the menu item called “General” ( orange arrow in the picture below) and then tap on the menu item called “Keyboard”.

Keyboard setting lists down all the keyboards configured on your iOS device and also provides an option to add new keyboard.

3. Next tap on the menu item which says “Add New Keyboard” as shown in the image below.

From the image below you can see that I currently have only an “English (UK)” keyboard configured on the iPad.

4. On the list that is presented to you on the right hand side, You will need to scroll down to select “Emoji”. See picture below

5. From the image below, you can see that an “Emoji” keyboard got added to my device.

6. As a last step, in order to use the Emoji keyboard you just added, open any app which requires you to enter some text using a digital keyboard on your iPad or iPhone (or an iPod touch). I have opened “Mail” below.

Clicking on the globe icon will allow you to switch between all the configured keyboards. (Remember, I now have two – English and Emoji)

  and here’s my free Emoji keyboard… Hurray!!!

And before i close this article, In order to make this whole content more engaging with the readers of Technofriends, i have also made a short video which explains all the steps above. Have a look and share your comments.

In order for you to show the complete path of the folder in Finder, you will need to enable a setting which can be done using the terminal. Therefore, its important that you open your Terminal. For those of you who are absolutely new to Mac or don’t use Terminal / have never used Terminal, you can find it under Applications.

Open the terminal and type the commands shown below. You will need to first type the first line of command, press enter and then type out the second command and then again press enter.

defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool YES

killall Finder

 

In order to revert back to the NAME ONLY mode, you can type the following at the command prompt.

defaults write com.apple.finder _FXShowPosixPathInTitle -bool NO

killall Finder

killall Finder will kill all running instances of Finder (which is another application, just like Explorer in Windows) and will then restart Finder.

TestsLive have practices and many years of experience in developing Oracle certification exam training and then delivering that custom training to our students, an approach that has been found by them to be a highly successful way to create an intelligent, logical method to study. User adoption is very flexible, yet a comprehensive method in which to study.

TestsLive uses a few important elements that guarantee success. Their strategies include: determining training needs, to develop a detailed plan while managing necessary initiatives for students; developing content that is important, relevant and critical in a custom-based format utilizing your software and company’s processes; they optimize their delivery methods and offer workshops and provide you with a coach to support and train your employees.

When you enroll in TestsLive, you have many choice options from which to choose for your Oracle certification exam. Most of all, they offer a professional learning environment that gives you the opportunity to choose the level and speed at which you are able to study and learn in a way that suits your personal style. They also offer a large variety of course studies so that you can find the appropriate course at the appropriate time. You can review the Oracle certification exam prep materials prior to purchasing. That’s part of their guarantee.

By the way, you should be on Safari to be able to watch the stream. I tried opening the stream on my Chrome browser on the macbook pro and i got the following displayed on my browser.

Live streaming video requires Safari 4 or later on Mac OS X v10.6 or later; Safari on iOS 4.2 or later. Streaming via Apple TV requires second- or third-generation Apple TV with software 5.0.2 or later.