iPhone/iPad
Source: XKCD
App store ratings are both a blessing and a curse. They can offer prospective buyers a semi-objective opinion on the use of an app and be the means of pushing a wary shopper to a purchase, but that all kind of hinges on the user actually providing useful information or even not having a personal vendetta against you.
I can completely sympathize with users not wanting to get hoodwinked out of their own cash, but many app store reviews are actually pretty worthless, even ones rated high. But if that weren't enough, I got a really strange email last...
iOS 5 has been a real treat, not just for the end-users, but also developers, as well. The introduction of UIAppearance, CoreImage, ARC, and many other goodies has really amped up the awesomeness in developing rich applications at a much quicker pace. One of the other interesting items is called UIStoryboard. Storyboards offer us the ability to apply our Interface Builder skills and take it to the next level for developing cohesive applications through a WYSIWYG interface. I developed my latest application, TF2 Recipes, exclusively in Storyboards in order to get a real feel of how they might be a...
Core Data is a very powerful framework for data persistence, but there are times when something isn't working quite right and it may not be entirely obvious what the problem is. Trying to track down how to enable tracing in order to debug what's going on yields solutions for Xcode 3, yet nothing for Xcode 4.
It's not that difficult, you just have to know where to look:
In the Schemes drop down select 'Edit Scheme...'
In the Arguments tab of the scheme, find the section entitled 'Arguments Passed On Launch'
...
As an iOS developer I have a number of devices with which to test. Among those are FaceTime capable iPhones, but because I don't have a phone contract or data plan for them the FaceTime app isn't available to use. The reason is because Apple uses a specially crafted text message to activate the application. But because I don't have a carrier plan I can't ever receive it.
Except there's a loophole that I just discovered. You still have to go into Settings --> FaceTime and do the usual setup:
Turn FaceTime on.
...
I have been on a riff lately, trying to find ways to upend the status-quo and try doing something different.
My opportunity came.
Last week the The New York Post decided to erect a paywall for anyone trying to visit their site on an iPad to view their content. I don't find paywalls to be intrinsically wrong, it's just that discriminating based upon the type of the device was an odd choice. You gotta make money somehow-- I get that--and maybe the NYP thinks this is one way to monetize their newspaper business in an increasingly digital world. However, pissing...
I got an iPod Touch a little while after they came out. I didn't want to get an iPhone at the time because I still had quite a bit of time left on an existing contract, plus I didn't quite feel like there were enough compelling reasons to be shelling out an extra $30 per month at the time. Nonetheless, it was a reawakening of sorts for digital content for me. I really liked RSS feeds and the ability to be able to get a wide variety of sources for what was going on in the world.
RSS was a good...
Yesterday I waited 5 hours in line to get my hands on a new iPad 2.
The Device
Having owned the original iPad for almost a year now, the iPad has been an integral part of my life workflow. I use it to gorge on RSS feeds, keeping up on the latest news and loved it for reading books. Despite what Amazon would tell you, the iPad is a wonderful eBook reader. Most people don't live at the beach or spend most of their time outdoors, so the fact that you can't read very well in the open sunlight is not an...
I had a lively discussion at my day-time place of employment about the Mac App Store, and in my case, the iOS App Store and the whole concept of Apple keeping 30% of the sale for themselves. One of the trolls in the discussion deplored the idea that Apple would be able to keep almost a third of the sale of software it didn't write, even if they are providing a place for centralized software distribution.
I guess I took the bate and pretty much summed it up with this:
As an indie developer, doing the math of app store development is...
Last summer at No Fluff Just Stuff I attended a couple of awesome sessions on functional programming. One aspect of this programming paradigm includes what are called anonymous methods. Like the use of anonymous classes in Java, anonymous methods allow behavior to be defined and passed inline as arguments to other functions. This can be very powerful and causes a programmer to think more in terms with behavior, than necessarily state.
While I really like the delegate pattern of programming that permeates Objective-C, it does add a bit of overhead and can cause a lot of code to have...
It has been too long since I've posted to my blog, but things have gone extraordinarily well with Webmail++. It has kept me plenty busy, but more than that, it has taught me so much about iOS development. I'm prepping some major updates to the app, but the original implementation has given me a real eye opener into Apple and their relationship with developers.
I've had my fair share of app rejections, all because I've tapped into their so-called private APIs. These are API that, by rule, are disallowed for third party developers like myself to use. Apple disallows the use...
Full iPhone/iPad Archive