Podcast – Cocoanetics https://www.cocoanetics.com Our DNA is written in Swift Tue, 21 Nov 2017 17:39:45 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 39982308 iOS Today https://www.cocoanetics.com/2015/06/ios-today/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2015/06/ios-today/#comments Tue, 16 Jun 2015 03:49:16 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=9678 Three years ago, I last visited the TWiT Studio in Petaluma, California. Located one hour by car north of San Francisco, the “TWiT Brockhouse” is well worth visiting if you are a fan of the shows that Leo Laporte and his team are producing there. I was guest on their show following the WWDC week.

iOS Today, formerly known as iPad Today, is hosted by Megan Morrone and Leo Laporte. Both are seasoned media professionals who know each other from more than 12 years ago, when they did the Screen Savers TV show together.

My strategy was to offer myself as guest to report on iOS 9 at a time after WWDC, when probably no other developer would still be in San Francisco. Usually WWDC attendees flee the scene as soon as the conference has wrapped, but I stuck around because I couldn’t get an earlier flight.

Because I was so excited about my visit there, I woke up at 4 am. When I couldn’t get back to sleep I put together a script for my segment. To which Leo responded:

“Looks good – but you won’t be able to read a script – so prepare to ad lib you’re way through this! We’ll have about five minutes.”

gulp but he’s the boss. So I condensed my script to talking points that fit on two pieces of paper. We ended up only using the first one of these. Here you can see the result where I provide my developer’s perspective on iOS 9.

Oliver Drobnik at iOS Today

I hid an ad for my book in there, as well as a reference to the social network prod.ly for which I am the developer evangelist. After the end of the show Megan and Leo posed with me for pictures. I even got to sign the guest wall with a greeting.

Oliver at the Set with Megan and Leo

After that I stayed for some more time when studio manager John Slanina gave me the VIP tour and told me a couple secrets about TWiT. I watched Megan record another show and then left for San Francisco so that I could return the rental car on time.

]]>
https://www.cocoanetics.com/2015/06/ios-today/feed/ 1 9678
Podcast #45 – “Barcodes” https://www.cocoanetics.com/2013/12/podcast-45-barcodes/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2013/12/podcast-45-barcodes/#comments Sun, 15 Dec 2013 12:58:07 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=8879 Oliver Drobnik talks about selling Linguan and why. Then why barcode scanning in iOS 7 is enough of a game changer to warrant writing a book and creating a web-based service.

Show Notes

Latest status of looking for a buyer to acquire Linguan.

Barcodes in iOS 7 are the inspiration for a book and a service.

The book will be using barcodes as a thread that runs through it, but cover a variety of iOS 7 techniques: barcode scanning, generation and printing, user location context, networking, background fetching and PassKit.

The service is named Product Layer. It will provide an API for developers to get basic product information to enable a new kind of interesting app scenarios which have not been possible before.

Follow us @cocoanetics or mail us to give feedback.

]]>
https://www.cocoanetics.com/2013/12/podcast-45-barcodes/feed/ 1 8879
Podcast #44 – “The Early Bird Catches the Worm” https://www.cocoanetics.com/2013/05/podcast-44-the-early-bird-catches-the-worm/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2013/05/podcast-44-the-early-bird-catches-the-worm/#comments Mon, 06 May 2013 08:17:49 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=8124 Toni Kaufmann and Oliver Drobnik chat about recent events, Toni shares some stories about where Microsoft has a leg up on Apple, and the history and future of WWDC.

Show Notes

Toni Kaufmann

His Apps

Working on next big release 1.5 for DTRichTextEditor and DTCoreText.

AutoIngest for Mac now with Sparkle.

Refer to my WWDC ticketing flow chart to see the plethora of problems people had. Some statistics and musings on Women and WWDC. A new blog for Women and Tech.

On the specifics of working with multiple people on Open Source projects. Using Kaleidoscope and SourceTree to diff and merge source code visually.

]]>
https://www.cocoanetics.com/2013/05/podcast-44-the-early-bird-catches-the-worm/feed/ 2 8124
Podcast #43 – “Week of Tools” https://www.cocoanetics.com/2013/03/podcast-43-week-of-tools/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2013/03/podcast-43-week-of-tools/#respond Sun, 17 Mar 2013 20:30:23 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=7809 David Mendels and Oliver Drobnik follow up on previous weeks topic “Women in Tech” and then discuss great new tools for developers.

Show Notes

Tools mentioned:

Self-hostable SCM systems mentioned:

David Mendels:

Oliver Drobnik:

]]>
https://www.cocoanetics.com/2013/03/podcast-43-week-of-tools/feed/ 0 7809
Podcast #42 – “Meet my Friend Dave” https://www.cocoanetics.com/2013/03/podcast-42-meet-my-friend-dave/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2013/03/podcast-42-meet-my-friend-dave/#comments Sun, 10 Mar 2013 20:32:45 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=7771 Trying out a new format, a friendly chat with David Mendels a real professor and iOS developer. We’re talking from many topics from nano technology to how to get more girls into science and tech.

Show Notes

Other Podcasts mentioned:

Apple’s iBooks Author

How Etsy Grew their Number of Female Engineers by 500% in One Year (Video)

David Mendels:

Oliver Drobnik:

]]>
https://www.cocoanetics.com/2013/03/podcast-42-meet-my-friend-dave/feed/ 3 7771
Podcast #41 – “Megabytes of Who-Knows-What” https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/08/podcast-41-megabytes-of-who-knows-what/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/08/podcast-41-megabytes-of-who-knows-what/#respond Sat, 18 Aug 2012 16:30:29 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=6896 Apple updates Xcode 4.4, seeds the first point release for Mountain Lion, and somehow manual symbolicating of crash reports has become broken.

Show Notes

On August 7th Apple released version 4.4.1 of Xcode. Besides the already known 4.4 news the release notes are simply “This update runs on both OS X Lion and OS X Mountain Lion.”. There was an article by Apple Insider that claimed that 4.4.1 was the first release of Xcode as a standalone app, but apparently they deleted the article after realizing that this was BS. Though you still can find all the other blogs which simply copied some contents of the original content. I think I remember that Xcode 4.3 was the first version which replaced the installer app with an Xcode.app and moved some of the developer tools inside the app bundle.

Version 10.8.1 of Mountain Lion is not out to the public yet, but if you’re registered for the Mac developer program you have received an invite to the seed download invitation. There were rumors that this supposedly tweaks something about the graphics card to use less battery because people were claiming reduced battery endurance with 10.8. Though the seed notes do not mention this.

A user opened the distribution files in a tool called “Pacifist” and reports this:

Things of Note: Mail, QuickTime Player, kernel, AppleSmartBatteryManager (AHA!), 802.11, AHCI, and USB kexts, updates to system Mail components, Messages components, Bonjour.

Zimbra + Mountain Lion not being able to add calendar entries over CalDAV = Bug in Zimbra, Workaround is to set the default alert times. The problem occurs if the Calendar app tries to add an appointment with no alert set. Weird that this never occured before. In fact this was always working perfectly on my iOS devices. But ok, I set the default alerts and now the problem no longer occurs.

Several developers reported that they are no longer able to manually symbolicate crash reports with the Xcode 4.4 tools. We found this problem ourselves as well trying to symbolicate a crash report with a dSYM and app binary which had before generated on our Jenkins build server. There are two apparent workarounds, though I don’t understand how those are interrelated: Getting the atos start address, or hacking the symbolicate script. As I understand it then you can just look at the latter because the atos one only works if you have the debug symbols not stripped from the binary. The script fix is about helping mdfind which is used by the script to find the binary inside the .app bundle to actually find it. It might have to do with some people renaming the app bundle and dSYM after building to for example include the build number.

Smart App Banners

 

 

 

]]>
https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/08/podcast-41-megabytes-of-who-knows-what/feed/ 0 6896
Podcast #40 – “Happy App.net Day” https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/08/podcast-40-happy-app-net-day/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/08/podcast-40-happy-app-net-day/#respond Sun, 12 Aug 2012 19:09:03 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=6709 App.net reaches their funding goal, Apple releases Xcode 4.4 and almost kills armv6 support and a crowdsourced system estimates review times more accurately.

Show Notes

Since July 10 when Apple has released the Xcode 4.4. GM they started to accept submissions made with 4.4. They specifically encourage developers to use the new Mountain Lion features in their submitted apps, specifically highlighting the “new cross-platform Game Center Groups, so they’ll be available when OS X Mountain Lion ships”.

Having a shiny new version of Xcode also raised the question whether we could also submit iOS apps with that. Some very early adopters reported being rejected for Xcode 4.4. being not yet accepted. But soon thereafter other developers reported successful submissions. So at present we believe that Xcode 4.4. can be used for building app store legal iOS apps.

According to Apple the only difference between Xcode 4.4 and Xcode 4.5 is that the latter includes the iOS 6 BETA SDK. Though there are also some important differences that I was able to see.

  • There is no iOS 3 or iOS 4 debugging support that you can download and use. Looks like you can only debug iOS 5 and 6 apps with Xcode 4.5.
  • Building for armv6 is will no longer be supported in Xcode 4.5. Also the minimum OS version you can target with it is iOS 4.3.

Apple reacted quickly to the problems with IAP. They published a document that shows how to validate digital signatures on transactions using some private API that they permit you use for this specific purpose.

At the same time as Mountain Lion also several other updates were released:

  • Java 2012 004 which I need for Charles
  • The SMC 1.5 update activated power nap for my 13″ Air
  • The iWork apps now finally have iCloud support

At 5:32 pm UTC App.net has reached their funding goal of $500,000.

Tips

If you get an iOS or Mac app approved then tweet with #iosreviewtime or #macreviewtime ! A free site averages those: reviewtimes.shinydevelopment.com

To fix the problem of Reachability losing the ability of knowing that there is a connectivity.

To resign the keyboard from anywhere:

Always happy to have you follow me @cocoanetics on Twitter and app.net and receiver your questions via oliver@cocoanetics.com.

]]> https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/08/podcast-40-happy-app-net-day/feed/ 0 6709 Podcast #39 – “WWDC, what next?” https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/06/podcast-39-wwdc-what-next/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/06/podcast-39-wwdc-what-next/#respond Sat, 30 Jun 2012 20:32:46 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=6563 Episode 39, recorded June 30th, 2012

News

Apple sent all developers an email detailing some changes.

App and In-App Catalog Reports Now Available
Catalog reports provide you with extended information for all of your apps and In-App Purchases. To view and generate reports, go to the Catalog Reports module on iTunes Connect. New reports can be generated only once every 24 hours.

The report you get gives you one big list of everything you have on iTunes Connect. All apps. All In-App Purchases. Apple seems to be afraid of too much vanity and so they limit the generation of this report to once per day.

iTunes Connect Mobile 2.0
iTunes Connect Mobile 2.0 is now available on the App Store. iTunes Connect Mobile allows you to access all of your app information, customer reviews, and sales data on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch. You can now also access the metadata for your apps, designate favorite apps for easy tracking, and provide access for additional user roles.

The update to iTunes Connect Mobile already became available during WWDC and several developers have mentioned to me that they especially like the feature that you can now do a manual release of a held back app from on the phone. You know, when the app is in Pending Developer Release status.

High-Resolution App Icon and Newsstand Cover Art for Retina Display
Starting in July, newly submitted iOS apps require high-resolution icons and cover art. Large icons and Newsstand cover art must have a minimum resolution of 1024 x 1024 pixels. To change your app icons or cover art, go to the Manage Your Applications module on iTunes Connect. For more information, see the Custom Icon and Image Creation Guidelines in the iOS Developer Library.

There we where happily creating 512×512 artwork and now it turns out we have to go back and recreate everything at the higher resolution. Apparently there is some place in iOS 6 – still under NDA – where these high res icons will be used. Any way, you should be creating your icons with a resolution-independent vector art program anyway. This serves as a reminder to that.

On June 22nd Apple added added app stores for 32 new countries, and since we all have time I’m going to read them to you. There will be a test later:

  • Albania
  • Benin
  • Bhutan
  • Burkina Faso
  • Cambodia
  • Cape Verde
  • Chad
  • Congo
  • Fiji
  • Gambia
  • Guinea-Bissau
  • Kyrgyzstan
  • Laos
  • Liberia
  • Malawi
  • Mauritania
  • Micronesia
  • Mongolia
  • Mozambique
  • Namibia
  • Nepal
  • Palau
  • Papua New Guinea
  • Sao Tome e Principe
  • Seychelles
  • Sierra Leone
  • Solomon Islands
  • Swaziland
  • Tajikistan
  • Turkmenistan
  • Ukraine
  • Zimbabwe

I find it quite amusing to see certain countries on this list. Even some that I had thought to be imaginary ones from romance novels before. Yes, Micronesia, I’m looking at you!

Most amusing of all is that with the new countries located in Africa it now for the first time becomes easier to buy apps than to be able to find a clean glass of water.

Oh well, if we make a killing selling many more apps because of these additions then we might just as well donate some for charity: water. Problem solved!

Flipboard versus Twitter

The Best WWDC Party

Watch Videos like crazy, one per day

Tech Talks in Fall

13″ Air instead of Retina MacBook

Girls in Tech, my blog post

If you have a second please do respond to this and give your own opinion.

]]>
https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/06/podcast-39-wwdc-what-next/feed/ 0 6563
Podcast #38 – “Patents” https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/06/podcast-38-patents/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/06/podcast-38-patents/#respond Thu, 07 Jun 2012 12:42:34 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=6451 Episode 38, recorded June 6th 2012

I’m chatting with Jesse Goodman, a former patent lawyer, about patents.

Jesse Goodman does all the administrative work at Stackmob in San Francisco. He was a patent lawyer in an earlier life and so I took the opportunity to chat with him about the ins and outs of patents.

Here’s the video version of the interview:

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0Yq7IkxX6M

Please forgive the sub-optimal quality. This came together totally spontaneously and I didn’t have any good audio recording equipment available while being on my WWDC road trip. Though the video is interesting because it is the first video that I filmed with two cameras and used the new multi-cam support in Final Cut Pro X to cut it. Great fun!

]]>
https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/06/podcast-38-patents/feed/ 0 6451
Podcast #36 – “Google Currents” https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/05/podcast-36-google-currents/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/05/podcast-36-google-currents/#comments Sun, 06 May 2012 21:26:07 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=6336 Episode 36, recorded Sunday May 6th, 2012

In this episode my special guest is Will Kiefer. He is the Senior iOS Engineer in charge of Google Currents. Will tells us why UIWebView isn’t all that bad and has some amazing performance tips for us with which to tame it. You should make lots of notes and you will feel like you visited a lab at WWDC and had your brain supercharged.

Show Notes

Google Currents iOS app on the app store, recently available internationally.

Performance Notes:

  • Cache UIWebViews, saves time on setup
  • When profiling also look at CoreAnimation tool and VM tracker
  • JavaScript is slow (e.g. JQuery), because JIT compiler is not available for web views
  • Avoid changing the frame of web views, that causes it to do overtime
  • When communicating from web view to Objective-C it is faster to change the hash on a small hidden iframe
  • The frame of a web view should be smaller than the size of the screen, or if that is not possible have a clipping view
  • NSURLProtocol is a better choice for caching than NSURLCache because it is concurrent
  • With CoreData Will has one MOC for UI stuff and a second for updating in background, changes are then merged in by UI MOC

Google Currents Producer Tool, requires Chrome at present.

Will Kiefer on Twitter, on Google+

]]>
https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/05/podcast-36-google-currents/feed/ 1 6336
Podcast #35 – “TapCaps” https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/04/podcast-35-tapcaps/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/04/podcast-35-tapcaps/#respond Sat, 28 Apr 2012 18:06:06 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=6297 Episode 35, recorded Saturday, 28th of April 2012. “TapCaps”

Alice Ning discusses the ins and outs of having a Kickstarter campaign for physical products versus software, we learn a bit about the magic behind capacitive touch screens and we learn what goes on behind the scenes of the TapCaps Kickstarter campaign.

News

The big news this week of course have been the record sales of WWDC 2012 tickets. Most of the people at the US west coast missed out on tickets because the rush was over in just 2 hours. Compared to 10 hours last year.

This year Apple tried something new. Individuals could only purchase one ticket and company accounts could only purchase 5. Non-transferable, no refunds. Unfortunately the system to detect scalpers was a bit overzealous. Several people who used the same credit card and same IP address but different developer account received a cancellation notice from Apple.

The problem with starting too early was that some people tried to purchase multiple individual tickets like this because at that time they couldn’t get hold of the company account agent. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that Apple can work this out, it is a bit of an embarrassing situation. Apple – as usual – trying an engineering approach with technology to solve the problem of scalping, but them stumbling over a stupid bug.

Apple obviously wanted time the availability of tickets such that its early morning in the US, evening in Europe and before midnight in the far east. But what even surprised them was the speed at which the tickets went. Probably helped along very much by the WWDCalerts system that sent out messages to over 9000 people. I received my own such message about 10 minutes after the begin of the sales, that was 2:40 pm central european time. There where several people not so luck as SMS are known to be unreliable at times. Some received their notifications never or simply too late.

Now two hours still twice as long as Google IO, but hey, people get free hardware there. I think we can attribute the breaking of last years record mostly to twitter and the alert system. I got lucky myself as well. I had my phone on silent so I totally missed the starting bell. But fortunately for me some nice chap sent me a direct message on Twitter. Which only further solidifies my theory that when people organize over social networks then they will break any record.

Some other items, before we get to the interview.

Pro Tip by Cédric Luthi: You must use MyImage@2x~ipad.png NOT MyImage~ipad@2x.png when using the automatic process of imageNamed. You know, imageNamed can automatically give you the @2x version on iOS devices with a Retina display. But did you know that it can also give you automatically a different image for iPhones and iPads? Yes, it does! You just call imageNamed:@”MyImage.png” and if there is a ~iPad between the 2x and the extension then this will be returned on iPads. But the order matters. It’s Name, @2x, tilde device, extension. Remember this.

Shortly after being acquired by Facebook Instagram has opened up and nicely documented their API. You have an URL scheme to open instagram from your own app as well as web-based APIs to add and delete objects. In theory you could build your own Instagram client with that. Any takers? You probably won’t be purchased by Facebook though…

Peter Steinberger reminds us: “If Xcode 4.4 creates an entitlement with NSFileProtectionComplete and your app fails to start up, just delete it. Stuff isn’t ready yet.” and he references a developer forum thread discussing this. Well you shouldn’t be using Xcode 4.4 in product environments yet, making production apps with… but that doesn’t prevent many individuals from doing exactly that. This is apparently already in iOS 5 as the mentioned thread is in the Core OS iOS 5 beta archive. No longer under NDA. So I can mention the official responds from an Apple engineer:

One of my colleagues here in DTS discussed this issue with iOS engineering and the conclusion was that this stuff does not currently work.

App Review Weather: Both new apps and app updates have improved to 99% chance of being reviewed in under 5 business days.

Interview

Alice Ning, management consultant by day, inventor by night, from Washington DC.

Myth Busted: iPhones won’t work with Gloves

TapCaps Campaign on Kickstarter 

Alice Ning on Twitter, Homepage

TheTapCaps.com

]]>
https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/04/podcast-35-tapcaps/feed/ 0 6297
Podcast #34 – “Be Excellent And Valuable” https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/04/podcast-34-be-excellent-and-valuable/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/04/podcast-34-be-excellent-and-valuable/#respond Sat, 21 Apr 2012 16:02:59 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=6242 Episode 34, recorded Saturday April 21th, 2012

We can learn about cool company philosophy from the Valve employee handbook, Objective-C is creeping up to C++ as the world’s almost most favorite programming language. And iOS 4 can now  be retired.

Show Notes

Still no WWDC, some people start to get nervous and some even try to jinx it. Marco Arment, of Instapaper, would prefer if WWDC 2012 didn’t happen in the week from June 11th through 15th because that would mean he couldn’t spent his birthday at home which falls in this interval. There are no other obvious candidate dates for WWDC so we keep on being stressed out by Apple with every passing day.

And yes, I am stressed too. Aren’t we all… for the next big update to my iCatalog framework I’ve spent the last week to migrate everything to ARC. The whole project started out as one iPad app and over time the number of target has grown exponentially. We’re now developing some more advanced features but decided that these will be iOS 5 only. So – of course – I’m switching to ARC. And of course there is ShareKit which has no hope of being migrated to ARC soon, so I had to pack that into its own static library with ARC turned off. In the end I want the iCatalog project to be only for the core functionality. All the iCatalog apps should be in a different project so that I don’t have to mess with the dozens of targets for all the catalog apps any more. I am telling you this for two reasons: 1) as an excuse for not having a better show prepared. and 2) as a pointer that you might want to have reusable core functionality also in your own modules and sub- projects.

Oh, and I have another excuse: my MacBook Air is still being repaired. I suspect that the power regulator had a problem. Sometimes it wouldn’t charge, then it would. If you were lucky you could start it, but then it would shut down by itself after a short while. And then you couldn’t start it until you reset it with these secret key combinations. But fortunately I have AppleCare for it and so that should be fixed next week.

And now for some interesting news … yes there where a few…

TIOBE Software publishes their Programming Community Index every month. This is sort of a hit parade of programming languages somehow measured by an elaborate methodology that uses search engines to determine the relative importance of programming languages. In the current April report the top position went to C which overtook Java on second place compared to a year ago. C++ stayed put on third place. The big winner in the top 10 is Objective-C which moved from 8th place last April to number 4. Objective-C also became the “Language of the year” in 2011 because it seems to be rising in these ranks like a rocket. All of us iOS and Mac developers using this for our favorite platform probably helps here quite a bit.

Google Currents launched internationally this month, after almost half a year being US-only. Will Kiefer, the iOS developer behind Google Currents, told me that they too make widespread use of UIWebViews for the main reason that their online publishing tool requires Javascript to run and that only the HTML5 CSS support in web views allows them to expose the customizability for their content partners. Will told me that to speed up image loading he replaced the normal NSURLCache mechanism with NSURLProtocol. This is faster because NSURLCache can only return one cached response at a time while NSURLProtocol can work concurrently. That’s definitely something worth looking into. I’m trying to get Will on the Cocoanetics podcast in one of the next episodes.

LLVM.org published in much greater detail the new Objective-C literal syntax for NSNumbers and Containers. Users of Apple’s compiler will be able to start using these features with Apple LLVM Compiler 4.0. Users of open-source LLVM.org compiler releases can use these features starting with clang v3.1. The 4.0 compiler will be in Xcode 4.4 which is due out about the same time as OS X Mountain Lion sometime this summer. The good thing will be that since this is compile-time technology it will mean that we should be able to use the new Literal syntax also in older iOS versions.

Valve software, makers of Steam and amazing games like Half-Life, have published a copy of their new employee handbook online. This manual is supposed to give new hires an overview of the Valve company philosophy. I recommend that you download this book and read it on your iPad because it is truly a piece of art. The manual in itself is a piece of art, it has beautiful illustrations and a ton of interesting content, even if you don’t plan to try to be hired by them.

Valve is nevertheless quite unusual in their philosophy. They don’t have a hierarchy or managers. Instead you are free to pick the projects that you would like to work  on. It’s like at Google where people have 20% for their own projects. Only at Valve this is 100%. I’m astonished that this can work, but I too will need to read the manual first before I can tell you how they do it. Quite inspirational!

Speaking of the value of employees: In the last quarter the profit per employee of Google, Apple and Sony were: $96,090 (33,464 employees) at Google, $215,200 (with 60,400 employees) at Apple and at Sony the average employee (of 168,200) lost the company $11,690. It’s interesting to see how Apple employees manage to make their company more than twice as much profit per person as Google employees. What is it that makes them so valuable? Possibly Apple selling boatloads of iOS devices?

David Smith published his latest 5.1 Upgrade stats and he reports:

Upgrades appear to have leveled off into the slow trickle phase. After the initial surge of upgrades (both OTA and otherwise) user adoption has transitioned into a more measured pace. Overall there is still a clear movement towards the newer OS variants. 82% of all users are now running some flavor of iOS 5.x.

What’s interesting in these statistics is that there is even greater adoption of iOS 5 than it seems because the numbers are drawn down by laggards on various versions of the iPod Touch. On iPad you’ll find no less than 86% on iOS 5.0 or higher. On iPod Touches this is only 65%. My theory is that these iPod Touches are mostly in the hands of children which don’t care for a newer iOS versions while the games they want to play still support iOS 4.

David Smith concludes that these numbers are good enough for him to drop iOS 4 support in his next major updates.

App Store Review Weather: As of April 20th there was a 3% chance of raining on your New Apps, 1% of bad weather for App Updates.

Kickstarter Projects mentioned:

  • Geode from iCache! – An iPhone case with build in e-ink display for dynamically displaying loyalty card barcodes plus on-the-fly programmable credit card
  • Galileo – an remote-controllable robotic iPhone stand for panning and tilting
  • Pebble – E-Paper Watch
  • Double Fine Adventure – previous record holder until the Pebble beat it
  • Make Leisure Suit Larry come again – cutting it close to the $500,000 goal, Larry is dear to many but a bad influence for many more
]]>
https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/04/podcast-34-be-excellent-and-valuable/feed/ 0 6242
Podcast #33 – “Rich Texting” https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/04/podcast-33-rich-texting/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/04/podcast-33-rich-texting/#comments Sat, 14 Apr 2012 17:01:52 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=6223 Episode 33, recorded April 14th, 2012

Everybody still waiting for WWDC. My MacBook Air misbehaves and thus I have no show prepared. But Kevin Smith from Dootrix saves us this week from having no show: we chat about Rich Text and the Simpl app which they made.

Show Notes

Kevin Smith is co-founder of Dootrix Ltd, a company that develops mobile apps for business and enterprise clients. We chat about rich text, display and editing and what went into the Simpl app they created for Simpl. And its all super-simpl, really… 🙂

Links:

Apps for taking only iPad to clients:

Feedback

I love to hear from you, you can email me at oliver@cocoanetics.com or tweet me @cocoanetics. If you want to give me audio feedback or have some interesting comment for me to play on the show please call my Google Voice mailbox:  (415) 860-4324

]]>
https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/04/podcast-33-rich-texting/feed/ 1 6223
Podcast #32 – “WWDC Notably Absent” https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/04/podcast-32-wwdc-notably-absent/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/04/podcast-32-wwdc-notably-absent/#respond Sun, 08 Apr 2012 10:05:51 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=6186 Episode 32, recorded April 8th 2012

Does Radar need to be fixed or not? Apple increases developer share for iAds. And we are on tenterhooks waiting for WWDC tickets to become available.

iAd Developer Share Raised

Apple raises revenue share going to developers from iAd to 70%, up from 60%. In a move that probably aimed at making iAd banners more attractive Apple raised the share to the same percentage developers are already getting for app sales and in-app purchases. The problem that people are still having with iAds is less the percentage they are getting, it’s the fill rate.

Because of this they are mediation networks like the one from Google or a component like my DTBannerManger which combines iAds, AdMob and MobFox to get 100% fill rate with the highest paying ads prioritized higher. Nevertheless we appreciate the gesture, personally I feel it’s a bit more rounded that Apple gets 30% share in everything.

Having a different percentage for a single service felt odd, not smooth, unlike Apple. At least they ironed this out for whatever reasons.

Miscellaneous Announcements

Apple has made new material available on the App Store Resource Center which you can use to promote your app with Apple’s blessing. On this page you can find the official “Available on the App Store” badge with instructions how you may and may not modify and use this. There are also official high resolution images for iOS devices which you can use in photo montages showing your app running on a device. The announcement mentioned new localized versions of the badge in Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Portuguese.

There where several great links in this week’s installment of the iOS Dev Weekly newsletter. I got the WWDC ticket availability stats post from there as well as the next two items:

There’s a cool guide on TheIconmaster.com that explains how to make a shortcut to new Photostream images in your Finder. This enables you to see new screenshots pop up right away on your Mac after you made them on your iOS devices. The advantage here is that you don’t have to have iPhoto running and iCloud sync working over peer-to-peer when your devices are on the same WiFi network. There is a smart search feature in Finder that automatically updates when new files appear. By combining this with a search for PNG files and the photo stream sync folder you’re set.

There is an extensive code style guide on NearTheSpeedOfLight.com. It describes in great detail how you should style your code. From naming conventions to tips on how to structure your APIs. This joins the ZDS Code Style Guide by Marcus Zarra and the Google Objective-C Style Guide in trying to bring order to our chaotic code. While the contained details in all three guides might remind you a bit of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) there are nevertheless many good reasons for why it makes sense to do certain things a certain way. If not following it slavishly it might do wonders on your own code style and code readability if you pick up a couple of pointers when skimming through these guides.

App Review Weather Report: New Apps 97% chance of being approved in 5 days, Updates 99%.

This week was somewhat uneventful, probably because I was on vacation. Could it be that Apple is aware that many developers are taking the week off leading up to the Easter holidays? I mean, if they would have announced the 2012 Worldwide Developer Conference in this week then they would have annoyed all those vacationing people. I for one was glad that they didn’t because it saved me from having to deal with somebody else buying a ticket for me while I am incommunicado.

WWDC 2012, … NOT!

Somebody – whose name I forgot – did a linear regression on previous announcement dates and ended up seeing April 18th as the most likely date that tickets could go on sale. Scott McAlister compiled a complete list of when tickets went on sale in relation to the conference dates for the last 8 years. Before the iPhone there were around 4 months lead time. For the past 4 years there were between 40 and 88 days lead time, that equates to around 2 months.

If we take the speculative date of 11th of June then that means we are today just over 2 months way. By the way, the dates 11th through 15th of June are the only guess we have based on the Moscone West event calendar which has a “Corporate Meeting” by an unnamed company. Any day now….

Apple has no rush, its not that the event will not sell out in under 10 hours. To allow developers to be notified when tickets become available there is WWDCalerts.com which announced that they have 9000 subscribers so far. Mind you all these are competing for about 5000 tickets. Well that REALLY scares me.

I talked to John Geylense – head of developer evangelism at Apple – at last years Apple tech Tour in London. When I suggested to him that Apple should do one regional WWDC per continent he responded that he thought that this would be too expensive and that they couldn’t ship around all the engineers to the events. Then I pointed out that maybe 3 events – evenly distributed around the globe – would probably cost less than the 10 road show events combined because of all the flights and hotel rooms they would have had to book for the road show.

Though I fear that this suggestion – which probably many other developers have given as well – has fallen on deaf ears. If I were a betting man then I would still put my money on a single WWDC in June, followed by a 10 city road show later this year. Oh wait … I AM betting on this, because I already purchased a flight and hotel for 2 weeks in June. And apparently many others as well, because I found that the hotel room costs twice the normal rate during the rumored week of WWDC.

Either way Apple should announce the event at least 3 weeks beforehand simply for the reason that peoples who will fly to the USA for the event will have to register for Electronic System for Travel Authorization if their country is part of the Visa Waiver system. If I am not mistaken you’ll have to do that at least 3 weeks before traveling.

Some creative developers have begun filing Radars to express their frustration with not being able to buy a ticket or even knowing the official date. Unfortunately that seems to be the only way to communicate with Apple when we are dissatisfied with them. Just as unfortunately you cannot ever hope to get a useful response for these kinds of non-technical bug reports.

The other creative way I found how some people deal with the fear of missing out is to form Dub-Dub-Buddy-Teams. Thereby two developers both agree to buy an extra ticket for each other, just in case. This way there is a higher chance that both will get a ticket and if there are any left over it would be easy to find a buyer for that.

Radar, To Fix or Not To Fix

Speaking of Radar. The number of people who have registered their Radar-fixing Radar at Fix Radar or GTFO is holding at 329 which is a sad and low number. I would have thought that this cause should have been able to unite more than 300 developers. The goal of this initiative is to inspire Apple to improve their bug tracking and feature requesting system. I inquired why many more developers are taking objection to the goal of the initiative or the tone it is written in.

Some developers are afraid that they might anger somebody at Apple. And that this would cause Apple engineers to delay fixing the actual bugs they filed. While I can understand this fear, I refuse to believe that Apple engineers are vengeful and I refuse that this sort of egotistical thinking would be the norm.

Oleg Andreev even goes as far as calling the initiative “nonsense“. He wrote:

Developers do not need a radar. Apple needs it. And they make it good enough for themselves, not for 3rd party developers. If the UI sucks and they get 10 times less bugs than people would love to file, it must be something they are okay with.

I’m interested in your opinion. Did you file your duplicate Radar mentioning the one from the site? Or did you write a lengthy blog post explaining why this is futile? Or if you did neither, what is your reason for your inactivity? Could not be bothered? Leave me a voicemail under (415) 860-4324.

Peter Steinberger caught a glimpse of Apple’s internal Radar.app and tweeted:

The funny thing is, now that I’ve seen Radar.app, I totally understand why Apple never gonna release that. ^^

So it might be simple embarrassment why Apple does not let us have the Radar app so far.

I have my doubts that Apple will every open the issue tracking system even a tiny crack. So that’s why you should also post a copy of your bug report to the OpenRadar site hosted on Google Apps. Every now and then when I trip on a bug I found – when googling for it – that either somebody asked about this bug on Stack Overflow or there is an Open Radar entry for it. If you then file your own Radar you can mention the other Radar for reference. That probably makes the Apple engineer’s live easier to categorize the bug report as well as gives us some peace of mind that we can be reasonably sure that it is not our code that has a fault.

Xcode Jobs

In the previous episode I told you about this new hobby project I started and called XcodeJobs.com. The idea here is basically that through all the Twittering that I do I see many iOS developers and development companies looking to hire iOS developers for fixed staff positions. Now it is my believe that regular job adverts just don’t cut it any more to capture the attention of experienced developers. You need to be a bit more creative than simply list all the skills you are looking for. Why should this iOS expert be interested in working for you when can just as well can have his own small business doing contract work?

XcodeJobs.com is set up such that if you sign in you immediately have the rights to create a blog post with a creative description of what you do and why candidates should closer look at your company. The best example I’ve ever seen for a creative iOS job advert was by Polarbear Farms. They sort of a billboard that looked a bit like a blue print. This brilliantly examplifies how to create an advert that is both memorable and intriguing. The link to the one iOS Jobs rundown I did a while back on my blog is also in the show notes.

The blog goes together with a Twitter account by the same name which I’m now using to retweet all the job offers that come before my eyes. Though I’m filtering a bit there as well, I have a bad feeling about retweeting job tweets that have a #jobs hash tag or that lead to websites that are obviously commercial recruiting agencies. That’s another thing that you definitely shouldn’t use if you are looking to prove your originality to your next iOS developer employee.

So – long story short – if you’re ever looking for somebody, then please do a creative ad at XcodeJobs.com or if you couldn’t be bothered then at least tweet a link to a job offer on your own company website so that I can retweet it.

Feedback

I love to hear from you, you can email me at oliver@cocoanetics.com or tweet me @cocoanetics. If you want to give me audio feedback or have some interesting comment for me to play on the show please call my Google Voice mailbox:  (415) 860-4324

 

]]>
https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/04/podcast-32-wwdc-notably-absent/feed/ 0 6186
Podcast #31 – “UDID Fire” https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/03/podcast-31-udid-fire/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/03/podcast-31-udid-fire/#respond Sat, 31 Mar 2012 17:47:53 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=6146 Episode 31, recorded Saturday March 31st, 2012 – UDID FIre

Mach ado about UDID, jobs for iOS developers abound and my guest today is Appsfire Co-Founder Ouriel Ohayon.

News

Apple informed developers via e-mail that iTunes Connect will have individual reports for Sweden and Denmark from now on. For March, app sales earnings in Sweden and Denmark will be split and reported in two different documents, one covering the time period before the change and one covering the time period after the change. Earnings from sales that occurred before the change will be in the Euro-Zone (EUR) financial report. Earnings from after the change will be in the new financial reports for Sweden (SEK) and Denmark (DKK).

I am wondering what the benefit to us developers will be. Are the reporting guys SEARCHING for work to do that nobody actually cares about, just so that they are not bored?

Speaking of non-sensical changes: Apple invented two new price tiers. Tier 63 is $124.99 and Tier 69 is $174.99. Both tiers are available for both apps and In-App Purchases. Can anybody explain to my what this is good for? Are apps too cheap? Does Zynga want to sell more expensive In-App-Crap? You know, lower levels of tiers usually correspond with the price in dollars. The geek in me revolts, what is the secret algorithm here?

UDID, or didn’t you? Now that some rumors seemed to indicate that Apple might be beginning to reject apps that are using the unique device identifier developers are scrambling and are ripping out the trusty old identification code and replacing it with something new. But that only seems to be part of the story. Tapbots published the original rejection letter they received from Apple and this contains some very interesting information. This letter says that they where sending identity information to their server without having asked the user.

Apple seems to actually do a man-in-the-middle attack on HTTPS when reviewing our apps. Tapbots was sending the UDID in a HTTP GET request over HTTPS. If you simply look at the data packets then you don’t know the URL that is being requested because the first step in the HTTPS is to do a CONNECT. Then the GET is performed and already encrypted. This man-in-the-middle means that Apple has a tracing server that spoofs the HTTPS target and re-signs the packet such that it is still accepted by the URL connection on the device.

This is technically easy, I blogged about how to spy on any app’s traffic with the Charles debugging proxy app. What’s interesting that we learn for the first time that not even encryption is holy to Apple. So if you are sending something naughty to your server, then don’t rely on HTTPS thinking that nobody can see the contents. Better to send hashes instead of plain text. This is sort of similar to when the Path app sent your address book.

Many people ask: what should be use instead of UDID and the privacy advocates generally say: nothing. A user is not the same as a device. About the only market that requires to uniquely identify devices is advertising, especially when it comes to conversion tracking. If you need to have some sort of temporary identifier then you can use CFUUID to create one and then you can store it in the keychain. This will persist even when the app is removed as opposed to the user defaults.

For those who are developing libraries for ad networks the de facto standard has become the OpenUDID project which is available on GitHub. It was developed by on of the founders of Appsfire. There is a second competing project called SecureUDID but when I surveyed the market as to which is winning I found that most ad networks had switched to using OpenUDID. This includes the MobFox framework which you might know that I originally developed.

Flurry Analytics reports the relation of income of the three major app stores: Apple’s app store, the Amazon app store and Google Play (aka the Android app store). The comparison they came up with is this:

$1 on Apple’s App Store is 89¢ on Kindle and 23¢ on Android

What’s interesting is that Amazon is able to get the value proposition for developers into the vicinity of where it is for us iOS developers. Well it certainly helps to have the marketing experience of the world’s largest retailer and a dedicated device that locks people into their marketplace. And it still gives us a warm and fuzzy feeling that we are focussing on the app store where the most money is made. Our grass is greenest, yeah!

Here’s another good reason why we developers should always buy the latest Apple devices. An iOS forensics company has created a tool that lets law enforcement officials find out your passcode lock. There’s a video where you can see them boot an iPhone with their own custom boot loader. iPhone hacker Chronic has told me that iOS devices with an A5 chip are safe.

A5 devices can be jailbroken on a per-firmware basis, but their exploit(s) are userland-level, so passcode lock is safe.

That means you should have no less than an iPhone 4S if you are worried about that the law or some lawless thugs who got hold of this software can decrypt all your secrets. Hey, it’s a business expense and of course we need proper test devices for our jobs.

Speaking of security, the Australian Department of Defence has published a PDF that treats in great details all the security aspects involved in using iOS devices in official agencies. It’s a great manual to have and pass on to IT guys who are evaluating use of iOS devices in the enterprise, it contains background information as to which questions you should ask from government contractors whose apps are to be used on those Secret Agent devices. Conversely if you ARE such a developer who is interested in the vertical market of government software then this guide contains all the questions that you probably will be asked. So you can prepare yourself accordingly, and have your apps be secure by design.

If you are looking for iOS or Mac developers for your compony or are looking for employment as such then I’d like to draw your attention to my new hobby project. I wanted to have a blog – combined with Twitter feed – where you could get the pulse of our industry. Though I don’t want to have any extra work, so I made it such that if you create a login on XcodeJobs.com you can write a short blog post about the positions you are trying to fill. This I can then publish very early. If that is too much effort for you then you can also tweet me a link to the job profile on your own site and I’ll retweet it with the @XcodeJobs twitter account.

This is completely non-commercial and Recruiter-free. When I was looking for a name for this baby I realized that all my favorite platforms we use Xcode to develop for. And since the name was free I grabbed it. If I hear from Apple’s legal department I can always change it later. But they say: “we’ll cross this bridge when we get to it”. Right now there are record numbers of people tweeting about the site and following the Twitter account. So why not benefit from this attention too?

Oh and speaking of hiring. I have hired my first actual real employee! And it’s great! He’s going to start working with us next month and I can already feel our output increase. Many iOS developers shy away from this sort of commitment, OMG how much that costs. What if you don’t have any work any more? But the reality is, that work always grows larger and larger and frankly I cannot afford to pay for contractors. At the current rates an employee costs me about a third as much as a contractor based in USA or Europe.

Guest: Appsfire Co-Founder Ouriel Ohayon

We chat about why there is a need for a UDID-replacement and what is is used for.
Appsfire App on the App Store

Feedback

I love to hear from you, you can email me at oliver@cocoanetics.com or tweet me @cocoanetics. If you want to give me audio feedback or have some interesting comment for me to play on the show please call my Google Voice mailbox:  (415) 860-4324

]]>
https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/03/podcast-31-udid-fire/feed/ 0 6146
Podcast #30 – NSConferencing https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/03/podcast-30-nsconferencing/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/03/podcast-30-nsconferencing/#respond Sat, 24 Mar 2012 17:29:22 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=6130 Episode #30, recorded Saturday March 24th, 2012. “NSConferencing”

First time visit to NSConference. Apple implements design that Steve Jobs called shit 5 years ago. And they sell more than 3 Million new iPads in 3 days.

Show Notes

Kevin Dent reports that Apple have begun to reject and pull apps that are accessing the unique device identifier. He claims that this was confirmed by multiple sources now. I have not been able to confirm this as of yet, several of the ad network libraries that we are using need the UDID for counting unique devices and so far there where no complaints.

Nevertheless Apple has deprecated the public API in iOS 5. This usually means that it will cease to exist on devices that are using the next major iOS version, iOS 6 in this case. Now this causes some problems for people who need to have a device-wide unique identifier, say for ad targetting or unlocking restricted content. The best method I have seen so far is used by paid component MyID. The approach there is to create a GUID and put it on a private pasteboard. This way the identifier is available to all apps knowing about this pasteboard and still globally unique.

On the third day after launch of the new iPad Apple revealed that they had already sold three million. Looks like the move to Retina display and US-crippled LTE was sufficient to trigger these record-breaking sales. Well, I have to admit I convinced myself too that I needed a “test device” and so I bought my new iPad in London while traveling to NSConference.

Don McAlister from Screencasts Online points out that with the 3 million new iPads that Apple sold in the first 3 days they also sold 3 million of 1080p video capture & editing devices. Add to this the millions of iPhone 4S – which nobody wanted – and you can see how Apple revolutionized the video camera market just the same as they took over the photo market before. Do you remember those statistics that show the percentage of certain cameras used by people uploading to Flickr? The iPhones are still in the lead. There is a camera that is apparently catching up to the iPhone … the Canon EOS 5D Mark II. Although this is a $2000 camera a 21 MPix DSLR. So no real danger there for a camera phone that costs way less.

ImageOptim.com has done a case study on Tweetbot for iPad. They took the Tweetbot for iPad bundle, uncrushed all contained 978 images totalling almost 50 MB in original form. The default crushing via Xcode reduces this to about 26 MB. Their ImageOptim algorithm resulted in a size of 17 MB. And by converting to PNG8+Alpha with their ImageAlpha algorithm AND using ImageOptim they got the total needed file size for images down to 9 MB. These are quite impressive numbers. To have these compressions stay in effect you have to disable Xcode’s crushing though, because this would undo them. ImageOptim’s benchmark also showed a significantly reduced time for decompression which would – in theory – make PNGs thus optimized on par with JPGs.

Speaking of file sizes, Apple has officially confirmed the raised 50 MB file size that’s downloadable over cellular data. Nothing new there, but now it’s official.

If you have a server-based system that sends push notifications Apple has the following tips for you:

The Apple Push Notification Service provides a high-speed, high-capacity interface, so you should establish and maintain an open connection to handle all your notifications. Connections that are repeatedly opened and closed will affect the performance and stability of your connection to the Apple Push Notification Service and may be considered denial-of-service attacks. You should also connect regularly to the feedback service so you don’t send notifications to devices that no longer have your app installed. Learn more about connecting to the Apple Push Notification Service.

Obviously push notifications seem to be at an all time high which is why Apple wants to make sure that nobody abuses the service to the detriment of others.

A former Apple employee named Michael Margolis was – in his own words – responsible for implementing the AppleTV 2.0 interface. That was the new interface on the first AppleTV hockeypuck that ran on iOS. About the new design for the new 1080p AppleTV menu he wrote:

“Fun fact – those new designs were tossed out 5 years ago because Steve Jobs didn’t like them. Now there is nobody to say ‘no’ to bad design”

Many people who see the new design seem to think it is worse than the previous one. Do we have to fear that Apple lost their design sense now? Is this the beginning of the end?

Speaking of hell freezing over, Apple is finally giving in to pressure from shareholders. Apple announced plans to initiate a dividend and share repurchase program. The $10 billion repurchase program is expected to be executed over three years, with the primary objective of neutralizing the impact of dilution from future employee equity grants and employee stock purchase programs.

Apple CEO Tim Cook stated:

“We have used some of our cash to make great investments in our business through increased research and development, acquisitions, new retail store openings, strategic prepayments and capital expenditures in our supply chain, and building out our infrastructure. You’ll see more of all of these in the future. Even with these investments, we can maintain a war chest for strategic opportunities and have plenty of cash to run our business. So we are going to initiate a dividend and share repurchase program.”

Historically a dividend was a way for large established companies to give shareholders an incentive to hold onto their shares as opposed to constantly trying to buy them low and sell them high. Apple probably wants to send shareholders the message that they now like to see themselves more as an established titan than as a constantly changing startup. Suggest stability and firm believe in the skills of the CEO to keep the cash rolling in to an extend that they can distribute some amongst the shareholders.

The company plans to pay out $2.65 per share per quarter. With a current stock price around $600 this means that an investment in Apple’s shares will be paying around 1.7% which is way more than most savings accounts.

Disclaimer: I own Apple stock and I am happy about the dividend as well as the growth.

App Store Review Weather Report: Of iOS submissions 92% of new apps and 95% of app updates were approved within 5 business days. The review weather remains friendly with only 5-8% of infrequent showers.

I visited my first NSConference this week. More details on my blog. But the gist of it: I loved to meet the European iOS developer all stars. That was one of the good things. I also loved to pick the brain of CoreData super star Marcus Zarra which I was able to do on a lab that went on in parallel of the single stream of talks. That was the one thing I didn’t like, the organizer Scotty made it all to easy to sit through talks even though you weren’t really interested in them. But he is quite aware that the talks themselves are only part of the value of such a conference and instead people go there to learn from each other and to often meet each other for the first time. Read my article on more details, it also has links to 3 write up blog posts written by Alex Blewitt who acted as the inofficial resident journalist.

I love to hear from you, you can email me at oliver@cocoanetics.com or tweet me @cocoanetics. If you want to give me feedback or have some interesting comment for me to play on the show please call my Google Voice mailbox:  (415) 860-4324

]]>
https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/03/podcast-30-nsconferencing/feed/ 0 6130
Podcast #29 – “The New iPad has Landed” https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/03/podcast-29-the-new-ipad-has-landed/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/03/podcast-29-the-new-ipad-has-landed/#respond Sat, 17 Mar 2012 11:01:43 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=6093 Episode 29, recorded Saturday, March 17th, 2012.

New iPad finally in people’s hands, exciting updates for our favorite compiler and some problems arise for developers making magazine/catalog-style apps.

Show Notes

George Hotz, aka Geohot, who came to fame for jail breaking and hacking the PS3, was arrested en route to South-by-Southwest because he was in possession of a large amount of weed.  He was set free after paying a $1500 bail. So he didn’t need to employ his mad “jailbreaking skills”.

Apple more than doubled the size an app can have to be still able to download it over cellular data. It went from 20 MB to 50 MB and was confirmed that this is indeed the case for iPad and iPhone apps alike. Yesterday I downloaded a couple of apps in the field – yeah really, “in the field” because I was downloading stargazing apps on a field while out walking my dog. On the second app I tried on my iPhone 4S I got the message that it is larger then 50 MB. So that proves that.

Apple’s App Store Team has announced two new functionality’s for your In-App Purchases and wants to make sure you are aware of them.

Application Loader now features Mass In-App Purchase Delivery – Application Loader 2.5.1 allows you create and deliver In-App Purchases for multiple apps simultaneously by importing a spreadsheet of your In-App Purchase metadata. Application Loader and the Application Loader User Guide are available in the Manage Your Applications module on iTunes Connect.

Improved In-App Purchase iTunes Connect Searching and Sorting – To manage your In-App Purchases more easily, you can now search and sort by their status on iTunes Connect. Additionally, you will no longer see the Ready for Sale status for your In-App Purchases on iTunes Connect. The Ready for Sale status has been changed to Approved. Approved In-App Purchases have been reviewed and are ready to go live on the App Store.

As of Xcode 4.3 LLDB replaced GDB as the default debugger for new projects. Unfortunately there seems to be a bug in LLDB that causes it to display wrong or no contents for same variables. Apple has confirmed that this is a bug. Chris Lattern, Apple’s compiler head honcho stated on the forum:

“Unfortunately, I don’t really know of a good workaround other than switching back to GDB :(.  It will definitely be fixed in the mountain lion tools (Xcode 4.4)”

So if you are unlucky and see this issue occur with your code, then you will should switch back to gdb for the time being.

Morgan Stanley thinks that Apple might go as high as $960 by March next year, reports Fortune. This is of interest to us for two reasons.

1) We are not Apple employees, so we don’t get stock options. But we can still directly participate from Apple’s growth if we invest a few of these monthly app store payments in Apple stock.

2) If Apple’s valuation grows, so do our markets.

Morgan Stanley’s Katy Huberty explains it this way:

1) Enterprise tablet adoption combined with demand upside from lower-priced iPad. The pace of enterprise tablet adoption is exceeding expectations, according to our January 2012 CIO survey. Fifty-six percent of US companies already purchase tablets for corporate use, compared to a 51% expected penetration a year ago. Assuming Apple maintains its 80% share of the enterprise tablet market, iPad purchases by enterprises could account for 9 million units and $5 billion in iPad revenue in CY12. This is in addition to consumer purchases of iPads, some of which will also be used in the enterprise.

2) iPhone estimates don’t credit Apple for the potential share gains when it launches an LTE-capable device in 2H12. Our supply chain checks suggest Apple’s sixth generation iPhone could include several changes that, in our view, will increase the upgrade rate relative to past product cycles. In particular, iPhone 5 is likely to include a higher-resolution and potentially thinner screen, new casing material, faster processor, and quad-mode baseband chip that works on multiple flavors of 3G and LTE. Our December US survey indicated that 62% of iPhone owners planned to upgrade to the new version, iPhone 4S. Assuming a similar upgrade rate for the LTE iPhone due out later this year, this implies 148M and 160M upgrade purchases in our base and bull case. The remaining 38M and 86M shipments would come from new users, roughly split between emerging markets and mature markets. For perspective, the same math implies Apple added roughly 48M new users in CY11.

3) China and other emerging markets, like Brazil, remain huge untapped markets. The emerging markets remain a huge opportunity for upside long term due to attractive demographics. Smartphone penetration is highest among cell phone users 25 to 34 years old, according to Nielsen. The emerging markets have nearly 14x the population in this age range than Western Europe and North America.

The uptake in the enterprise market can already be felt as more and more vertical apps are being developed. For example we at Cocoanetics are continuing to work on an enterprise application for my client ELO Digital Office in Germany. They released an iPad version of the app just two weeks ago. They tell me that demand in the enterprise for an iPad client has much grown.

Europe is lagging behind a bit rolling out LTE and so the latest information is that the iPad’s LTE won’t work in Europe because of different frequencies being used. That could all change until the end of the year with the iPhone 5 possibly being the first LTE phone also working in Europe. Though I find it puzzling that Huberty talks about a higher resolution screen on the iPad 5. That’s plain nonsense, why should Apple go beyond Retina? Oh wait, maybe she’s trying to say that she thinks the display will be larger. That would make sense, because then to keep the same pixel density it would require more pixels. BUT: at the same time this doesn’t make sense because then we’d have our problems with different screen scales. Like 2 for normal retina and 2.2 for a larger screen. I have my doubts.

Still all in all we agree that there will be even larger queues for the next iPhone however this may look.

Finally China, well, better get your apps localized by somebody versed in their cryptic language. I have just the tool for you. 🙂

Apple’s Frameworks Evangelist Michael Jurewitz reminds us that if you want your Retina graphics – which you have painstakingly been packaging into your apps since last fall – to show up, you have to build with Xcode 4.3.1 as well as link against the 5.1 SDK. You can still have a lower depolyment target. If you have your SDK set to “Latest” then you are fine.

There’s a change in iOS 5 that a few people stumbled upon. Beginning with iOS 5 the maximum tile size for CATiledLayer is limited to 1024×1024 pixels. That means for a Retina iPad you will see that regardless of what you set the tileSize to, it never gets larger than 512×512 when drawing. An Apple engineer confirmed that this is by design, though he did not say what design this is. We can only speculate that this has to do with the maximum texture size in OpenGL.

Apple is not only doing away with the numbering of iPads. I already predicted last year that the iPhone 5 will also just be the new iPhone. What else does have a number now, but will not in the future? Objective-C 2.0! Chris Lattner, head of the compiler at Apple, announced that Objective-C will no longer be carrying version numbers in the future. On March 7th he wrote:

We’ve had internal discussions and have explicitly decided *not* to version the language any more. Instead of “Objective-C 2.0” or some such, there is now just “Objective-C as of Xcode 4.4” or “Objective-C in LLVM Compiler/Clang 4.0”.

If you’d like to reason about or conditionalize your code on various language features, please use the Clang feature checking macros:
http://clang.llvm.org/docs/LanguageExtensions.html#feature_check

For some Objective-C examples:
http://clang.llvm.org/docs/LanguageExtensions.html#objc_features

A tangential thing I’d like to point out is that the Objective-C literals features that went out with the Mountain Lion beta tools are now in the LLVM.org repository. We are still finalizing the documentation for them though.

-Chris

Speaking of Apple Compiler Technologies. LLVM is an open source project and Apple is actively contributing to it with their own additions. They now committed an update to it that brings a couple of new syntax for Objective-C. This makes it official and so we can finally talk about it.

There’s a new syntax for literals. Literals are static values that get baked into the app by the compiler. Previously the only object literal we would have is the @-double-quote that turns into an NSString. Now you have similar ways of specifying literals for NSNumber, NSArray and NSDictionary. Joris Kluivers has some examples. This update has yet to find it’s way into the actually shipping compiler. Later this year. Looking forward to that.

Since last weeks episode of this podcast I got around to writing 2 blog posts. One is about what it costs to license a font for use in your app. Hint: it’s quite expensive. The other one is clearly a hot topic as I can judge from the click-through numbers I’m seeing: Image decompression benchmarked.

Error: I misspoke, I meant to say that it is still faster to work with JPEGs for Retina-resolution iPad than crushed PNGs.

I’m attending NSConference, beginning next Monday, and going to meet many European developer Allstars. It’s my first one, so I don’t know yet what to expect. If you happen to see me, then you have my permission to approach and say “Hi!”.

]]>
https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/03/podcast-29-the-new-ipad-has-landed/feed/ 0 6093
Podcast #28 – “App Economy” https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/03/podcast-28-app-economy/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/03/podcast-28-app-economy/#respond Sun, 11 Mar 2012 10:56:33 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=6085 The new iPad further strengthens the foundation of the app economy, there are more iOS-related jobs than ever before and my guest on this show is Martin Pilkington who just sold an app to get his own app economy in order. And the latest -Gate in Apple’s history is Open-Streetmap-Gate.

Show Notes

Apple commissioned a study by Analysis Group about their impact on the US Economy. Based on the results Apple launched an interesting page which summarizes the facts.

“[The study] found that Apple has directly or indirectly created 304,000 U.S. jobs.*These jobs — spread across all 50 states — include thousands of jobs in numerous industries, from the people who create components for our products to the people who build the planes and trucks that carry them to our customers. For example, this figure also includes workers in Texas who manufacture processors for iOS products, Corning employees in Kentucky and New York who create the majority of the glass for iPhone, and FedEx and UPS employees. Together with the 210,000 iOS jobs generated by the app economy, these 304,000 jobs make a total of 514,000 U.S. jobs created or supported by Apple.

With more than 550,000 apps and more than 24 billion downloads in less than four years, the App Store has created an entirely new industry: iOS app design and development. The app revolution has added more than 210,000 iOS jobs to the U.S. economy since the introduction of iPhone in 2007.And Apple has paid more than $4 billion in royalties to developers through the App Store. We also provide app developers with the tools and distribution they need to bring their best ideas to tens of millions of iOS customers worldwide.

The number of Apple jobs based in the U.S. has more than quadrupled over the past decade, from less than 10,000 employees in 2002 to more than 47,000 today. That number more than doubles again when we include vendors that employ more than 50,000 people who directly support Apple. These jobs require people with a wide variety of skills — including construction workers, component manufacturers, retail specialists, tech support representatives, salespeople, marketers, and the best hardware and software engineers in the world.”

Then they also mention how almost all of the 246,000 retail employees are full time and not seasonally hired. And how proud they are of having their telephone support based in the US instead of india, where it would cost half as much.

Pxldot.com has a great analysis how soon after launch customers will have updated their devices to a new iOS version. They correlate it also with how the story looks on Android, but what’s most interesting for us iOS developers is this: about 20 weeks after release 75% will have upgraded. And about 40 weeks after launch you can assume that almost 100% of devices will be on the new iOS version. Then there is a long tail of some devices that never will get updated. Like the original iPhone I gave to my in-laws as a normal mobile phone. Those are dropping off around 3% per week.

Today we are at 21 weeks after launch of iOS 5 and on the chart you can see that indeed iOS 5 is around slightly more than 75%.  There are two nice learnings from from this: If you start a new project it almost never makes sense to support iOS versions that are older than the previous major release. And if you are planning ahead and for example plan for a launch in 3 months then you can even not bother with iOS 4.

Long story short, we are extremely lucky that Apple apparently has a strategy that gets the software modernized as quickly as possible contrary to Android where so many factors prevent a quick and wide-spread adoption of new versions of the OS.

Somebody should maybe make a website that takes this formula and counts down the approximate percentage of devices on a a given iOS version.

The same Martin Pilkington which I am going to interview in a few minutes launched fixradarorgtfo.com which about 300 developers are supporting so far. The idea is to demonstrate to Apple that we developers would like for them to improve the bug reporting site aka Radar. To join the effort all you have to do is create a new radar, copy in the open letter featured on the site and – if you like – add the bug number and your name to the ever growing list of supporters.

Let me read the first few paragraphs:

“The only way to really communicate with Apple about what is broken and what we want is Radar. But Radar sucks, and has done for a very, VERY long time. This puts a lot of people off filing radars. The user interface is awkward and slow. We have to stop what we’re doing and go to a web UI that still thinks we’re running Mac OS X 10.1, that makes it awkward to look at bugs we’ve already filed and generally is un-Apple-like.

Radar is also a black hole. We file radars and we’re lucky to hear back about them. The majority of radars are either left untouched or marked as duplicates of other radars we cannot see. We may get a request for more information from engineering, but sometimes it is for irrelevant information or information already given in the original report. All this makes us feel like our radars make little difference. And this is important as our time is valuable.

We are contractors and every minute spent filing radars is time not spent doing client work. We are employees and every minute spent filing radars is time not spent writing code for our employers. We are indies and every minute spent filing radars is time not spent writing great apps for our users. We are hobbyists and every minute spent filing radars is time spent not doing our hobby and enjoying ourselves. We are all developers and every minute spent filing radars is time spent not making the great applications that show off how your platforms can be so much more than just what you ship to customers.”

After the 25-billionth app was downloaded Apple released lists of the all-time top iPhone and iPad apps, both free and paid. Dan Frommer from SplatF analyzed the list and came up with some interesting facts:

  • Angry Birds is 3 of the top 10 paid iPhone apps — nos. 1, 5, and 8. And 3 of the top 25 free iPhone apps. And 3 of the top 10 paid iPad apps. And 3 of the top 25 free iPad apps. Just incredible.
  • 3 of the top 12 paid iPad apps are “office” apps — Apple’s iWork suite of Pages (no. 1), Numbers (no. 11), and Keynote (no. 12). Clearly there is demand for these types of apps, and Microsoft Office is missing out.
  • None of the top apps are “location based services” — unless you count MotionX GPS, Google Earth, or Groupon.
  • 4 of the top 10 paid iPhone apps — Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, Words With Friends, and Angry Birds Rio — also have free versions in the top 25 free iPhone apps.
  • 7 of the top 10 free iPhone apps have blue as their dominant icon color. (Only one, Netflix, has no blue at all.)
  • Instagram, a relatively young app, made it to no. 19 in free iPhone apps. That’s pretty impressive. And Facebook‘s newish iPad app already made it to no. 17 in the free iPad apps. (Two third-party Facebook apps also made it into the top 25 free and paid iPad apps, reflecting the void Facebook left unfilled for so long.)
  • I’m surprised to see Bump so high in the top free iPhone apps (no. 14). Do people actually use this app? Have never seen it.
  • iBooks seems to have been excluded from this list. Or is the Kindle iPad app — no. 5 in the free iPad apps list — really the only one in the top 25? Seems like a strange exclusion.
  • Average current price of the top 25 all-time paid iPhone apps: $1.51. Average current price of the top 25 all-time paid iPad apps: $5.59.

So successful iPad apps are more than 3 times as expensive as iPhone apps. Would you have expected that?

The big news this week – obviously – was the announcement of the new iPad, no number. And an Apple TV hockey puck that has a new UI and is able to place 1080p. No surprises. There still is a home button and now there’s finally really a device that will make use of the @2x images you’ve been putting into your iPad apps since last fast. You have been shipping Retina-capable iPad apps, right?

Right on the heels of the keynote apple emailed all makers of Catalog apps and informed them that they catalogs had been moved to the new Catalogs section on iTunes. This was of special interest to me because 18 of the apps mentioned on the front page use my iCatalog.framework. We welcome this move, even though Apple decided to do that behind our backs, because it makes it easier for customers to find our catalogs and also we have a more direct comparison to our competitors. Previously catalog apps where dispersed in a multitude of categories, which made it impossible to rank them against each other.

Apple has released iPhoto for iPhone and iPad. In the new Photo Journals feature Apple is not using map tiles from Google, but instead is using OpenStreetmap data with their own custom tiles. So writes OpenStreetMap on their blog. Though Apple seems to have forgotten to add the necessary credit. OpenStreetMap writes:

“It’s also missing the necessary credit to OpenStreetMap’s contributors; we look forward to working with Apple to get that on there.”

OpenStreetMap-Gate! Both Google and OpenStreetMap require that map tiles have an annotation of the source. Apple obviously wanted to be able to omit this source information because it looks ugly on people’s photo journals. So Apple bought mapping company Poly9 in July 2010. This was the second mapping company they acquired after buying Placebase just one year earlier. One of these two companies seems to have been secretly copying data from OpenStreetMap and passing it off as their own. The data in question seems to be from early 2010, so that might have been one final desperate attempt by Poly9 to look more attractive to Apple. Which worked.

The latest fake app in a long series of scam apps is “Counter Strike” which has a description and screenshots that lead you to believe you are indeed purchasing the well-known shooter. But its a scam. The actual app you get might be a game of some sort, but it is NOT the real counter strike. The loophole seems to be that you can change description and screenshots after getting approval for an app. Apple checks to see if you app matches your description and will reject the app if it doesn’t. This way you can sneak in any app and do a bait-and-switch right under everybody’s nose. This app is rated “9+ for infrequent/mild realistic violence”, probably to warn you that this developer is out to violently abuse your your wallet.

I fear that this will eventually lead to Apple disabling the ability to modify the description and screenshots after approval. Just because somebody peed in the pool everybody loses out. Unfortunately there is no way to directly inform Apple about such scam apps. Only if you already fell victim you can follow the guide in an knowledge base article How to report an issue with Your iTunes Store purchase. So definitely ask for your money back and inform them that the app does not match the description. If enough customers do that then Apple will pull the app.

Martin Pilkington

We chat about how Martin become a professional iOS and Mac developer and what led to him selling his Storyboard app to a friend.

]]>
https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/03/podcast-28-app-economy/feed/ 0 6085
Podcast #27 – “Copyright Bullish” https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/03/podcast-27-copyright-bullish/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/03/podcast-27-copyright-bullish/#respond Sun, 04 Mar 2012 14:21:28 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=6035 Instapaper will soon go iOS 5-only, we learn why the Clang project was started, and Tapbots being bully-ish about Copyright.

Show Notes

Adobe has finally released Photoshop Touch for iPad. Steve Troughton-Smith has taken apart the app and found that it is indeed a cross-compiled Adoble AIR application. It’s the same app that also runs on Android. I tested it a bit and must admit that it runs quite well. Does this spell the end of programming Objective-C as we know it? I hope not. I don’t want to have to learn Flash or AIR for that matter.

TextMate, our favorite text editor, did some statistics which OS 10 versions the TextMate 2 alpha is running on:

  • 10.8 2.0%
  • 10.7 86.7%
  • 10.6 11.1%
  • 10.5 0.2%

“With such a small percentage on 10.5 it makes sense to drop its support. Moving forward we may decide that requiring Lion will be a reasonable tradeoff as it provides many underlying benefits we could take advantage of. The usage statistics will be monitored to determine the feasibility of this move.”

This indeed means that OS 10 users seem to be very quick to adopt new versions of the operating system. Personally I am astonished to already see 2% on Mountain Lion, that’s a very big number for even the very first developer preview of anything.

Speaking of dropping support for earlier Operating Systems. Marco Armand of Instapaper fame has released a minor update to Instapaper. And in the release notes he states that this is the last version which will support iOS 4. His next major update will only work on iOS 5 and above.

In my experience all the good stuff that makes my live easier right now became widespread with iOS 4. That is, things like blocks and ARC. This is why ditching iOS 3 support relieved the most pain. Marco is blazing a trail here, which he can because his statistics seem to indicate that most of his users are quick to adopt the latest iOS version anyway. Obviously it is easier to only support the latest iOS, but I have yet to see a compelling reason or feature in iOS 5 that would cause me to to drop iOS 4 support. If you know any, then please let me know so that I can discuss it on the show.

History Lesson: Did you know why Clang (aka LLVM) is being developed independently from GCC and is replacing it in more and more places?

The GCC project began in the mid 80s by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation. Stallman’s radical idea was to develop software that would be shared rather than sold, with the intent of delivering code that anyone could use provided that anything they contribute to it would be passed along in a form others could also use.

That’s the same Richard Stallman that blogged that he is glad that Steve Jobs is gone because he felt that Macs are just pretty jails.

Some developers wanted to be able to have the compiler fronted in a dynamic library so that they can do syntax analysis from within tools. Like what we have in Xcode if you do Build&Analyze and also what ARC uses to determine what needs to be retained and what released. So somebody on the GCC mailing list asked this question:

“… is there a reason for not making the [GCC] front ends dynamic libraries which could be linked by any program that wants to parse source code?”

To this the Richard Stallman personally responded:

“One of our main goals for GCC is to prevent any parts of it from being used together with non-free software. Thus, we have deliberately avoided many things that might possibly have the effect of facilitating such usage…”

When I heard these quotes in a talk by Chandler Carruth, who is on Clang at Google, a light went on. So you see the historical answer is that GCC hat its time as one of the important drivers of Linux and free software, but was never meant to become part of something greater that could be used to develop commercial software with. This is why Apple (and many others) ditched GCC and now uses Clang. Because free software advocacy has become a jail of its own when it refuses to work with commercial software out of philosophical reasons.

So we can be thankful to Apple and Google and all the other companies and individuals who contribute to the LLVM open source project because this is what brought us most of the advances in compiler technology in the recent past. And also made our lives as programmers much much easier.

Have you ever gotten the question from a client on how Apple manages to disable the HOME button on those iPads they use in Apple Stores? Zachary Christopoulos found it out and documented it on his blog. It’s a preference of the springboard app called SBStoreDemoAppLock. Now, the only way how you can set preferences for Apple apps is via mobileconfig files. Those are essentially plists (which can also be signed for safety) that contain preferences. You need to reboot the iPad once and then the first app you enter has the Home button disabled. To remove the lock you can either use the iPhone Enterprise configuration utility or you can simply reboot the iPad and go into General – Profiles and remove the configuration profile there.

Reminder: To pinch off center on iOS simulator you use Shift to translate (alt to initiate multitouch)

Arrrrr, Pirates!!!

Somebody hacked the OpenGL-based image filters from Instagram and thought he would get away with putting the reversed source code for them on GitHub. Not cool. This is a real case of actual software piracy, hell, the owner of the repository actually admitted to the deed by naming the repository “InstaFilters” and the description “Instagram filters hacked and open sourced. Supports both photo and video”.

GitHub has a repository just for the DMCA takedown notices they have received. It’s very interesting reading, you find notices from the likes of Sony, Oracle and Cisco.

But this process can also be abused as experienced by Mugunth Kumar who found himself at the sharp end of a DMCA stick held by Tapbots. The story went like this: Kumar built MKInfoPanel which is basically a red panel with a warning icon and some text. In doing so he tried to make it closely resemble a similar panel found in TweetBot. He painted himself a couple of images and had these also in the repository.

A company named Leap found this project so useful that they included it and Kumar’s images in an app of theirs. Somebody sucking up to Paul tweeted him a screenshot comparing TweetBot and Leap and there indeed was a striking resemblance on the red notice panel.

Tapbots’ Paul send the following DMCA notice to GitHub:

Hi,
1. <https://github.com/MugunthKumar/MKInfoPanelDemo/tree/master/MKInfoBundle> includes several assets that are copyrighted by Tapbots LLC.

2. All assets under the <https://github.com/MugunthKumar/MKInfoPanelDemo/tree/master/MKInfoBundle> directory infringe on our work.

5. I have a good faith belief that use of the copyrighted materials described above on the infringing web pages is not authorized by the copyright owner, or its agent, or the law.

6. I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in this notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner, or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner, of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.

Paul did not contact Kumar, he just sent off this notice. I inspected both the images from TweetBot and the original images from Kumar’s repository only to find that they are really very much different if you zoom in a little. TweetBot’s notice icon is constructed way more professionally in black and white which blends nicely with the background. Kumar’s looks quite amateurish.

So the Tapbots’ claim was false. On twitter they then shifted to the excuse for their over boarding behavior that Kumar also infringed by merely copying the look. “If you draw Mickey Mouse by hand then you infringe on Disney’s rights”. That might be true for Mickey, but I refuse to believe that one can hold copyright on the looks of a notification panel.

Kumar didn’t make a TweetBot clone, he didn’t sell his solution for profit, he did it out of the challenge to get close to the original. Purely educational, if you will. A classic case of Fair Use. You can use copyrighted material without license to critique it. If anything looking closely at the pixels that Tabpots designs together makes you appreciate their art.

If anybody then Tapbots should have contacted Leap instead and ask them to modify the artwork because it looks too much like TweetBot. But even Paul knew that this was ridiculous. To this Paul said that they say they accidentally included the artwork. Yeah, right, there I go and accidentally copy the look of the best known Twitter client on the app store!

After quite a bit back and forth Tapbot’s Paul conceded that he has no objection to Kumar’s source code. So I asked him to put this back up and possibly create some new artwork that substantially looks different. So the repository is back up, now without images.

Many people thanked me for standing up for the small guy’s rights. But to this I can only say: hey, we are all colleagues. And I cannot stand some big shot bullying another developer because his copyright paranoia lets him have an overdrawn knee jerk reaction. Paul has not said that he is sorry and he probably never will. He actually still thinking that he is right.

I kind of understand Paul, that in this current climate there is much danger of people scamming unsuspected clients by making fake apps that resemble those of Tapbots.

What do we learn from this? Make your own distinctly looking artwork. Just because their apps look nice you cannot expect the makers to be also nice people. If you use a component from GitHub, then look for a license or preferably make your own distinctly looking artwork.

If you do, and you find somebody copying your code without proper license then you can send your own DMCA notices.

And most importantly, please, PLEASE, don’t suck up to Tapbots by sending them screenshots of apps that copy their look. They only care about your money. They don’t care about being your friend. Just think to yourself, “I know where they have the idea for this look from” and then move on.

While this matter might be amicably resolved there’s one problem that we still have no answer for. How close to somebody else’s work can you make your art to be?

]]>
https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/03/podcast-27-copyright-bullish/feed/ 0 6035
Podcast #26 – “iOS Dev Weekly” https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/02/podcast-26-ios-dev-weekly/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/02/podcast-26-ios-dev-weekly/#respond Sat, 25 Feb 2012 14:52:49 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=6003 Episode 26 for Saturday, February 25. “iOS Dev Weekly”

Daver Verwer lets us peek behind the scenes of the iOS Dev Weekly newsletter, Apple sold more iOS devices in 2011 than Macs every be fore. And we learn what an NSInception is.

Show Notes

If you are in Germany you might find that our iCloud push email does not work any more. The reason for this is that Motorola Mobility won an injunction against Apple there that forced them to disable push. A support page exists saying that Apple thinks the patent in question is invalid and is fighting it. In the meantime your options are to either leave Germany or enable pulling as detailed in the knowledge base article.

LLDB replaces GDB  as the default debugger as of Xcode 4.3. Mugunth Kumar was the first to mention:

“LLDB now supports typing dot notation. You can type
po self.myObject.name
instead of
po [[self myObject] name].

Finally!”

Carl Brown distilled the learnings from his Mac App Store review down to some great learnings.

  • You can’t require 3rd-party Apps to be installed
  • The first rule of Sandbox is you don’t talk about Sandbox
    = “3.3 Apps with descriptions not relevant to the application content and functionality will be rejected”
  • They are serious about keeping the user informed
    = rejected for not presenting a progress bar
  • got rejected because I didn’t specify a minimum window size – would allow the app window to get so small that the app becomes unusable

Regarding the App Store review process, FAKE scam apps are all the rage. Apple has the rule in the review guidelines that you have to have the appropriate rights for what you put in apps. Nevertheless there are always some passing inspection that don’t. Like a Pokemon Yellow game, Nintento would never let themselves be caught making iOS apps. The sad thing really was that these where just slideshows, but still, these developers don’t even have the rights for screenshots of Nintendo games, only Nintendo does. Other scam apps basically copy successful apps and just choose a slightly different name, like Temple Guns visavis Temple Run.

There’s a fabulous cartoon making fun of that: twitpic.com/8mpcab


If you want to stump an expert, find a a way to addObject an NSArray to itself. I actually did that to myself, I added an array to an array to an array and third array I tried to add to itself. You don’t get any error but very cool bad access exceptions. Fabio Cionini on Twitter suggested that we call this kind of exception an NSInception!

Amazing ARC article, including workarounds for most common migration problems.

Apple sold more iOS devices in 2011 than all the Macs it sold in 28 years, Asymco reports.

Installed MoLo on my secondary iMac. Xcode 4.3 does not run. Need to get newer version that does.

Apple announced that the weather in March is too cold to play in the sandbox. The requirement for Mac apps to implement sandboxing has been shifted to June 1st. Not just that, they also mentioned that existing apps won’t have to add sandboxing. They did that “to provide you with enough time to take advantage of new sandboxing entitlements available in OS X 10.7.3 and new APIs in Xcode 4.3.” Which is a bit odd because Xcode itself does not have any APIs as far as I know. What we do know is that there is a new possibility to hold on to the permission of accessing a file or folder once you have gotten it. Documentation for this can be found in the developer forum and in a published FAQ.

Don McAllister from Screencasts Online has a request for you, more specifically your iOS apps. He asks that you add an option in the settings to highlight touches on screen. So if you demo the app via AirPlay to have something show where you touch the screen. He highlights PDFPen by Smile Software as the first to do that and it is a boon for everybody doing live demos of your apps.

On the official Apple dev forum Steve Weller asked if NSXMLParser is thread safe. To which he got the response: “NSXMLParser is, in general, thread safe.  The only gotcha is that, prior to this fix, it didn’t initialise the underlying libxml2 parser properly.  If you’re using NSXMLParser from multiple threads, and there’s a chance that two threads might simultaneously start up parsers, you should work around this problem by initialising the libxml2 parser from the main thread, prior to using NSXMLParser at all.   The routine to call is xmlInitParser. This problem was addressed in Mac OS X 10.7 and iOS 5.” – So before iOS 5 you have to manually call xmlInitParser from libxml2, afterwards you don’t have to do that any more. I also found it quite enlightening to learn that NSXMLParser is indeed using libxml2 internally, just like my own HTML parser DTHTMLParser which is also based on libxml2.

Interview with Dave Verwer

Newsletter: iosdevweekly.com
Twitter: @daveverwer

Company: shinydevelopment.com

Apps:

]]>
https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/02/podcast-26-ios-dev-weekly/feed/ 0 6003