Reviews – Cocoanetics https://www.cocoanetics.com Our DNA is written in Swift Tue, 11 Mar 2014 14:51:44 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.3 39982308 Printing to Thermo-Labels https://www.cocoanetics.com/2014/03/printing-to-thermo-labels/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2014/03/printing-to-thermo-labels/#comments Tue, 11 Mar 2014 14:49:43 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=9020 A few days ago I largely finished chapter 5 of my book where I explain how to print a sheet of QR stickers as well as individual serial number barcodes to roll-feed printers. The latter is a new capability of iOS 7 and extremely useful if all you want to print is a single label. This is why I picked the use case of a serial number barcode for my book. The assumption for the sample app is that you want to print a single serial number as Code 93 which you would stick to the back of some corporate IT hardware item.

The iOS Printer Simulator is a nifty addition to Xcode which simulates several kinds of printers so that you don’t have to waste tons of printing material while developing your app’s printing functionality. This is how largely went about putting together the two sample apps for my barcode generation chapter. But while being awesome for general developing there are some thermo-specific quirks which it cannot simulate.

The rule that you should test on physical hardware does not only apply to iPhones, but I found it also to be applicable for creating a label printing solution. So I looked around at label printers which would work with AirPrint. Brother is offering the QL-710W and the QL-720NW. The only difference between them seems to be that the 720 model has a built-in ethernet port. I opted for the 710 model since I am content with having it part of my WiFi network.

Activating AirPrint

The firmware version which my QL-710W came with did not yet support AirPrint. You need version 1.28 or higher for this. To get it into your WiFi network you need to connect the printer to your Mac via USB cable and then run the Wireless Device Setup Wizard app from the CD. Fortunately I still have a CD slot on my iMac…

Brother Wireless Setup

If you want to get a nice P-Touch Editor app installed then run the Start Here OSX app, also from the CD. This detects the current label type you installed a roll for in the printer and lets you design the label contents.

The printer firmware can either be updated with the P-Touch Update Software app which gets installed together with the editor. Or you can get the Brother Label Firmware Update iOS app from the app store. Either will let you update the firmware, your choice.

I am not exactly certain at which time AirPrint started working. Immediately update the firmware transfer it did not work, then I had to shut everything off because of the weekend. When I returned to the office the following week, AirPrint worked. I could see the printer appear in the iOS printer selection dialog. Hands off, nobody touches anything!

Picking the Right Labels

There are two kinds of labels from Brother, die cut and “endless”. The latter are called DK TAPE (yellow), the former are called DK LABEL (red). The pre-cut labels come with a fixed size and usually round corners. The tape variant can be cut at any length as needed by your use case, note that the longer dimension is measured in meters here as opposed to millimeters everywhere else. For example (see picture) the DK-22205 is 62 mm wide and 30.48 meters long.

Of course this would be too easy if the USA would be using the metric system little other reasonable countries do. Therefore there are variants of all Brother label rolls that are specified in imperial units. But we won’t mess with these, otherwise we might risk crashing a mars lander…

Various Brother Labels

The printer comes with two sample rolls, one TAPE and one one LABEL roll. Installing rolls is a two step process. First you align the right side – looking into the printer – and drop the roll into the guiding part. Then you thread the tape through the slot at the front. It is recommended that you turn off the printer for this.

Step 1 Step 2

After closing the door and turning on the printer you have to be patient for a few seconds to reconnect to your WiFi network. Don’t worry if you don’t see the printer appear on the iOS printer selection right away.

Wasting Stickers so You Won’t Have To

When printing the first few physical stickers I found that they would not scan so well. The reason being that a line of 1 point width would come out slightly thicker than a space of 1 point width. I believe this effect to be a result of thermo printing. A laser beam is used to head individual dots on paper which turns black where heated. Since you cannot make this beam infinitely thin you will always have some bleeding making any areas (like lines or rectangles) appear slightly larger than specified during drawing.

I wasted a ton of labels to find out the reason for this….

Wasting Labels

The following image shows the original exact drawing at the top. The middle barcode has the bars reduced by 0.14 points. The bottom barcode has the bars thinned by 0.26 points each. Direct your attention to the leftmost 2 bars and spaces. They should all have equal widths, 1 point. Due to the heat bleeding from the larger black block following the left marker you can see that the space is squeezed quite a bit.

Barcode bar thinning

 

The bottom thinning value results in the best output. Look at the image in full resolution to see for yourself.

All those stickers use Code 93 which has a certain degree of tolerance for such bleeding effects. Because of this even the original output – without thinning factor – can be scanned. But you have to agree that the bottommost sticker is visually much crisper than the others. Thus is can also be scanned successfully from slightly further away.

Conclusion

Printing individual stickers with the Brother label printers is fun! Never again do I have to waste an entire A4 sheet of stickers just to get a single one. Installation was a bit counter-intuitive – especially the part requiring a CD drive – but I managed to get it set up and AirPrint-capable in the end.

Most use cases probably have no issues with slightly thicker lines than you draw them at. But for barcodes – where the ratio of black bars to space is key – you have to account for thermal bleeding to get crisp output.

My book teaches you how to produce the above Code 93 (and many other) barcodes with BarCodeKit. If you buy the book you also get a free license to BarCodeKit (value €150). Until March 18th you even get 50% discount with promo code “bwiaunch50”! So what are you waiting for?

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Nest Protect https://www.cocoanetics.com/2013/12/nest-protect/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2013/12/nest-protect/#comments Sat, 28 Dec 2013 12:57:34 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=8910 The regional government of Lower Austria is currently doing a promotion where you can get smoke detectors at a discount. They are doing that to nudge more people to become interested in securing their homes from break-ins and fires. You get a detector with a 10-year battery for 16 Euros. This reminded me that I have like half a dozen of such detectors still in original packaging in the basement, never got around to installing them. Two reasons: we have rarely any open fire and they are boring.

I figured – being a lover of modern and connected things – that I wanted to see if Nest had finally released their own device. Nest is the company that reimagined the thermostat and had announced a smoke and CO detector a while ago. At first glance it looks like you could only get the Nest Protect in Canada, USA and UK.

Shipping to EU Countries

Somebody on Twitter found out and informed me that apparently Austria is a possible selection to be shipped to from the UK store. Indeed the UK store ships to Austria, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Spain and United Kingdom. They specifically mention that all instructions and the voice of the device will be in English, but to me this is a feature, not a limitation. The price tag is at 109 GBP (about 130 Euros).

I picked the white model with the 5-year-battery because I didn’t know if I would have a power cable running to where I wanted to mount it. White blends in much better with our whitewashed walls and ceilings. Ordering went almost without any issue, only my credit card was having problems on the first two attempts, but this resolved itself on the third attempt. Some sort of communication problem.

Shipping notification arrived by email on Dec 19th, the device arrived by GLS on Dec 27th.

Nest Protect in Box

You can mount the Nest Protect either on the ceiling – sufficiently distanced from the wall – or on a wall within 60 centimetres from the ceiling. Mounting on walls or slanted ceilings you have to make sure that the nest logo is not upside down. This is not only for reasons of marketing integrity, but because the sensors require this to function properly.

Mounting

You mount the Nest Protect’s backplate with 4 provided screws to a suitable surface and after doing the initial setup via the iOS app you click the box onto the backplate with a slight twist. Of course – why pause and think – the first time I mounted the backplate I did it the wrong way around. The clips which you can see in the next photo need to face outwards.

Nest Protect Backplate

You can also see that there are many additional mounting options besides the outermost 4 spots. I guess that these allow you to reuse existing screw-holes of a previous smoke detector.

Setup via App

For setting up the device you download the Nest Mobile app. This guides you through creating a Nest login and then asks you to scan the QR code on the back of the Nest. This contains info about the device you are setting up. For the book I am writing I am working with many kinds of barcodes and seeing this as part of the setup process delighted me especially.

Nest Protect Setup QR

The app tells you the name of an adhoc WiFi network which the device is broadcasting on during the setup phase. You connect to that in your iOS settings and then you return to the app. This proceeds to connect the device to your home WiFi and lets you make some initial settings. For example you want to specify which kind of room the device is located in. When stating alarms the Protect’s voice will announciate this room name so that you know which of your – potentially multiple – rooms is filling with smoke.

Nest Protect Mounted

When this is done, you put the box onto the backplate. You can and should test it frequently by double-clicking the big button inside the colored glowing ring.

Features

Nest Protect detects smoke or a build up of Carbon Monoxide. The combination makes sense because CO is an odorless gas which displaces oxygen. It can be produced by incomplete oxidation, complete burring of a fuel would produce CO2. In Austria it might also make sense to install Nest Protects in wine cellars even the chance of an actual fire is so small it does not exist at all. But fermentation can also produce CO and this gas is known as the silent killer.

The device’s manual has an extensive list of places where you should not mount it. It shouldn’t be too drafty so that smoke has a chance to get to the sensor, but also it shouldn’t be too much of a dead corner. There are many more factors to consider, like you wouldn’t want to mount it in the stove area of your kitchen or in high humidity areas like next to a shower.

When installing it you quickly realize that several Nest Protect would be even more fun than a single one. You can add up to 10 to your Nest account and once you have them set up they can also communicate amongst themselves. If one gives a heads up on a smoke or CO buildup or is sounding an alarm then all other connected nests will do so as well. If you have a place where your normal home WiFi signal cannot reach then the solution is to add more devices in between because of this interconnection feature. This is able to route the information around the WiFi bottleneck. The manual specifically mentions that this peer-to-peer connectivity will only work with other Nest Protects.

Whenever there is a warning (aka “heads up”) you can approach the device and wave at it frantically to silence it. Some very dangerous alarms cannot be silence this way, most likely because you are in mortal danger then and shouldn’t worry about the noise, but rather how to quickly exit the building.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMGuJGSjtJ4

There is a feature which you probably want to disable on sleeping rooms, but enable everywhere else: the night light. Since the device can sense if somebody is inside the sensing cone of the IR sensor it can enable a light. This doesn’t turn on during normal daylight time and so I don’t know yet how useful this actually is.

The battery-powered version comes with 6 AA batteries preinstalled which are said to last for 5 years. The Nest Protect itself has an expiration 7 years in the future. The reason for this appears to be that the sensors will lose their sensitivity over time. Regardless which version you choose you will always have to replace it after 7 years because then the device will bother you until you do. It is the hope of Nest that the replacement will be another Nest Protect of course.

Conclusion

The Nest Protect is well designed and well integrated. Neat features are how multiple will work in concert and that they are hooked up to the Nest service on the Internet which lets you see the current status via their app or website. You also push notifications to your mobile device if there is an alarm.

The big downsides are the hefty cost and the limited lifetime. It costs more then 5 times as much as other smoke detectors. Having a limited lifetime might be a reasonable precaution to insure the functionality of gas sensors, but that much of a price difference makes it a definite luxury item. I’m thinking the sweet spot would be in the vicinity of $59 or $79 as opposed the current $129 they are charging a piece.

The Nest Protect ($129) is cheaper than the Nest Thermostat ($249), but you won’t have to replace the latter at all. In a way the Protect is a Trojan Horse!

As soon as you have installed your first Nest protect you will feel an urge to add more Nest Protects to your mobile dashboard. But how can you sell this to your wife who is already thinking that you already paid too much for the first one? And having to repeat this purchase every 7 years! I can only hope that as time passes Nest will reduce the price tag of their otherwise brilliant device so that husbands around the world have less of a problem to get their respective wives to approve the repeating expense for multiple Nest Protects.

Verdict: Only buy if you can buy 3-5 Nest Protects together without flinching at the recurring expense.

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MailChimp Launches iPad Editor https://www.cocoanetics.com/2013/09/mailchimp-launches-ipad-editor/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2013/09/mailchimp-launches-ipad-editor/#comments Fri, 13 Sep 2013 16:05:55 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=8654 More than 3 million people use MailChimp to design and send email marketing campaigns. And today they launched a native iPad client that lets you create and edit such campaigns. For the parts of that which require rich text editing they rely on our DTRichTextEditor component.

Amro Mousa, Senior Mobile Developer at MailChimp, shared his experience implementing DTRichTextEditor.

When we set out to build a native campaign editor for the iPad, a big unknown was implementing native rich text editing and going to/from HTML. We tried web-based solutions but they were sluggish and unresponsive. We were very excited when we found DTCoreText and DTRichTextEditor.

Amro took a very active role in improving the underlying DTCoreText open source component. Especially his implementation of CSS cascading was the main driving factor behind the several of the most recent releases of DTCoreText.

Amro continues:

A few feature requests and contributions later, we were able to use DTRichTextEditor as the core of our rich text editor. This saved an incredible amount of effort. DTRichTextEditor is fantastic.

The result is a beautiful user experience running on the iPad.

MailChimp Text Editor

MailChimp’s CEO Ben Chestnut blogged about the app launch. There he explains why they created a native client even though they recently made their online HTML-based solutions way more smartphone-friendly. Who needs a native app?

Teams don’t always build email campaigns together, huddled around a computer and collaborating. More often, teams have people who work on content, people who work on design, and someone in charge of pulling the whole thing together and sending it (an editor, if you will). And they’re almost never in the same room at the same time. So they email each other.

And we all know what it’s like to receive those seemingly endless back-and-forth emails during the revision process. Editor helps facilitate asynchronous collaboration among teams, so it’s easier for them to build and send campaigns. Plus it has a few other tricks up its sleeve.

So the reality of people working together while not being in the same room plus the need to have an offline-capable solution prompted them to invest in a native MailChimp Editor.

MailChimp Mobile Preview

With iOS 7 looming many developers are looking for solutions that will allow them to support both iOS 6 and iOS 7 during the transition period everybody is expecting. It is the ideal and most feature-rich solution to have future-proof rich text editing on iOS devices. And now MailChimp Editor for iPad is the poster child to show it off in action.

The app looks so inviting that I myself am also considering signing up for a free MailChimp account, just so that I can take it for a spin. The app is available for free on the app store.

DTCoreText is Open Source on GitHub. And DTRichTextEditor is available to license for your own projects on the Cocoanetics Parts Store.

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iOS Developer Challenge https://www.cocoanetics.com/2013/08/ios-developer-challenge/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2013/08/ios-developer-challenge/#comments Mon, 05 Aug 2013 11:49:58 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=8524 it is very rare that I review other developer’s apps; and usually only if they make use of one of my components. But for the iOS Developer Challenge I am making an exception. This app is quite unique as it is a fun mixture of being an iOS development game and education app.

iOS Developer Challenge is a universal app, available on the app store for two dollars. It is targeted squarely at  iOS developers and those who want to become pros some day. It has tons of questions, formulated in a way how you might be asked in a job interview.

iOS Dev Challenge Modes

There are three modes:

  • Challenge where you try to win the highest score of your developer friends on Game Center
  • Training where you learn the correct answer for all asked questions
  • Interview is the hard core mode where you have to impress a future virtual boss by answering more than 80% correctly

The app has a large number of questions in all the relevant areas related to iOS development. This is the result I got on my first challenge. 1 incorrect answer out of 21. So close to perfect victory. Damn, I need to go again!

First Run

Navigation throughout the app is straightforward and it has many neat graphics that give it a decent amount of liveliness. For such a low price I think it is an insta-buy for all iOS developers. If anything then this app can enlighten you as to which areas of the whole iOS development story you are lacking in.

What’s also fun is to see the test integrated with game center for the leaderboard as well as achievements. This, coupled with the ability to challenge your colleagues. At the time of this writing there were only 63 players in total on this app’s leaderboard.

There are clearly there are more developers with iOS devices out there than this, so the only reason why there are so few players is that until today you probably didn’t know about this game. You should get it today.

PS: Here are the two Quiz blog posts I created myself a while ago for this site: 1 2

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Individual Learning App uses DTRichTextEditor https://www.cocoanetics.com/2013/02/individual-learning-app-uses-dtrichtexteditor/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2013/02/individual-learning-app-uses-dtrichtexteditor/#respond Wed, 13 Feb 2013 15:39:45 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=7590 Stefan Zimmermann of CoSciCo kindly provided me with this testimonial about why and how they licensed DTRichTextEditor for their iLA app.

ILA (CS) is the first incarnation of the iLA platform and is designed with deep learning, easy knowledge sharing and project planning in mind. Well, sure you can also just take notes and “beam” them to a friend or colleague.

Excerpt, organize and share, thoughts, ideas, and knowledge topics in a natural way, – simple and fast, without the interruption of the flow of ideas by having to think how to organise it, first.

Stefan’s own words after the break.

In iLA everything is about flexible creation of RTF Texts, collecting excerpts from Web pages and other media, about pictures and any content that helps to understand a problem, line out a process, or to complete a task.

We evaluated a couple of options until we found Oliver’s DTRichTextEditor. At first we thought “boy, 500 €, that is a proud number”, but: “think about it”.

Ending up with the wrong thing, or doing it yourself is way more expensive. So we contacted Oliver who was already at first contact very helpful (yes support is a factor !).

We purchased a license. For us it turned out to be a very good investment. We knew DTRichTextEditor was not designed for what we had in mind to do with it. But it performed surprisingly well out-of-the-box already, even in the abusive way we put it to use, and after a couple of tweaks we see that we could not have made a better choice.

When we had questions, Oliver promptly helped with his expertise, when we had suggestions or found an issue, the fix was sometimes done in a matter of hours. We saw, we didn’t buy a piece of software only, but premium support comes with it.

Well, as no software is perfect, we are having some grief with ordered/unordered lists, but I am sure it is only a matter of time that this will be fixed.

iLA hit the App Store in January and if you want to see what DTRichTextEditor can do for you, check out the free iBook about the iLA App.

iLA Screenshot

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Ziner Uses DTCoreText https://www.cocoanetics.com/2013/01/ziner-uses-dtcoretext/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2013/01/ziner-uses-dtcoretext/#comments Fri, 11 Jan 2013 11:15:04 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=7448 You know I love to hear from developers who are making good use of my open source or commercial components in released apps. A shining example of lat is Ziner.

Ziner is the latest entry in the battle for the best Google Reader client, fighting it out with other heavyweights Reeder, Feedly, Flipboard, Mr. Reader, FeeddlerRSS and Newsify.

I asked Ziner’s developer Jay Zhao to share with us a bit of the back story of Ziner.

Making of Ziner

(in Jay’s own words)

As we know, there are already a lot of Google Reader clients on the App Store. So why do I bother creating another one? Because they all failed to meet some of my criteria:

Google Reader Clients

So before I set out to create Ziner two years ago, I commit myself to solving all the problems they have and combining all the good stuff to create a Google Reader client that I want to use everyday.

After 18 months of hard work, Ziner is now released and it truly excels in many aspects. For example, Ziner is really fast in syncing with Google Reader! You get all feeds synced within 4 seconds, the latest articles appearing within 7 seconds and all articles downloaded within 1 min. (Tested over Wi-Fi, 10000 unread items, 448 subscriptions). Yes, even faster than Reeder.

Ziner’s render speed is much faster than other RSS readers. See for yourself in this video demo:

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIpup-XHfNg

How about other Google Reader clients?

Take Feedly for example, when you tap a summary to read the full article, you always see “loading…” and only after a while can you see the full article. “Loading…” is really annoying and in Ziner you hardly see it except in the very first loading stage.

The great speed of Ziner is attributed to DTCoreText from Cocoanetics, a library that helps you convert HTML & CSS to Core Text, thus increasing render speed dramatically.

Ziner Screenshot

You can get more info about Ziner on its website and it is available on the app store.

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TWIT haunted by Cocoanetics https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/07/twit-haunted-by-cocoanetics/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/07/twit-haunted-by-cocoanetics/#comments Mon, 02 Jul 2012 04:51:04 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=6680 One day before the WWDC 2012 keynote a group of Austrians hired a car and drove north to Petaluma where the TWIT podcast studio is located. We have been long time fans of Leo Laporte and his prize-winning podcast pioneering. So we were delighted to be witnessing the taping of This Week in Tech #357.

One year before, when I attended my first WWDC I was less well organized and at this time Leo Laporte was still residing in what they called the “TWIT Cottage” a small house with next to no room for guests. But this year 2012 was different since just a few months earlier TWIT had raised enough money to move to their much larger current studio.

Because of this emailing ahead and reserving seats was but a formality.

Occording to Google Maps this trip takes around an hour, but realistically you have to add another half hour that it takes you to get over the Golden Gate bridge and out of the city. That’s not too bad, it is about the same time that it took the three buses from San Francisco to Cupertino for all the developers who wanted to pay their respects to the Apple Apparel collection.

The car we had gotten thanks to great organizing by Brendan Duddridge from Tap Forms (the famous iOS database app) was fully loaded with 4 gentlemen and one lady. Being the most compact of the lot I sat on the middle seat in the back row. Nobody complained about lack of space as we all were ecstatic to be visiting Petaluma for the first time.

Leo Laporte is running his studio like a big family. He’s the don, the star and a small army of helpers makes sure that technology, audience and organizing all goes smoothly. I had written specifically that we are iOS developers who are in town for the big event to follow the next day. I was hoping to get some time on the show, because in stark contrast to two of my traveling companions I am not camera shy.

But apparently Leo has not yet adapted his style to dynamically include audience members in his shows, at least not those who are not celebrities themselves. I guess he’s just got a certain way to do his show like he always did it, his two guests dialed in via Skype and appearing on large monitors to either of his sides. This would be the first feature request that I have for TWIT: include the live audience now that you have room for one!

The second room for improvement I saw with the chairs for the audience. It’s great to have the room to accommodate visitors, but your backs hurt after the show. Leo being Leo noted to me, when I tweeted him that, that with more comfortable chairs the audience would never leave! Really?

After the show Leo kindly offered himself to be taken pictures with all the while with the live video stream still going on. Some funny suitable comments could be seen passing by on one monitor that was showing chat room messages in extra large letters. Leo let everybody have ample time to chat a bit and so I took the bull by the horns and used the airtime to promote Cocoanetics a bit.

In the video below you might notice that in the middle of my chat with Leo the audio turns bad. This is because we were filming with my iPhone 4S and my GoPro camera at the same time, but the helping hand holding the iPhone 4S switched the recording off too soon. Everybody was assuming that I was about to raise from Leo’s throne which he graciously had offered but then I had the inspiration to mention my podcast.

This turned into me pitching to Leo the idea of doing a developer podcast dedicated to iOS. With cameras still rolling you can see his brain going into overdrive and this resulted in a full second act for my 10 minutes of fame. I’m still hoping that this was able to plant a seed in Leo’s fabulous podcasting brains and maybe one day there will be a TWIT iOS podcast.

The third act – which I moved before the first two in the Video for effect – was about me showing Leo the Find my Friends experiment I had been running all throughout WWDC. 114 “Freunds” symbolized by purple pins who were all converging on the Moscone Center. And while I was showing off the current state on my iPad we could see the third pilgrimage in one cluster moving north heading back to San Francisco. Leo was genuinely excited by the demonstration.

9 days after our visit I got another few minutes of airtime, or rather my iOS 6 public transit article did. This happened in MacBreak Weekly #304. I thought it only fitting to append this after my chat with Leo, sort of as an echo. Leo even mentioned that I had visited “a couple of weeks ago”. I won’t be holding this inaccuracy against him but rather I am thankful for getting another sliver of fame out of that.

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

The material you see was recorded with two iPhone 4S and one GoPro HD (original, not the 2). My buddy Christian had begun to cut it on his Adobe Premiere but the program somehow messed up the project and made it unusable. So I could only use the first section of the video from the start until the beginning of the show. But thanks to the fabulous multi-cam support in Final Cut Pro X I was able to piece together a nice memento of the experience.

I still have to involuntarily giggle: Adobe messes up, Apple saves the day … or in this case, my video.

We’ll be returning to TWIT as soon as we can, at the latest when we’re coming back to San Fran for  WWDC 2013. Leo, don’t forget the iOS podcast! We got you on tape liking the idea!

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DTCoreText Case Study: NMSTC https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/06/dtcoretext-case-study-nmstc/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/06/dtcoretext-case-study-nmstc/#respond Mon, 25 Jun 2012 11:28:55 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=6619 Despite some advances in rich text support coming in iOS 6 my DTCoreText open source project continues to prove its usefulness. First and foremost it provides the ability to convert simple HTML text into attributed strings to give you the ability to retain full control over the display of the text.

I love to receive mail telling me about where in real life DTCoreText finds good use. Especially so if it is used for good, like by the Nottingham Multiple Sclerosis Therapy Centre info app. A case study.

Andy Warwick, Director of Creed New Media developed this app. It’s a ‘support’ app for a local charity that he’s involved with, the Nottingham Multiple Sclerosis Therapy Centre (NMSTC). This member-led charity specializes in Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy (HBO), Physiotherapy, Reflexology, Hopi Ear Candles, Massage, Aromatherapy and advice on various topics.

The NMSTC app uses DTCoreText extensively to display background and informational text in multiple sections. You can probably tell where it’s used: if not, it’s in the ‘Booking a HBO Session’ view, and the ‘About’ view.

 

Andy had tried using local web pages, but he found this solution to be far more polished and elegant.

It was useful for embedding images in the flow of text, styling text, and adding external links; all the stuff that you can do using local HTML pages. The key bonus for Andy, though, was the ability to display the content without having the jarring pre-load flash you get when using a UIWebView, even for local files.

“Thanks for all the obvious hard work you’ve put into your code; it makes things so much easier. Great job!” — Andy Warwick

There are hacky ways around that, of course, but DTCoreText — once Andy understood it’s usage — gave a much better ‘finish’ to the app, while still retaining the ability to quickly and easily edit the content when client made text changes.

You can download the free app on the app store to see DTCoreText in action. We say “Good Job, Andy!”

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Getting Around San Francisco https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/06/getting-around-san-francisco/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/06/getting-around-san-francisco/#comments Fri, 08 Jun 2012 17:39:09 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=6471 There are multiple ways of maneuvering around San Francisco, whether you are attending WWDC or just in town to take in the air. Here’s a summary of some things that were not immediately obvious to me.

Updated: added info on Clipper.

In stark contrast to most other US cities San Francisco actually does have a reasonably working and convenient network of public transportation.

The ‘hoods

The locals are referring to areas of San Francisco by the neighborhood names. The most important region for us iOS developers is the area south of Market Street, incidentally called “South of Market Street” or SOMA. The Moscone Center is in there, relatively close to the main traffic vein Market Street. All of the hotels I’ve ever lodged in are north of Market, in Civic Center or the Financial District. These are the areas where you can get buy without entirely on foot and without ever using any kind of transportation aside of having ridden the BART from/to the airport.

Incidently it is also these neighborhoods which are used as names for the 3 conference rooms at the Moscone Center: Presidio being the largest, Pacific Heights and Nob Hill being distinctly smaller. (Sorry, I have to giggle every time when I mention NOOB Hill. LOL.)

In the least you should memorize an understanding where SOMA is, because this is what is turning into the New Silicon Valley with lots of tech companies settling around Bryant Street. (The original one being an hour or so south of San Francisco around San José)

Here is a wonderful guide to what kinds of people to expect to meet in the various neighborhoods.

Public Transport

Google Maps has all the public transport timetables. So the easiest way to get from A to B is to hop in your maps.app or online on Google Maps locate your current position and plan a public transport route to where you need to go. It even shows you the amount that the fare will be.

For the fare you should keep a stack of single dollar bills handy. A ride on the bus typically is $2 which you shove into a box next to the driver who will hand you a paper ticket in return. You need to enter the exact amount, no change given. So if you won’t want to be in the position of embarrassingly asking around if somebody could break a $5 bill, then you better be ready.

The trams and busses are supplemented with something they call subway, even though it is not subterranean as far I could tell. One thing that might be difficult is to find if a line you are supposed to change to is in fact downstairs.

There is an alternative to cash … tip courtesy of Nathan de Vries. You can buy a Clipper Card at Walgreens. This appears to be a card to put a balance on and then fares are subtracted from this whenever you “tag your card” i.e. swipe it over a reader in the vehicle of your choice.

This card also seems to be a replacement for the crappy card you get from the dispenser for BART and you can re-use it the next time you are in San Francisco. So I’ll probably get one, this tip is the first time I heard about it.

Generally whenever you pay or tap the Clipper card this is good for 2 hours. Therefore you don’t need to pay on every vehicle you get. You still tap your Clipper card every time so that a beep will tell the driver that you paid up. But you will not get charged for that.

Let’s not go there … Taxi

SF Cab drivers are known to complain about you paying by credit card, are grumpy all the time and often you cannot even be sure that they’ll come and pick you up. Or so I’ve heard.

At first I was sticking to the feet, then I climbed level 2 and used some busses and a tram to get to Fisherman’s Wharf. Level 3 is to get your own personal limousine.

Uber

The name of this company and it’s service derives from the German word Über, but since Americans cannot pronounciate the Ü they went with U and think they are funny using this creation. Having said that, “Uber-” is used to describe something that is totally over the top (much better) than the same thing without this prefix.

This service is one of many examples where a local tech company has taken on something that is not really working to the user’s advantage (Taxis in SF) and made it into a web- and app-based service that aims to disrupt the incumbent industry. It was highly recommended by my friends at Stackmob and when somebody I follow on Twitter was also mentioning it I figured I have to try it out.

So you sign up on their website, register a credit card and download the iPhone app. The cool thing is that if you use my promo link then you get $10 off the first ride and I get $10 credit as well. You should get this setup down in advance on the Hotel WiFi so that you are ready to go when you need a pickup.

You specify the pickup location and a delightfully cute icon of a man with suitcase and raised hand marks the spot. For a couple of seconds you have to wait for a driver to accept your hail and once you did, you will see the car driving towards you on the map.

I couldn’t believe it at first when I saw the car that was coming to pick me up, driven by Joseph who was wearing a suit.

An actual limousine?! And a bit of LOL’ing at the license plate.

My driver, Joseph his actual name, explained to me that he’s been driving limousines for many years now, but since Uber started he almost exclusively drives rides he’s getting from their service. And there are many other advantages: with the registered credit card you don’t have to worry about money at all, no chance for a robber.

Joseph’s limo has leather seats, water bottles if you are thirsty and also loves Uber. He’s also the one who told me about Taxis in San Francisco, see above.

Uber is said to be about 50% more expensive than taking a Taxi and the digital payment already includes the tip. You can fit up to 4 people into such a car, but I wouldn’t recommend it, it would totally spoil the feeling of luxury.

My ride came to $16 in total, $10 of which I was discounted because I had registered by promo code. They also keep a track of the route and email you a receipt. This in itself makes my geek hart jump with joy.

The trip I took was from my Hotel to the Stackmob Offices and it was a blast. I’ll definitely use this service again. It costs 8 times as much as taking the bus but the experience is worth it.

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iPhone User Interface Cookbook https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/01/iphone-user-interface-cookbook/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2012/01/iphone-user-interface-cookbook/#respond Thu, 26 Jan 2012 07:37:55 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=5851 A month ago I was contacted by PacktPub with a “Review Request” and was provided with a ePub copy of the book for this exact purpose. PacktPub – which I had never heard of before – apparently is trying to get traction on the iOS developer market with a dozen books on the subject matter. But this pales in comparison to the hundreds of books they published for non-iOS ecosystems (Microsoft, Web, Java, etc.)

Is it just me or does it seem like more and more iOS developer are hoping to supplement their living from getting book royalties?

At the end of my procrastination I sat down and forced myself to read the first half of the book, taking notes to give this book a fair and balanced review. A word of caution: this will be a tragic comedy of epic proportions.

In Austria we have a saying: “Nothing is useless, it can always serve as a bad example”. It is my hope that this bad example serves to improve the overall quality of literature on our favorite subject matter.

The title of the work suggests that this book is not meant to be read in a linear fashion. You’d expect from a “Cookbook” to find “Recipes” for individual things that you would look up should you need to cook them. In the chapter about the book’s copyright you can read:

Every effort has been made in the preparation of this book to ensure the accuracy of the information presented. However, the information contained in this book is sold without warranty, either express or implied.

So far so good, but who is this book meant for? In the words of the author:

The iPhone Interface Cookbook is written from the ground up for people who are new to iOS or application interface design in general. Each chapter discusses the reasoning and design strategy behind critical interface components, as well as how to best integrate each into any iPhone or iPad application. Detailed and straight-forward recipes help give guidance and build understanding far beyond what is offered through Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines.

From these two parts of information – and possibly the short author’s bio – you come to expect a highly polished work that may sit on the shelf of a fledgling iOS developer getting his feet wet on his first couple of apps. A reference manual for design, if you will.

This puts me at odds with the premise. Neither am I fledgling, nor am I designer. I love to code and generally I like to delegate designing UI and UX to the companies that hire me. After having realized this I gave the book a second chance in my head: if it is worth the expense maybe I could recommend it to those designers sitting in my client’s companies for reference?

As an iOS contractor you often have to deal with companies that have established themselves on non-iOS platforms and now – due to public and marketing pressures – they also want an iOS app. Generally their in-house designers will know how to design a Windows app or website. Often I have wished for being able to recommend to them a guide as to what they have to do differently when designing for our platform.

This book isn’t that either.

Maybe I was “holding it wrong” because I read the book from the front cover to slightly more than half when I had to abort the mission. I’m detail oriented by nature and so I found boatloads of errors, formatting problems and blatant omissions with which I filled a note on Evernote with.

For example this is how e-mail addresses are formatted throughout. What do you think if you see this?

At first I attributed the problems I was seeing to the ePub format. Apparently the publisher did not invest in this being properly edited. Neither from a formatting point of view nor in terms of technical correctness.

Each chapter in the book slavishly follows this structure: Getting ready, How to do it…, How it works…, There’s more…, See also. The general style hides some interesting information in a tone ripe with fluff and half-truths.

And what’s even more annoying is that these mini-sections all take up space in the index which is destroying that as well. In this example you can see the worthless index. Why in god’s name would I want to directly jump to a There’s more in a section? You have no way of quickly getting an overview of what “Recipe” would be the right one for a real-life design case. Except wade through these superfluous entries of sub-sections.

I admitted that I am probably a) not the right person and b) not reading it correctly. But the problems with this book go far beyond the formatting.

Somehow I am getting the feeling that the individual chapters in this book might have been articles on a blog, that somebody just copy/pasted together and replaced all instances of “article” with “recipe” and “blog” with “book”. Is that truly the way how modern developers expect their information to be diced?

For one thing you’d expect from an experienced iOS developer to know how to spell the name of our IDE correctly. Instead Cameron (or is it a lawman editor?) insists on spelling it XCode. This book couldn’t have been edited on a Mac because even my WordPress autocorrected that to Xcode. Purists might call this a blatant disregard for what is holy.

There are many more examples of misspelled classes, apps or terms we iOS developers deal with every day. To give a second example: WebKit is one word, not two.

Ok, there are formatting problems (ePub’s fault), there are technical editing problems. To top it off there are factual problems as well.

The author details how to generated certificates on the provisioning portal, but omits the simple information that you can just connect your device via USB, click on the “User for Development” button in Xcode Organizer and have Xcode auto-provision the device in your “iOS Team Provisioning Profile”.

Then there is much commingling. Alert Views are thrown in together with modal view controllers. Later they are mashed up with push notifications and local notifications. And the rationalization for why everything is modal:  “iOS is a highly modal operating system, forcing one application at a time upon the user.”

There are 4 step guides where the second and third step are identical, just worded differently. There are in-depth explanations about topic that a designer has no interest in, and the interesting topics are covered incompletely. In truth I found two or three nuggets of information buried deep in what I read. For example I found the explanation on Fitt’s Law quite interesting, didn’t know that.

Sooner or later you realize that the statement from the Copyright section is a lie. “Every effort” was definitely not made and the information isn’t presented at an acceptable level of “accuracy”.

The second promise that the publisher did not keep is who the book is for. Where are the explanations “far beyond” of what you can find in Apple’s HIG? Where are the chapters that I can recommend to the UI/UX designer working at my client’s?

I had to stop reading half way through, when I had accumulated 3 screenfuls of “bugs”. I am not getting paid to correct this book, so that amount exceeded the level of bullish!t I was willing to put up with. My job is to evaluate whether this work of art is worthy of your attention.

By now you should fathom my opinion.

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BarCamp Graz 2011 https://www.cocoanetics.com/2011/05/barcamp-graz-2011/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2011/05/barcamp-graz-2011/#comments Sat, 07 May 2011 21:15:58 +0000 http://www.cocoanetics.com/?p=4977 Conferences are an interesting diversion from the daily work as an iOS developer. BarCamps are the same, but they are not classical conferences in the sense that an organizer takes care of everything and you can simply consume. Rather at a bar camp you bring your own content. That’s why they are also referred to as un-conferences.

I visited my first such event in Graz, let me give you some of my impressions. Welcome to the BarCamp Graz 2011.

When you enter the venue you get a name tag and have 3 slots where you put your tags. Those are basically the three copies that you feel interest you the most. I put CoreText, Components and Partnerships. Then – after breakfast – people can put topics they feel like giving a talk on onto post-its which are input into the “Paper Wiki”. That is a big piece of paper which a grid of rooms and the times. Organizers try to consolidate talks with general interest, some of the talks got moved to “next day” (or never), in some cases

At present – due to my daily involvement in this topic – I felt most passionately about CoreText. I have very little practice in giving talks in general, I’m simply too young in this industry to be a renowned speaker. But what’s great about bar camps is that you don’t have to if you have something to present. Even though I didn’t do any specific presentation preparation, the feedback I got suggested that people liked my presentation.

A bit unfortunate was the fact that all the other visitors to the iCamp generally seem to be too shy to present. Why is that? I keep meeting brilliant iOS engineers who are true artisans when they navigate around Xcode, but for some strange reason they also seem to think that they have nothing to share. I have a bit of an advantage though that I have some extrovert tendencies that found a fertile ground at this event.

There was one other iOS-related talk that I thoroughly enjoyed, talking about how to customize a UITabbarController. Boy, you can apparently make this do just about anything if you torture it enough… 🙂 There actually where a few prepared Keynote slides. Regardless, I found that truly fascinating.

But my best reason to attend was not the conference itself, but the number of people I would meet there for the first time. It turns out that most of the engineers of BytePoets, a partner of mine, were present. We have entered into a partnership agreement, signed and sealed, a week before we actually met here in Graz for the first time face to face. The product that we are collaborating on might be revealed tomorrow, or not, we’ll see.

I did not have any Keynote presentation, although I still wish I had a reason to create one. Instead I simply used 3 tabs on a Safari window to show:

To avoid an appearance of wanting to hide between the desk I stood up when I was not giving a tour of code or websites. I feel that this made it also more personable and in touch with the audience.

Granted with a bit of preparation I could have cut down on the fluff and finished the talk in the time allotted, but it did not seem to bore people that I took an hour instead of 45 minutes. On the contrary! I had several interesting questions before and after it, which tells me that it indeed was a valuable introduction for most of the attendees.

One technique that worked really well to get people engaged is to ask question hand have them be answered by show of hands. Who’s a developer? Almost all. Who’s used CoreText before? Almost none. Perfect, captive audience, captivated by my talk. I couldn’t have had an easier to please crowd. Might have been luck. Or might have been the charm of bar camps that due to the number of multiple streams and topics you invariably tend to end up with the perfect audience because they WANT to listen to you.

In a way this 2-day event could also be seen as a sort of trial of the concept of traveling light. Earlier I had gotten myself an 11″ MacBook Air. This was supplemented by a 3G iPad 2 and – of course – my iPhone 4. In fact, since my Air also had Xcode 4 installed and working, I was only too happy to supply it for somebody else’s presentation. Keynote took longer than expected to install from the Mac app store, so the slides had to come from another 11″ sitting next to it. So you can see, the 11″ Air apparently is the modern presenters device of choice.

Ah and yes, so far I am very very happy with the mentioned combo. Of all the volume in the had I carried with me, most was made up of a two compressible rainskins and a pair of BarCamp swag T-Shirts. Now that my partner won’t attend the second day, there’s even less volume to carry. I can highly recommend this way of moving around. Yes, you can probably prepare a bit more professionally, have Keynote installed and ready to roll with some slides, but technically all you need are those 3 lightweight Apple devices.

Ah and I forgot to mention the best part: barcamps are  free and try to have as many streams as there are rooms and talks. On the one hand this means that nobody HAS to be there and you usually get more interested listeners than if people have to choose between the less boring talk in two streams done by paid professionals (which does not in itself mean that those couldn’t be boring as well). The other is that that since nobody gets paid for talking one saying holds true more than ever: it is what you make of it.

A truly intriguing experiment in doing a conference that isn’t one.

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Saturday Morning, Breakfast, Wired eMag https://www.cocoanetics.com/2010/05/saturday-morning-breakfast-wired-emag/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2010/05/saturday-morning-breakfast-wired-emag/#comments Sat, 29 May 2010 18:18:23 +0000 http://www.drobnik.com/touch/?p=2599 I’ve always loved to read glossy tech magazines. In fact I feared that I would like them too much to be unable to throw them away. When I was young I had an extensive collection of P.M. (a German popular science mag) that came right to fill the hole that selling my Mickey Mouse collection had left. So I wend cold turkey, no subscription only buying on vacations, as to avoid assembling high towering stacks of paper.

With the iPad I fulfilled my first dream of having a PADD like Jean Luc Piccard, so it was no question that I had to purchase the first digital WIRED app/magazine that came out last week. Many people rambled about the price tag, $4, but I think that’s fair, because you get way more value than you would in paper. Let me share my impressions and let’s peek under the hood of the first eMag that deserves to be called that.

Sipping a fresh espresso with a bit of cream, browsing through the Wired eMagazine. Let’s have a look at how it is to read it and look behind the scenes to see what we can learn from it as iPhone/iPad developers. Maybe there’s an eMagazine of our own in our future?

UPDATE: Here’s Adobe’s Promo for the Magazine. Adobe has announced that soon there will be software on Adobe Labs to do do what they did for WIRED for any InDesign publication.

The first hurdle to getting WIRED is obviously having to acquire an iPad, which is still not possible through official channels throughout most of the world. Next comes the $5 price tag, but we have made worse investments than that. Finally you have to wait until the 552.2 MB Behemoth downloads to your hard disk. This uncompresses to 570.5 MB which tells us one thing: most of it is video or PNG files for which zipping does not gain any additional compression.

How does it read?

Once you have it on your iPad the app loads very fast. It shows a mosaic and then you come to the front page. You feel like you’re looking at the “real” paper issue, but only visually. The first button you notice plays a short movie clip from Toy Story 3 in full screen. Then you notice that all the headlines are actually hyperlinks that lead you to the corresponding articles. This solves the problem you might have notices at the newsstand that one headline intrigued you but you would have to go search for it in the magazine because there was no usable index.

Of course WIRED also has an index that pops over the current page so you don’t get disoriented when you call it up.

The meachanics of reading WIRED as quick to get used to. If you tap the page black navigation bars appear at the top and the bottom. The bottom has a scrubber showing previews of the pages as you slide left and right. The top has buttons to return to the cover, a pop-over index, and the overview button. The last one being sort of a panoramic view.

The overview panorama also shows you which pages are longer than one screen.

Interactivity Ideas Inspected

In terms of interactivity I’ve seen the following ideas in play…

Thumbnail/Button plus partial page replacement. Most of the time you would have an article that explains the steps to something, take for example Sex in this issue. The four steps that make up the story are 4 round number buttons. If you push them the text below changes to describe the step.

Audio/Video. Advertisements or articles might have a play button to play related music or video. There are 10 audio files (25.4 MB),  15 video files (144.9 MB),

Swipe to Build. A 3D animation or something that builds up can be controlled frame-by-frame with scrubbing.

Tap to Animate. A tap might also start an animation that’s integrated into the page.

Rotate to Resolve. While most of the articles have identical text in both layouts, some advertisements ask a question and you have to rotate the screen 90 degrees to see the answer.

Links. For the most part you see links leaving the app in advertisements. These lead to a website or to the app store.

Compliments to WIRED! I don’t think the added interactivity distracts from the reading experience, but it adds additional value to the magazine. Judging from the file size I would have imagined that most of that would be videos, but I was wrong. They account for only 30% of the entire bundle. The rest is what you pay for: gorgeous PNG files… pardon, I mean: pages.

One thing that disturbed me a bit was to find a whole page dedicated to the “Application Terms of Use”. And there specifically that WIRED reserves the right to “monitor the activity of the app”. Hm, as long as this does not diminish my reading enjoyment …

Advertisements, lot’s of them

This WIRED issue has 121 pages in total, not counting extra if you can scroll into subsequent pages of an article. 64 of these are really articles you paid for. The other 57 pages are full screen advertisements, 47%.

For the most part you get image ads like you would see in a real magazine. Those are full pages, again always in portrait and landscape. You have to look hard to find any links that lead you to leave the WIRED app, sometimes it would be a button to lead to an iPad app on the app store, sometimes a link to make a booking for something. But you get the feeling that traditional advertisers of WIRED jumped at the chance to be in the electronic version, just so that they can say they where.

I come to this conclusion because contrary to traditional in-app-ads or banners they don’t have the primary aim of getting the user to do something. Still being able to fill up half or your virtual page real estate with ads speaks to the popularity of WIRED. Advertising agencies are artists themselves and they seem happy to have found a canvas to paint on that’s worthy of their creativity.

Sell something? Nah! Be there or be square! Image is everything, at least in this first issue.

Under the Hood

The app itself consists of one view controller, coming from a nib, a couple of PNGs for all the buttons and a big folder called “Issue” which contains the magazine’s contents. This contents folder has a sub-folder per page and one 1.5 MB XML file that contains the entire navigation information about the magazine.

If you wonder how Wired manages to get the layout perfect and the text super-crisp, that’s easy technically. Each page is just a big PNG. In fact not just one, but in several versions. Each page has the following versions: Full-resolution landscape and portrait, preview for index landscape and portrait and thumbnail for the overview also in portrait and landscape. One page equals 6 files.

So you see how much professional work is going into each page, besides of writing the article and doing the page design, they have double the work at their hands because they have to do a landscape and a portrait version of each page. So images let WIRED control every pixel on screen not having to worry about HTML rendering or text flow.

As an engineer I’m also quite impressed by the simple yet effective way they chose to encode the magazines structure into one big XML file. I would have expected HTML or maybe PDF, but having an XML file dictate the hot spots and navigation structure is ingenious.

Wired was probably one of the magazines that had to change their approach to ePublishing on the iPad when Apple announced the ban on compiling apps out of Flash. So it was an interesting hint, or actually misdirection by Chris Anderson, Wire’s editor in chief:

“To deliver this rich reading environment, we’re using new digital publishing technology developed by Adobe. The yearlong effort, spearheaded by WIRED creative director Scott Dadich, will allow us to simultaneously create both the print magazine and the enhanced digital version with the same set of authoring and design tools.”

One might think that this statement hints at some sort of Flash involvement, but doesn’t. Most likely the mysterious “technology developed by Adobe” he refers to is just the regular CS5 tools like Adobe illustrator. Nothing special, everybody can buy that. No Flash or Flash-to-iPad-Compiler anywhere in sight.

In fact, everybody can publish an electronic version of his magazine the same way as WIRED does if he is able to create PNGs of his pages, in all 6 variants per page. Ah and you need an app to understand the XML navigation structure and present the result in a consistent and interactive form. But I suspect the coding for this framework would not be a really large project, possibly about 1 man-month. Most of the work is in the design and filling up on eye candy for the contents.

Conclusion

WIRED has a winner. I can understand the need for about half of the pages being ads. Like all other magazines WIRED has a business to sustain. And thankfully a tad more than half of the pages is real content.

I didn’t read WIRED for quite some time but I get the feeling that it’s aimed at Internet-century geeks with a very short attention span. Most of the articles are started and finished on the same screen, I would have wished for more longer articles that tell a story. Those 4 steps to Sex articles or the 4 step Zombie Survival Workout are cute and geeky, but leave a bit to be desired if you are an avid reader.

But in concluding I judge the first WIRED on iPad to be just as glossy as any paper issue and way more entertaining because of the total lack of bad conscience due to killed trees or compulsive collecting habits. If you love the quirky style of WIRED, get it while it’s fresh.

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Smart Developers track their Best Apps with MyAppSales https://www.cocoanetics.com/2009/11/smart-developers-track-their-best-apps-with-myappsales/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2009/11/smart-developers-track-their-best-apps-with-myappsales/#comments Thu, 12 Nov 2009 23:14:01 +0000 http://www.drobnik.com/touch/?p=1496 Sure, you should be doing your coding mostly because you enjoy it and only secondarily for the money. But it’s no sin to get a kick out of checking yesterday’s sales report and seeing how well your babies are performing. My aim for MyAppSales is to be the preferred mobile tool for this purpose.

I lost track some months ago, but I estimate my user base to be around 250 people worldwide. Because I am distributing MyAppSales as source code only this automatically requires users to have at least some fleeting knowledge of how to download source code from a Subversion repository. This is called “positive preselection”. That’s one of the reasons why I can hypothesize that MyAppSales users are smarter than the average Cocoa Touch developer.

I am proud of my baby and I was interested to learn which of the multitude of apps which are being tracked with MyAppSales are considered by their makers to be their crowning achievement . So I’ve asked my customers via Twitter which of their apps they deem to be their masterpiece (so far) and today I’m proudly presenting the best apps of the smartest developers to prove the hypothesis from this article’s title. I call this …

MyAppSalesMyAppSales Users’ App Showcase

Entires are sorted in order of submission. All wordings and descriptions are verbatim. The statements are not meant to be reviews but to illustrate which skills, talent and knowledge need to come together to make what a developer has the right to call “his best app”.

So what are those super powers? You’re about to find out …


Koh Jing YugCheese Collect

by Koh Jing Yu

Executive Summary

The cat is trying to attack you again! In this fun puzzle game, you are a mouse who tries to steal cheese without setting off the traps set by the cat. However, everytime you move, the cat would move the cheese away from you, unless there’s no space for it. Cheese Collect is a fun puzzle game with episodic updates.

Why is this your best app?

It was featured by Apple a while back and it earned the most out of all my apps.

Why do you like MyAppSales?

I love MyAppSales as it is very convenient and has a clean interface. I especially love the graphs as it allows me to track my progress. It’s definitely a must have tool for developers.

Cheese Collect

App Store > Games > Cheese Collect


Jason GullicksonShufflito

by Jason J. Gullickson

Executive Summary

My app “Shufflito” is very simple, upon launch, it immediately starts playing random songs from your music library.  The difference is that it remembers which songs have been played, and never plays the same song twice.  It’s great for discovering music you haven’t heard in a long time, or for road trips where you don’t want to re-shuffle the playlist every time you stop for fuel and end up hearing the same music again and again.

Why is this your best app?

In my opinion, iPhone apps should do one thing well and as simple as possible.  Of all the apps I’ve released so far, Shufflito embodies this goal the most. The focus, attention to detail, use of iPhone functionality and the tightness of the code is greater than any other app I’ve created so far.

Why do you like MyAppSales?

More than anything else, MyAppSales, and it’s developer Oliver Drobnik adapt; as the App Store and it’s customers change, updates to MyAppSales alter, extend and enhace the application to provide developers with the data that matters as well as leveraging the latest technology the iPhone platform has to offer.

Shufflito

App Store > Music > Shufflito


Gregory RaizClock Radio

by Gregory Raiz (Raizlabs Corporation)

Executive Summary

The application is a combination Alarm + Clock + Radio. We partnered with AOL ShoutCast to develop the application. It’s been number #1 Utility in Japan and #2 overall in Japan. It’s also done well in Germany, Italy and Spain.

Why is this your best app?

I think it’s some of our best work since it combined many aspects of a simple user interface, back-end server integration, and utility. While we have had more popular apps and more profitable apps this is something that I use on a daily basis and really enjoy.

Why do you like MyAppSales?

Clock Radio has been moving up the charts in various countries and MyAppSales made it easier to track international progress.

Clock Radio

App Store > Utilities > Clock Radio


Stefan NicolinToday Todo management

by Stefan Sorin Nicolin (Spielhaus)

Executive Summary

There is still room to innovate! Today manages your tasks for the actual day. No extra buttons, no myriad of taps to add a simple todo – just turn your device 90° to add a new task. With a simple yet beautiful interface Today also incorporates essential features like sorting and priorities without adding ballast to the navigation within the app.

Why is this your best app?

I think it’s some of our best work since it combined many aspects of a simple user interface, back-end server integration, and utility. While we have had more popular apps and more profitable apps this is something that I use on a daily basis and really enjoy.

Why do you like MyAppSales?

I love MAS because it spares me the otherwise cumbersome work of manually downloading the financial reports and scraping the App Store for user reviews – it is the all-in-one solution for my compulsive urge to stay up to date with our app sales.

Today Todo management

App Store > Productivity > Today Todo management


Vladimir RothAqua Globs

by Vladimir Roth (Qwiboo)

Executive Summary

Aqua Globs is an entertainingly strategic game where agility and quick thinking are essential. Very easy to get into with the main aim to gain points by joining cute wiggly globs. Touch and drag to navigate them and join them together. But watch out! Blue & orange globs don’t like each other, and you only have three lives! Before you know it, the globs are coming from every angle! Keep your cool to navigate the little foolish creatures! . Guaranteed you won’t be able to put down this tantalizingly exciting game that will always having you wanting ‘just one more go’!

Why is this your best app?

Because it’s the only app we have 🙂

Why do you like MyAppSales?

It saves us loads of time and that’s great! No more logging into websites and having all my stats with me all the time is amazing. I really appreciate also the option to easily backup the data through the web interface.
Aqua Globs

App Store > Games > Aqua Globs


Philip KirwanDublin Bus Maps

by Philip Kirwan

Executive Summary

Dublin Bus Maps is for regular Dublin Bus users and even for tourists needing to navigate the city.

  • The timetables are up to date so it’s better than most timetables at the bus stops.
  • The timetables are stored locally on your device. Perfect for iPod Touch users.
  • Like to stay up to date? The Bus Tweets and Dublin Bus News feature lets you find out what’s being said about Dublin Bus on Twitter and News Outlets.
  • Favourite your regularly travelled routes.
  • View bus stops for your route.
  • Get an approximate next bus time at each stop.
  • Are you a tourist? Find out how to use Dublin Bus, find out about sightseeing tours. Save yourself alot of time!!
  • Multiple Themes

Using any transport system in a big city can be daunting. Dublin Bus Maps provides all the information in the palm of your hand making travel less stressful so you can enjoy the city of Dublin with ease.

Why is this your best app?

I think this is my best app as it allows the user to get all the information the need to travel by “Dublin Bus”(Dublin,Ireland) while on the move. The app allows users to have maps and timetables so they are never lost. Even tourist are catered for.

Why do you like MyAppSales?

I love to use MyAppSales as it allows me to view my itunes connect account on the move and away from my macbook. With a great interface and ease of use I find it brilliant. the newest updates such as push notification for reports are great as well.
Dublin Bus Maps

App Store > Navigation > Dublin Bus Maps


josh. johnsoniAdvent

by Josh Johnson

Executive Summary

Go digital with your Advent Calendar this Christmas! iAdvent is a modern-looking advent calendar designed specifically for iPhone users. Keep track of how many days are left until Christmas. iAdvent works just like traditional advent calendars. Beginning December 1st, click each day to find something inside. iAdvent’s something is a fun fact about Christmas. You can email the fun fact to friends and family to share the spirit of Christmastime. If you’re a parent, it’s also a fun thing to do each day with your kids – they love counting down to Christmas!

Why is this your best app?

iAdvent is my best app, not from gross, but that it provides the most targeted niche (Christmas) and it has provided the greatest learning experience.

Why do you like MyAppSales?

MyAppSales is always with me. Even though the iPhone has a browser and I can go to the other App Sales sites, I don’t have to sit there scrolling like mad. Plus it is easy, I just open it and see charts, reviews, and daily/weekly stats. Finally, it makes it easy to add archived data and back up.

iAdvent

App Store > Entertainment > iAdvent


Andreas HecksSuper Trumps Sports Cars

by Andreas Heck (der.heckser)

Executive Summary

Our Super Trumps application is the modern conversion of the classical card game “Go Fish” (in other countries also known as Quartett, Megatrumpf, Happy Families, Jeu de familles or Authors). The 32 cards with modern sports cars  from BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Porsche, Ferrari, Lamborghini and others are shuffled and evenly shared between the player and the iPhone. The player choose the value of one category of the displayed card and the value is compared with the same value of the card which the iPhone is holding. Who has the higher value wins the trick and the winner has the turn with the next card of the stack. The game is ending when one player has lost all the cards or the timer of 10 resp. 20 minutes expires.

Although it’s a simple game – everybody knows from childhood – Super Trumps offers long entertainment and high motivation!

Why is this your best app?

We think this is our best app because it is an entertaining game with cool and professional user interface. The possibility to look at the 32 beautiful cars with big images is like having two apps in one. With the integrated social networking stuff like twittering your earned high score it’s even more fun. Along with a fair price we think that we did a good job.

Why do you like MyAppSales?

MyAppSales is always with me. Even though the iPhone has a browser and I can go to the other App Sales sites, I don’t have to sit there scrolling like mad. Plus it is easy, I just open it and see charts, reviews, and daily/weekly stats. Finally, it makes it easy to add archived data and back up. I can see my daily income on the fly wherever I am. The UI is clean and clearly arranged. To get the reviews of our apps is another benefit which is why MyAppSales pokes out of the competitors.

Super Trumps Sports Cards

App Store > Games > Super Trumps Sports Cars


Michele AielloWin for Life – Vinci per la vita

by Michele Aiello

Executive Summary

My best app so far is Win for Life – Vinci per la Vita, that is an app for an Italian Lottery that has just be launched in October. My app helps gamblers by suggesting numbers based on the customer’s preferred numbers and some statistics like overdue and frequent numbers. Moreover there is also a way to check your winnings by having the latest drawings on the iPhone. This application has been on top of the Italian Paid Apps for over 10 days.

Why is this your best app?

Win for Life – Vinci per la Vita, is my best app so far because is the only one that made it to the top of the Paid Apps Ranking and also because of the appreciation that I’m getting from my customers.

Why do you like MyAppSales?

MyAppSales is always with me. Even though the iPhone has a browser and I can go to the other App Sales sites, I don’t have to sit there scrolling like mad. Plus it is easy, I just open it and see charts, reviews, and daily/weekly stats. Finally, it makes it easy to add archived data and back up. MyAppSales is definitely the best app available for checking my sales on the go :-). I travel a lot and I like to keep an eye on how my apps are doing and what are the latest reviews from the customers. MyAppSales does all this and is also “open source” in the sense that I can have a look at the code and be sure that my info is not “misused”! I would have never trusted another app with my iTunes login/password if I couldn’t have a look at the source code. Great job Oliver and keep up the good work!

Win for Life - Vinci per la vita

App Store > Utilities > Win for Life – Vinci  per la vita


Geoffrey YoungThe Carrier – graphic novel and comic book

by Geoffrey Young (StopWatch Media)

Executive Summary

A man wakes up in a dark room. He doesn’t know how he got there and can’t remember who he is. He looks down, and a titanium briefcase is shackled to his wrist.  He doesn’t know what’s inside it… and he doesn’t know how it got there… and he might be the world’s most wanted terrorist.  What would you do if you woke up and had a briefcase on your wrist? Would you run? Who would you call? Where would you go?  What if you were a terrorist but didn’t even know it?

As a graphic novel, The Carrier is a globe-spanning action & espionage story.  As an iPhone app, however, The Carrier is a multimedia experience that unfolds in real time over the course of ten days, pulling you into the story through geolocation, email, messaging, and more. In all, The Carrier is a 35-chapter, 680-panel mobile comic experience.

The Carrier is a unique example of what the iPhone has to offer in terms of e-readers – it moves beyond a “just like print” experience and into to telling a layered story in entirely new ways.

Why is this your best app?

I’m proud of The Carrier for what it accomplishes creatively and programmatically: it’s a rich and layered storytelling event that hinges on connecting a fixed work of fiction with the world outside in real-time.  Seeing all that come together for readers is really exciting and rewarding, and that’s why it’s our best app.

Why do you like MyAppSales?

MyAppSales is always with me. Even though the iPhone has a browser and I can go to the other App Sales sites, I don’t have to sit there scrolling like mad. Plus it is easy, I just open it and see charts, reviews, and daily/weekly stats. Finally, it makes it easy to add archived data and back up.
MyAppSales provides not only an easy format for viewing global sales, but customer reviews from all AppStore markets around the world.  That kind of information is invaluable to us.

The Carrier

App Store > Books > The Carrier

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Can Retro Survive the App Store? https://www.cocoanetics.com/2009/07/can-retro-survive-the-app-store/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2009/07/can-retro-survive-the-app-store/#respond Sat, 25 Jul 2009 19:26:18 +0000 http://www.drobnik.com/touch/?p=1201 Many of the typical iPhone users of today can remember the infancy of video games. First we went to arcades to play simple games made up of sprites or vectors. Many coins went into the slots that allowed you to play. Later companies like Nintendo started to make “Game&Watch” games which you could take with you. Their technical basis would always be an LCD screen where otherwise translucent areas would be made black opaque by electronics to manifest game characters. Movement would consist of several such on/off graphics switched in succession.

The iPhone and iPod Touch devices from today have orders of magnitude more computational power and for a modern game to be successful it has to feature fancy graphics, action and 3D. Or does it? I had a look at two games that like to be correlated to the “Retro” category while at the same time claiming to add “a new twist”. I was intrigued by such a bold statement and thus I am reviewing both apps in this article.

Have a look at those two candidate games and let me know if you think that Retro can be a viable category of games on the store. Or is it the past and should we be glad that it’s over?

Radial 50 – 360 Degree Brick Breaker

The mother of all brick breakers has to be Arkanoid, now Radial 50 takes the concept of ball versus bricks and makes it circular. But before you can get to play you first have to jump through a couple of hoops to create a profile or skip it. When I started the game the first time my impression was not a good one because it crashed two times, each time at a later stage. Also when submitting my user name there is no visual feedback so I hit several times and got the message that user “Drops” already exists. Still I got into the game.

Which is way more polished than the non-game screens. You get into it rather quickly as the simplistic game mechanic involves rotating the bar at the radial outside of the game by means of sliding upwards and downwards. If you don’t bounce back the ball you loose energy which is shown as bars next to the score. Thankfully this bar recharges after a while of juggling the ball.

Radial 50

I had one problem with the controls because my iPhone 3GS screen does not permit good gliding because of the fat repellant coating. With experimentation I found that the tip of the index finger tends to get stuck which the part where your fingerprint is located tends to glide much better. Older iPhones’ screens probably glide much better.

The graphics are polished to the max and the background rotates together with the bar which makes for an amazing visual effect. I also give extra kudos for the rockin’ soundtrack which has a sort of trancy quality to it and fits perfectly with the style of the app.

Gameplay: Easy to get into. Great style and suitable soundtrack. Does not pretend to be an adventure game, but is a diverse and original variant of the brick breaker theme. Sometimes I got often confused by the direction the ball would get reflected by the bar, because it seemed more random than physically correct to me. But I guess you have your hands full anyway rotating it around the screen with only the up/down on one side. Fans of the genre have something fresh worth trying out.

Technology: I hope that the makers will soon fix the bugs in the profile setup screen and when first (and second) loading the game. But that’s fixable if they take quality serious and analyze the crash reports. From the point of view of the game itself you see great layering, snappy and responsive animation, A+ sound and music and generally great production value.

According to Applyzer ranking data the app is being widely sold with Slovenia, Vietnam, Venezuela being the current top three in Games/Arcade. But apart from a couple off-mainstream countries it seems to quickly loose ground.

Radial 50 (iTunes), Radial 50 Lite (iTunes)

Great Leaping Lambrettinis

Here I totally salute the makers because their effort to make an iPhone era “Game&Watch”-style app is just as daring as the leaping of the Lambrettinis themselves. The makers of the game assured me that the design and everything about the game is brand new. Only the style of the graphics aims to be a salute to era of LCD based pocket games. Even the sounds effects fit the style they are the sort of beep you got from such a device. And

I already explained the general game mechanic in the introduction of this article, control generally happend via some early form of plus-shaped D-Pad and maybe two buttons similar to modern Gameboys the grandfather of which those where. That’s another area where a straight “conversion” simply does not make sense. Instead of simulating a D-Pad on screen you control the Lambrettini family via direct touch.

Great Leaping Lambrettinis

Touch the artists on the boards to make the switch sides. Touch the people towers to make the top artist jump to the left. The only thing that was not immediately clear to me was that you have to make room for the constantly new artists jumping from the tower on the right by having the artists on the leftmost tower jump. For this there was a 2 page instruction leaflet, which looks as if it would have been found inside the box that came with the game.

When playing I found my brain drifting into sort of an automated trance state formulating strategies that would make possible a new high score with the least accidents. In the end I had the most success (see screenshot) by tapping the towers left to right 1,2,3 and then the boards right to left 1,2,3 which the new artist jumping off the tower was still in mid-air.

Gameplay: Once you have studied the “leaflet” you immediately get into the game and you are pulled in. Like a juggler having to keep track of multiple balls in the air you get sort of a brain-hand-coordination high by relaxing into a blank mind state that is necessary to control 7 moving Lambrettinis at the same time. Playing the game I found that true retro LCD graphics give it a unique charm that’s missing from most other games on the store.

Technology: The artwork is beautifully handcrafted, technology becomes transparent to the user and thus permits immersion into the idea of the game. Outside you have a couple of animations but again those don’t destroy the illusion of having a new “Game&Watch” game on your iPhone. You basically have a static colored backdrop and black images that are made visible and invisible at the right time.

Looking at the Applyzer ranking data I can say that D/A/CH seem to “get it” while it’s being largely ignored in the rest of the world. It only sells a fraction of what Radial 50 manages to move.

Great Leaping Lambrettinis (iTunes)

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Charitable Coding https://www.cocoanetics.com/2009/07/charitable-coding/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2009/07/charitable-coding/#respond Mon, 13 Jul 2009 07:05:08 +0000 http://www.drobnik.com/touch/?p=1129 When his son Roel was diagnosed with Autism 3 years ago, his father (also named Roel) researched possibilities to help him improve the quality of his life and discovered Righteous Pups Australia. This organization trains Autism Assistance Dogs (AAD) which are especially trained to help increase self-esteem, independence and overall well-being of the autistic dog owner.

As we know in IT, training costs money and those dogs need lots of it. About 29.000 AU$ to be exact. That’s approximately the price of 10 luxury MacBook Pros… kind of puts my own financial challenges into a different perspective.

OzSlangNow Roel has published his first app, an Australian slang dictionary dubbed OzSlang. This is a fun and essential tool for everyone who likes to brush up his OZ Slang skills to not stick out like “such a tourist” or to generally sound more like “Crocodile Dundee”.

I think you can see that the maker put a lot of love into it, it is very well made. Roel tells me that 100% of his proceeds (minus Apple’s cut) go to the above mentioned organization so that eventually the cost for a dog for his son can be covered. The details can be found on Paws 4 Roel website.

It was especially disheartening for Roel when he learned that his app had been pirated. The sales dropped and prospects for an AAD for his son deteriorated. Who can now still argue for piracy as a means of getting “trialware”? Very few (if any at all) of the people who download OzSlang from warez sites would eventually contribute to the cause.

In my book you don’t rip off charitable products especially if they are at the lowest price possible. That’s simply bad karma. If you burglarize the donation box, don’t complain if your future projects fail. That’s how karma works.. On the other hand if you want to get karmically ahead or even, it’s as easy as purchasing a copy of this app. 🙂

With his next app, which is currently under review by Apple, Roel will try a different approach. Make the app free, but include a charity button. We know that Apple does not like to see money is moving where they don’t get their 30% share. But I’m keeping my fingers that they won’t mind a donation button for charity.

You can do something good by either donating directly, contacting Roel about sponsoring opportunities or purchasing OzSlang via iTunes. If your contribution is a sizable one I will throw in an hour’s worth of iPhone Development consulting for free to be used any way you like. Good Karma anyone?

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MyAppSales Video Demonstration https://www.cocoanetics.com/2009/07/myappsales-video-demonstration/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2009/07/myappsales-video-demonstration/#respond Fri, 03 Jul 2009 21:33:29 +0000 http://www.drobnik.com/touch/?p=1097 Right after I e-mailed him the source code for MyAppSales, Moshe Malka responded:

OH MY GOD!
This Application is Extremely AMAZING!
“It puts AppSales Mobile in the trash bin!”

Do you mind If I review this app on my YouTube? — And I Guarantee this wont be a bad one! – Cause I am Flipping off at the amazing work!
Keep it up!

Of course I welcomed this. Long have I been longing for somebody to show the beauty and speed of MyAppSales in a video. Thank you Moshe!

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You Have All The Trumps … in one single XCode Project! https://www.cocoanetics.com/2009/06/you-have-all-the-trumps-in-one-single-xcode-project/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2009/06/you-have-all-the-trumps-in-one-single-xcode-project/#respond Wed, 17 Jun 2009 07:03:55 +0000 http://www.drobnik.com/touch/?p=1006 I recently helped Andreas Heck to unify 4 of his projects into a single one. Before this intervention he would copy the project from a previous “Super Trumps” app and modify parts of it to fit the new theme. But of course this would multiply the effort necessary to do updates with every iteration of the process.

Top Trumps Cars Top Trumps Guns
Top Trumps Bikes Top Trumps Aircraft

It was for this surgery that I researched and discovered the method of Target-specific Headers and many of the techniques in this article about compiling for 2.x and 3.0 from the same project. Now he can happily concentrate on just collecting artwork and information for new sets and can keep 95% of his code unchanged.

Andreas Heck is doing beautiful work on the contents of his apps, you can purchase them by clicking on the images above. Now that his first 4 “Super Trumps” games are live on the app store I checked up on them on Applyzer because I was interested which geographic preferences could be gleaned.

All Super Trumps games share the simple yet fun gameplay. From 32 cards you receive half. When it’s your turn you can choose which feature you think is the best. This is then compared to the card of the computer player and who has the better card wins. The game ends when time runs out or when one player has accumulated all the cards. The major strength of those games is the beautiful pictures combined with easy to get into gameplay.

I added all four games to the list of my subscribed apps on Applyzer, which you can currently do for free until the BETA ends. Then I made a screenshot of the first 5 countries for each game to see if there are any surprises.

Top Trumps Cars

cars rankings

UK and Germany are known for their interest in beautifully manufactured cars. An effect that seems to infect neighboring countries like Austria and Ireland as well. Slovenia has a strongly growing economy and because of that it is one of the most recent new member countries of the EU. With prosperity comes an interest in cars … and iPhone games about cars.

Super Trumps Bikes

bikes rankings

Germany is one of the biggest markets for the iPhone as well as motorcycles, but I could not have predicted the strong interest in Bikes in Egypt and Chile. Isn’t there too much sand in those places? No wait, the Egyptian desert is the place of choice for many bike crazy people who have fun hopping over dunes on their motocross machines. Switzerland and Finland have interesting and varied landscapes which make biking all the more fun. Here we can see their hidden interest in beautiful bikes.

Super Trumps Aircraft

aircraft rankings

Again we could have predicted Germany being top 5, but all the other countries express a longing for flying machines that you would not necessarily attribute to them at first glance. Well, except maybe Taiwan. Isn’t that where most of the electronics parts in modern aircraft are coming from?

Super Trumps Guns

guns rankings

Finally the Guns Trumps have always been the wild card in the deck. Andreas Heck originally targeted those at the gun grazed US market, but found almost immediately that the Americans seem to prefer first person shooters to card games about guns. Super Trumps Guns is doing extremely well because of it’s high rank in UK and Germany. Who would have thought that the peace loving Swiss care for guns? Latvia and the United Arab Emirates are also a surprise. Latvia might be influenced by the Russian mafia, while now we know what those sheikhs might be carrying beneath their long clothes … an iPhone with Top Trumps Guns.

The Future holds … Even More Trumps

Having such great success Heck tells me that he is working on several more card games. With the newly unified project he can now concentrate on content rather than coding. We’re thinking: how about a couple of adult-themed trump games. What other whacky or interesting themes can you think of to see in a trumps card game?

In any case I must congratulate Michael Dorn who does a fantastic job with Applyzer. This top 1000 ranking information allows for amazing insights into the workings of the iPhone app market.

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App Charts for May 12th https://www.cocoanetics.com/2009/05/app-charts-for-may-12th/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2009/05/app-charts-for-may-12th/#respond Tue, 12 May 2009 13:39:28 +0000 http://www.drobnik.com/touch/?p=756 These are the current hottest apps in the whole wide iPhone World for today. Ranking data is provided by Applyzer.com a site that is promising to provide ranking information that you can get nowhere else.

Top No. 1 Apps Worldwide in all categories
1. World Cup Ping Pong™ Lite
2. Need For Speed™ Undercover (International)
3. World Cup Ping Pong™
4. Camera Zoom
5. Racing Live – FREE for Limited Time!
6. Texas Hold’em
7. Skype
8. Chess Free
9. Tap Tap Revenge 2
10. 9-Toolbox (Free Event)
11. Airport Mania: First Flight
12. Leaf Trombone: World Stage
13. Wooden Labyrinth 3D Free
14. Headsup Hold’em Poker Free
15. iBASElite
16. Brain Tuner Lite (Free)
17. The Weather Channel®
18. Solitaire City Lite
19. Free Translator
20. Trivial Pursuit (International)
21. MotionX GPS
22. MONOPOLY Here & Now: The World Edition (International)
23. Hangman.
24. Fluid
25. Stanza
26. Ferrari GT Evolution: Lite Version
27. Bloomberg
28. HearPlanet Free
29. Touch Ski 3D Lite
30. Documents Free (Mobile Office Suite)
31. Flight Control
32. MotionX GPS Lite
33. Quickoffice® Mobile Office Suite (Word, Excel & WiFi)
34. Flick Fishing
35. iXpenseIt
36. ParkingLot
37. WritePad
38. Backgammon Lite
39. Cooking Mama Lite
40. Galaxy On Fire™ 3D
41. Human Atlas
42. METAL GEAR SOLID TOUCH Lite (EU)
43. QuickVoice Recorder w/Free Voicemail
44. Catcha Mouse
45. Who Has The Biggest Brain?
46. Lemonade Tycoon™ (International)
47. Television
48. Pyramid Bloxx FREE
49. Scrabble®
50. Bento
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Peer Reviews https://www.cocoanetics.com/2009/05/peer-reviews-2/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2009/05/peer-reviews-2/#respond Tue, 05 May 2009 22:16:33 +0000 http://www.drobnik.com/touch/?p=684 Several people have followed my call for peer reviewing each others apps. With a US iTunes account you can take part in this networking activity yourself. You might get much more valuable feedback then from regular customers.

Here are all the apps I had a look at so far. Sorry guys for taking so long, but my US iTunes account is on my Windows PC which I avoid to turn on whenever possible. 😉


MyMemoryMad

mymemorymad

Gameplay: The objective is to remember more and more flashing lights plus their distinct tones. This is simple and fun to test your short term memory, but you probably lose interest after having found your limit. Probably a less steep progression of the difficulty would increase long term fun. Like have the same number of flashes for several levels, only with increasing speed.

Technology: Very simple app, only a few screens. The game screen uses a fading effect for the flashing plus well selected sounds.  Unfortunately the German translation is done poorly, sounds like Google Translate. You could have called me to do a proper German translation. I could have done this app in less than 2 weeks. Then again, it’s very first app of this developer, so congrats on getting this done and into the store!

(iTunes Link)


Magnetic Block Puzzle

Magnetic Block Puzzle

Gameplay: Addictive! The game mechanic is original, I’ve never seen it before. You get into it very quickly, only one page of instructions. Also you can play with swipes or the accelerometer. The objective is to get colored boxes attached to each other as if they where magnetic, but most of the time you have to plan ahead because otherwise to attached boxes might block the path between two to-be-attached boxes.

Technology: A touch of 3D, probably Open-GL makes it stand out. The game engine itself works in 2D, but going the extra mile of having display in 3D gets extra bonus points. Also the dialogs are all designed beautifully. The sounds are fitting, though there is no real soundtrack. He gets full marks on all my scales.

(iTunes Link)


Bird & Snail

Bird & Snail

Gameplay: It’s clearly for kids. Haunted House has taken the same artwork and created a multitude of variations of it which you can either purchase by themselves or in the one dollar higher priced deluxe version which bundles all of them together. You get two versions of a coloring book, a story with active parts, story just to listen to and a memory puzzle. The latest (and only free) app is a sliding puzzle in the same style. The artwork is the definite strength of the set and also makes it unique.

Technology: A tip of the hat has to go to the beautiful integration of graphical art and synchronized sound effects and/or narration for the book variants. Having so many different editions probably has marketing reasons. There cannot be a technical limitation as there is a deluxe version with all the parts combined. Apart from this it is not a technological marvel, but a solid translation of multiple childrens books into the iPhone realm.

Deluxe (iTunes Link), The Book (iTunes Link), Paint Lite (iTunes Link), Memory Match (iTunes Link), Paint Full (iTunes Link)


Astronomy Picture of the Day Viewer

APOD Viewer

Usability: Search for pictures, add them to your favorits, get the picture of a specific day or a random one. No clutter, you get what you expect. I cannot imagine any other way to access this publicly available source of fabulous astronomy-related images.

Technology: Nice UI, rotates to make use of a wider screen in landscape. Makes good use of the tab bar. Nice effect of making the picture description larger with the touch of a button. Why does he abuse badges as counters instead of notifications of something new?

APODViewer (iTunes Link), APODViewerLite (iTunes Link)


Wake!Simply & Wake!Gently

Wake Simply

Usability: A settings page and the clock, rotatable between landscape and portrait. That’s all there is. The Gently variant also has slowly increasing volume for the alarm. Why there are two versions of essentially the same app can only be explained by marketing.

Technology: I know from my own experiments with the built in LED-font how difficult it is to properly place the letters because they are proportional. You either have the letters as graphics or you have right-aligned lables for all the digits. Makes also great use of implicit animations for flashing the colons. Kind of minimalistic if you ask me.

Wake!Simply (iTunes Link), Wake!Gently (iTunes Link)


Dodgers & Red Sox & Yankees

Boston Sox

Usability: There is one app per team, a marketing ploy? Or do Americans generally only root for “their” team? Then this seperation might make sense. You have a couple of pages with baseball related stats and news. Something only an avid baseball fan might find useful. That’s why those apps came out when baseball season started.

Technology: A navigation view with 3 screens, plus some code for loading the stats and news from a site. Somewhat barren I should say. Nothing that has not been done before. Retrieval of data is rather slow, but beggers can’t be choosers. Most likely the data is scraped from an official site.

Dodgers (iTunes Link), Red Sox (iTunes Link), Yankees (iTunes Link)


London JamCams

London Traffic Cams

Usability: Simple interface, make good use of the tab strip. Though the icons on the tabbar could be improved. But the retrieval of a random cam was very fast and convenient. So fast, I was astonished to already see an image.

Technology:  Though I don’t think it is regular UI practise to have 0 on badges, only values greater than zero make sense there. Also badges are meant to show something NEW as to alert the user that there is new content. In this app this concept is abused for counting the content. This is a minus for otherwise flawless execution.

(iTunes Link)


Hot Field

Hotfield

Gameplay: This game mimicks a vertical scrolling shooter like you have probably played on in arcades. But several twists make it more playable on the iPhone. You don’t need to worry about shooting, you have auto-fire. Otherwise the plane follows your finger and combined with additional fingers you have special abilities. Easy to get into, though the boss battles last maybe a tad to long.

Technology: The author visibly mastered several basics needed to create such vertical scrolling shooter. Sprite Graphics, Collision Detection, Power Ups, Auto-Fire, and many many more. There is a slight 3D effect but obviously the developer wanted to retain the retro style with sprites. The maker has all right to have this in the “Game” category of the app store unlike many other wannabes.

HotField (iTunes Link), HotField Lite (iTunes Link)


If you want me to also review YOUR APP, then send me a promo code or let me take part in your ad-hoc BETA.

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Geolocated Distributed iPhone Developer Database https://www.cocoanetics.com/2009/04/geolocated-distributed-iphone-developer-database/ https://www.cocoanetics.com/2009/04/geolocated-distributed-iphone-developer-database/#comments Thu, 23 Apr 2009 20:15:16 +0000 http://www.drobnik.com/touch/?p=566 Tonight I fore-went (is this a legal word?) my Cocoa coding time to write this very article about a topic that has begun to burn in my heart and I just have to get it out into cyberspace to get a diskussion going.

You and me and lots of other iPhone developers have strenghts and weeknesses. Some of us can code really well, others are great at design and there are also some people who excel at marketing iPhone apps. There are some commonalities amongst us as well, besides of 99% having a physical iPhone and 66% using twitter to build their network. We all have Internet, as benign as this may sound. We all have websites that have some information on the apps we have in the app store. We are advertising ourselves to the world. Hoping to get noticed. Looking for help. Or simply looking to make as much money as possible with the jewels they have polished in endless hours.

Static, non-machine-readable HTML. Sometimes even worse: Flash! Looking great, but achieving nothing except a good feeling for the person who created it. But that’s just Web 1.0

A few of us took the next evolutionary step and started to write in forums (the official one as well as the largest non-official one) and get business-centric profiles on facebook or Xing. That’s Web 2.0.

But still those are information silos, you don’t own your posts, you don’t own your content on “social networks”. I say “That’s passé!” Here I am proposing Web 3.0 and all participating iPhone developers will benefit.

The fundamental need that I am trying to address with this proposal is to create a way for iPhone developers to find their peers. Find someone who talks their language, or is close enough geographically to meet and discuss ideas with over coffee.Starbucks, anyone?

My first thought was to create an online DB with a web form to allow people to enter their details, but then it hit me: that’s < 3.0 and I have sworn an oath to my coding god to never touch anything that does not adhere to the fundamental law of web 3.0: “RAW DATA NOW”. I would have created yet another silo and you would not have owned the data you had entered there. 

They say that web 2.0 is about user-generated content, but you can claim content as being your own only if it is on your own blog and you can modify or even erase it at a whim. I believe that the benefits of web 2.0 can only be truly realized when you make your properties machine-readable. The same goes for any other information about your apps. There are countless websites out there which scour the iTunes XML data for information about apps. But just as countless they are useless. Very few add value, most use this as free content that is their substrate on which they plant their tradedouble links. That’s the modern form of spam: repurpose other people’s content with your own pay-per-clickthrough links and make 5% on every app sale.

I propose to wholeheartedly step into Web 3.0 by creating an XML schema or protocol that allows every developer or development company to publish meta information about themselves on their web site root. This schema would be similar to RSS or FOAF in that it would be present as link rel=”alternate” in your HTML pages. So I might have an XML file on my blog like this: http://www.cocoanetics.com/iphonedev.xml for example.

The schema of such an XML file would have to be defined reusing as many previously defined xml modules as possible. For example I would put in ICBM information into the file so that you could find developers who are close to you. 

I think it’s best to think of developer and app entities as objects non unsimilar to Cocoa classes. Only difference would be that URLs are the pointers, the class definition would be an XML schema and class methods would be endpoints of XML-RPC, SOAP or REST based scripts.

Off the top of my head this is the information that I think would be useful:

  • A permalink to the master Xml. If somebody makes a copy he should preserve this link and treat is as the primary key. This link will also be the source from which to refresh the data from.
  • Name or Nickname of the developer
  • if this is a developer or corporate entity
  • Link to the developer’s blog rss feed
  • A .profile or .project where the developer can write in freeform text what he is currently working on
  • Several ways of contact: e-mail, twitter, etc.
  • Artist ID of the developer to be able to directly link to all his apps on the store
  • Languages understood
  • App IDs, Names and Icon.png of all your apps on the store. This could be used to automatically construct a signature that has your apps’s icons with links to the store. Maybe even more meta information if it’s useful to trade it, like the release notes for the latest versions. Thinking about it, maybe in the developer XML there should only be links to XML files that would represent the individual apps the URL of those XML files again will be the permalink.
  • if the dev is interested in: partnering, specific resources, training, providing training, etc.
  • and then links to other such XML files of other developers. If a process is retrieving this developers XML file it should also provide him with at least another developers key URL. Also there should be sort of an approval or ranking scheme to such outgoing URLs so that I can say e.g. developer A I have successfully partnered with or developer B I know personally or developer C I don’t know
  • You should also have a possibility to specify if you purchased another developer’s app and how you liked it. The app information would contain a link back to your review or rating which is still on your web server, so every dev could validate that a statement about your app is really coming from the person you say it does. If you write up your reviews in your blog, then the review’s permalink should be present here.

Having a basic XML structure will enable most people without web development capabilities to participate in the network and their information will get seeded. I expect for people to start spidering these XML files to create searchable databases of developers which could also be searched for local peers.

Developers on a higher level will also be able to create or use open-source solutions to provide instance methods for their online objects. For example to aggregate links that are presented to other XML iphonedev files. So one web server should be able to ping a certain number of known developers to inform them when there is a new peer. Also if there are significant changes this peer-to-peer network should pass on such information.

I absolutely invite your ideas or expertise in web apis so that we can collaborate on establishing the best, most useful spec. Who thinks this is a good idea? I invite you to share your thoughts.

Can this benefit a great number of iPhone developers who currently struggle to get their solo-projects done? Or do you think that this would only increase the number of people sticking around and preventing the self-cleansing process of the iPhone developer community?

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