February 2012
14 posts
5 tags
Quick Friday Review: Jira Mobile Connect
Recently I gave Jira Mobile Connect a spin: the idea is pretty simple. You integrate Atlassian’s SDK into your app, and any crashes get automatically logged back in Jira. There’s also a nice optional front-end UI you can use to communicate with users about issues they’ve logged.
Currently it’s only available on iOS, but the client code is open source and there’s...
Splash screens == sloth →
This post, from an Adobe evangelist, just bubbled up HackerNews.
Whilst it’s railing against big, heavy packages like Photoshop and Office, it’s also one of the big problems on mobile - or rather, one of my big bugbears (that nobody pays any attention to).
Apple are pretty clear in their Human Interface Guidelines for iOS that splash screens are a bad thing:
Display a launch...
4 tags
AFNetworking: Resuming a Download
Now with updates
I have been getting a lot of people hitting my blog recently having searched for “AFNetworking resume download”.
ASIHTTPRequest supported partial downloads out of the box - for developers writing apps that involved consuming large (50MB+) bundles of content this was extremely useful, particularly in the days before background tasks were supported on iOS.
...
4 tags
3 tags
My Favourite Books: Peopleware
There’s a long running show on BBC Radio 4 called Desert Island Discs. Every week a guest is invited to imagine they are to be cast away to an idyllic island, and to choose eight pieces of music, a luxury item, and a book to entertain and amuse them.
I suspect I would probably end up taking a work of fiction as my book of choice, but Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams would...
4 tags
I ♥ Parse
Recently I’ve starting using Parse.com for one of my personal apps. I wanted to allow users to have preferences and content bookmark carried over across their iPad and iPhone.
Now, this sounds like a job for iCloud - a simple way to synchronise data across different instances of an app. I could have gone with iCloud, and it probably would have served me fine…until I decide to port my...
6 tags
Augmented Reality & Cats
Failure doesn’t necessarily mean your idea is doomed. Plenty of people threw themselves off cliffs with strange contraptions strapped to their backs before the Wright brothers decided to mount an engine onto some wings. Sometimes, however, it can simply mean what you’re attempting is terrible, and should never be attempted again. The difficulty is deciding into which camp your own...
Predicting the Future
Suppose I’m walking down the street one day and a man comes up to me. “Why hello”, he says, “I just happen to have a proven strategy to win the lottery - and it’s your lucky day, because for £10 I’ll tell you my secret technique!”.
Now, perhaps you spend £10 on lottery tickets each week. You might think “well, this lottery thing hasn’t been...
Apple TV & Samsung: Of Little Concern? →
“We’ve not seen what they’ve done, but what we can say is that they don’t have 10,000 people in R&D in the vision category” - Chris Moseley, Samsung
I think in terms of R&D Apple are not the leader in terms of raw cost. Until recently Nokia had the largest R&D department in the mobile industry, but it didn’t really help them adapt to the changing market. I’m...
Apple's New Retail Czar - The Sequel
I probably should have seen this coming, but the apathetic-to-negative coverage about Apple’s new retail hire is starting to seep over to the US tech press. Jon Gruber added a new post on Daring Fireball, entitled “Dixons Apparently Sucks”, following a story from the Wall Street Journal that had this little gem:
PC World was slated in a 2009 report as the worst place to buy a...
Why Freelancers Don't Write Their Own Apps →
Short and to the point - I am in pretty much the same boat. I have what I hope is a great little app, but it serves a very small niche market. On a good week, I make about $40 from it, on a bad one $5. It’s a hobby, and that’s it…
Apple's New Retail Czar
The recent appointment by Apple of John Browett to run their retail operation is an interesting one - and something that’s probably been under-scrutinised by the usual suspects. I doubt anyone outside of the retail industry had heard of him until this appointment, which probably explains the lack of in-depth analysis.
Jon Gruber, for example, just devotes a cursory few lines:
You don’t...
