Apple timed the introduction of Apple Pay exactly right for the US market.  Retailers are just in the midst of a switch to NFC payments, and are making changes to their payment terminals. It’s hard to convince retailers it’s worth making a change, but they’ve been convinced that they need to change something by the […]
The most frustrating thing about developing in Apple’s ecosystem today, for me at least, is bugs that are difficult to reproduce. I have two separate issues right now where customers write to me because they’re having a problem, and I can’t reproduce that problem. In both of these scenarios, asking the customer to reboot their […]
I just burned a few hours on this: Auto layout for UITableView cells is awesome. It’s so much easier than what we had before which was having to measure cells before they existed. With auto layout, as long as you specify the height of the cell’s contents in relation to its superview (by having constraints […]
My two cents on David Owens’ take on Swift Experiences. In the section on Modern Syntax, David makes some points that could be valid in some contexts. The example that’s showing the modern syntax for sorting an array of strings *is* fraught with ambiguities and complexities.  But this is a shortcut syntax, intended to be […]
Hardware manufacturers shouldn’t be responsible for software. The problem is crystal clear. Your new TV has a computer in it, running some embedded OS and some software that came with it. If it’s a smart TV, it probably knows how to connect to the Internet and stream Netflix. And that’s great, until it stops working. […]
There’s been some chatter going around (spawned by Brent Simmons) about whether it’s possible to run a business solely on the profits of selling an iOS app in the App Store. Here’s my two cents on why the low price of apps is hurting our ability to promote them. Fall Day Software’s two main apps, […]
Will Apple ever make a hybrid tablet / desktop computer? Traditional mouse and keyboard user interfaces don’t work well on touchscreen devices, and apps designed for touch don’t work well with a traditional user interface. They are fundamentally different, so much so that Apple decided, back when first designing the iPhone, to build a completely […]
I get the “Age of Contextâ€. I get the desire to share the stuff you’re doing, the stuff you’re creating, even if it’s fairly mundane. I have a PS4, and I like that Sony thought sharing was so important that they put a Share button on every controller. It’s easy to take the last few […]
Why not, here’s my WWDC wish list. Some way of sharing files between apps. Not necessarily a file system, but a way of making a file or folder visible to another app. Add file upload support to WebKit. Sometimes users need to create a file in an app, and then upload that file to a […]
Brent Simmons wrote a bit on how common back-end services should be a solved problem by now.  I agree 100%. I proposed something like this when I was at Adobe, when Adobe was trying to build Flash as a platform (which would also have the same sort of requirements), and couldn’t get them to bite […]