I was just in Montreal for a few days for Çingleton. More about that later. This post is about Airbnb. By the time I received my invitation for Çingleton, the lovely Hotel Nelligan was booked up.  Looking for a place to stay, I decided to try out Airbnb.  I love the Airbnb concept.  In a […]
I installed the Argus activity tracking app yesterday, and was surprised to discover that it was showing me my footstep data from the day I purchased my iPhone 5S. The iPhone 5S has the M7 motion co-processor, which can track activity in the background. Â The way I expected this to work is that an application […]
iOS 7 has significantly expanded the number of downloadable fonts available for iOS apps. iOS 6 supported downloadable fonts. This is hinted at in Apple’s Tech Note HT5484, which says “Apps can also install the following fonts as necessaryâ€. The fonts available to install mostly provided support for non-English text. With iOS 7, they’ve expanded […]
There’s an article in the excellent online magazine objc.io by Brent Simmons on the topic of using SQLite instead of Core Data. Â An example I’ve heard cited before is Brent’s example that he uses in this article of “what if you need to mark 10,000 items as read?”. This is a compelling example because with […]
Some folks are complaining that there wasn’t enough “innovation” in Apple’s iPhone 5s and 5c announcements. Â But I think the 5s represents the kind of innovation Apple does best. Â I’m talking about the fingerprint scanning. A few years ago, backups were a pain in the butt. Â Apple did something amazing with Time Machine in that […]
Disney Infinity is a fascinating game. I had high hopes before it’s release. Disney has a lot of great characters, and Disney Interactive has done some really interesting, innovative things over the years. ToonTown Online brought the MMO genre to kids over 10 years ago and is still going strong. Disney Infinity is, in many […]
I’ve built Android software and I’ve built iOS software. Â I much prefer developing on iOS so that’s what I spend most of my time doing, but I’ve done enough Android to have my two cents to contribute on this issue. In a nutshell: Â BBC said that they have almost 3x the number of developers working […]
The Mac and iOS App Stores don’t offer upgrade pricing, and they probably never will. Apple’s model for apps is akin to physical products. Â If you bought a toaster last year, and this year a new toaster comes out, there is no upgrade path. Â Your old toaster still works. Â If you want the new one, […]
Between Resume Designer and Unicode Character Viewer, I’ve done a fair bit of laying out text by hand on iOS. Part of laying out text is measuring it. And iOS sucks at that. Here are two examples. In Resume Designer, I’m using CTFramesetterSuggestFrameSizeWithConstraints to measure paragraphs and then drawing into that frame.  I noticed that occasionally […]
Last week Google IO, Google introduced their new app analytics for the Google Play platform.  This will make it possible for app developers to learn how users are discovering their apps.  Developers who spend money on ad buys will be able to correlate ad spend with sales, Apple’s developers, meanwhile, have no support at all […]