My son is a Status Board fan. Â I’m not sure why; he just loves adding and arranging panels. Â I recently picked up a Withings WS-50 scale, which has an API that you can use to query weight and other data from the scale. Â Data from the scale and a status board to display it […]
I’m definitely a “scratch your own itch” kind of developer. Â I like building apps that I plan to use myself – it’s very rewarding to be using my own apps. Earlier this year, my son was in a spelling bee, his first. Â It was a fun experience. Â And of course, after we signed up, one […]
Trevor McKendrick has a post, the first in his ten-part series on his first year in the App Store, on How to Choose a Profitable Niche within the App Store. This is a great topic.  I submitted a blitz talk proposal for NSNorth this year on the same topic.  Didn’t make the cut for NSNorth, but […]
I spent the weekend at the new NSNorth conference in Ottawa. This was a small iOS developer conference in the spirit of Cingleton, and NSConference, put on my Dan Byers and Philippe Casgrain. It was a great weekend. Working from home full-time, especially, in a small town, it was great to get to hang out […]
One thing I learned from having apps in the store is that users don’t always get iOS UI conventions. Resume Designer has a view that shows you your collection of documents. Â Each document has a long-press menu with options like delete and duplicate. Â I used to get support emails about once every couple days asking […]
Market watchers and analysts seem baffled by the fact that the PC market is collapsing. Â Sales have dropped, but is that really surprising? Â Take a look around your own office. Â Does your computer seem too slow to get your job done? Â I’ll bet it doesn’t. I’m usually on the cutting edge of technology, but […]
Facebook Home is a bold move by Facebook to essentially take over the home screen on Android. This is made possible by the fact that Google gives applications all the access they need to do this. Â But how is this going to play out? Years ago I was a Windows developer, and one of the […]
Kevin Lynch just left Adobe and joined Apple. I worked for Adobe for 6 years, from 2006 to 2012, so I was there when Kevin joined through the Macromedia acquisition. I was always very impressed with Kevin; he’s a smart guy, and a good speaker. Unfortunately, Kevin was the public face of Flash for a […]
For the last three and a half years I’ve been working from home, so the news that Yahoo is bringing all remote employees back into their offices is of particular interest and concern to me. Yahoo has been foundering for years. They seem to have too many employees for what they do, and extended themselves […]
There’s been some interesting activity around podcasts lately. Apple has been giving podcasts some added attention. Rather than simply ignoring podcasts, they’ve moved them out of iTunes and into their own app. The iOS Podcasts app had a rocky start but it’s turned into a decent app, and it’s got a great radio-dial metaphor for […]