So Google bought Nest. This seems like a big deal, and maybe it is. It’s too early to tell. I was listening to John Siracusa in a recent ATP episode talking about how the privacy concern with Google adding the Nest data to the collection of data they collect on all their users isn’t that […]
There was some traffic on Twitter yesterday around a new Apple knowledge base article Photo Stream Limits.  Some people were under the impression that this article is saying that Apple will now host an unlimited number of your photos and videos. This article doesn’t actually say that, although it doesn’t say they won’t do that. […]
Syncing the settings between instances of your app, through iCloud, seems like a good idea.  And doing this automatically, by walking the contents of NSUserDefaults and syncing them seems like a good idea.  Until you realize that what goes into NSUserDefaults isn’t just your own stuff. In my Unicode Character Viewer app, I was using […]
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 […]
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, […]