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 […]
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 […]