An iPhone app developer’s diary, and some thoughts on Android — A self confessed nerdy journalist and author of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab iPhone app discusses building their app using the TapLynx framework and why they didn’t launch with an Android app. 9/1/10
Thoughts on Android and iPhone Development — An experienced .NET/C# developers gives his impressions of Android and iPhone development after working with both for 3 months. His conclusion (spoiler alert) is that they both have their pros and cons. 8/27/10
Interesting iPhone and iPad development, design or even marketing items. Often new, sometimes old.
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Briefs iPhone Prototyping App Goes Open Source — After waiting 3 months for Apple to approve his Briefs prototyping toolkit for the iPhone without a word back, the developer Rob Rhyne has released the source code on GitHub and is moving on for now. See also, the more frank commentary from Jeff LaMarche on the matter. 8/26/10
If you’ve ever wanted to identify when your app is being run on a specific device iOS model, in order to limit or enable certain functionality, you’ll have noticed that Apple’s doesn’t provide a way to return the exact version number in its model method to the UIDevice class. Erica Sadun’s UIDevice Extension adds a category to your UIDevice and provide access to a more precise hardware model string. Today’s new release includes a way to identify not only the iPhone 4, but also whether it’s running on AT&T or other carriers.
Other hardware specs like the CPU and bus frequency and total or free disk can also be queried. (via Dr. Touch on Twitter).
Update: As Will Strafach points out, it also identifies an unreleased ‘iPod Touch 4G’ and something called the ‘iTV 1G’.
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Interesting iPhone and iPad development, design or even marketing items. Often new, sometimes old.
- The Cross Forward looks at iAds for developers, coming to the conclusion that it is likely ineffective for driving sales.
- Slava Bushtruk shows how to create a simple Timer app that works in both iOS 3.x and 4.0, using location notifications in the latter when the alarm is set to go off.
- The first of a three part series for beginners to iOS, Ray Wenderlich focuses on creating a simple iPhone app with all the basic controls and core functionality.
- iOS BetaBuilder by Hanchor LLC is a simple Mac OS X app takes your archived IPA file and creates the required manifest and HTML files for wireless distribution.
- iPhone Developer Tips looks at how to access passworded sites using basic HTTP authentication.
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O’Reilly Betas HTML5 Reference as Mobile Web App — While the final product will be a native app in the App Store, a public beta of their new HTML5 & XHTML reference is out as a web app that works on both iOS and Android. This would have been a great cross-platform candidate for jQuery Mobile, if it were out already (via author Simon St. Laurent on Twitter). 8/25/10
Aqua Globs Developer Shows iPad Piracy Rates Dwarfing the iPhone — The iPad is shown to have a 50% piracy rate, as opposed to the iPhone at only 5%, which developer Vladimir Roth attributes to the relatively high cost of iPad games. See also, Jeff LaMarche and David Wooldridge’s recent thoughts on battling piracy by addressing consumers. The story points to an interesting side effect of systems like OpenFeint: the ability to get concrete numbers for a game’s piracy rate by comparing leaderboard submissions to sales figures. The game is actually really well done and fun to play. It’s like Flight Control meets Osmisis. The full iPhone version is currently available for free for the launch of the iPad version, which itself is now only $1.99. 8/25/10
Android Advanced Task Manager App Brings in over $75k to Date — Daring Fireball linked to this developer’s revealing breakdown of sales data for Android’s leading task manager application Advanced Task Manager, a category often mocked by Steve Jobs as a sign Android ‘blew it‘ with multitasking. Among other things, the launch of the Droid was when sales really started to take off, and the AdMob powered free version made him more money than the $0.99 premium app at one point. 8/24/10
Interesting iPhone and iPad development, design or even marketing items. Often new, sometimes old.
- Nick Vellios suggests that developers using Obective-C for iOS game apps will run into performance problems for complex titles that are processor intensive, and shows how he got almost 2x speed improvement by sticking with straight C.
- bunnyhero dev offers a pointer on how to load an image mask from a file when using a Core Graphics image masks and how to avoid a common mistake in the process.
- Inspired by the additional features of UIViewController on iOS, Cocoa developer Josh Abernathy created his own NSViewController extension, allowing it to catch up to its iOS cousin using method swizzling.
- Jeff LaMarche’s contribution to this Goodies post (I swear the guy does nothing but code and write blogs all day) is a fix to his UIImage blur code to work on iOS, along with a sample project that uses it.
- ios-png-check.py is a simple Python script that checks for @1x versions of all your @2x retina display assets to make sure you’re not missing any.
- Justin Pratt at Mobile Evolution isolates the iTunes review links that iPhone and iPad apps respectively can usein-app to make sure they aren’t simply reviewed by people just about to delete them.
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Useful bits & pieces for iOS development, lovingly maintained by Joost Schuur, a product manager from the gaming industry who thought it was time to code again.