Author Archives

Radar: App gets killed without Crash Log

Apr 30, 2013

The following bug report has already been confirmed by Apple. Still I am posting it for the public so that it might help somebody who is getting the same problem.

The workaround is to override the readFromURL:error: method of UIDocument instead loadFromContents:ofType:error: since the problem lies inside NSFileWrapper. While being very convenient to use on smaller documents having too many items inside an NSFileWrapper will cause the problem described in this bug report.

Filed as rdar://13586175 and on Open Radar.
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WWDC Ticket Aftermath

Apr 26, 2013

The results the world had with Apple’s new plan where mixed. By a rough estimate over 20,000 developers where trying to storm the bastille at exactly 10 am PDT. But only a fraction was successful in winning the race, many just found a system in shambles.

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AutoIngest for Mac 0.2

Apr 26, 2013

AutoIngest for Mac is a small app that runs in your status bar and downloads your app sales reports. This helps you keep an independent archive of all your reports without having to rely on a third party.

At present in the Daily, Monthly, Weekly and Yearly flavors. You can also activate the auto-download where it will do the downloading every 24 hours. You can put this on each of your Macs if you download the reports to a shared Dropbox folder because each instance will automatically skip report files that are already present locally.

Version 0.2 is the first version that we are distributing as a Developer ID-signed app. This is convenient for people who don’t want to build it from source code but still want to have a version they know they can trust, with a Developer ID signature.

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Apple announces WWDC 2013

Apr 24, 2013

Apple announced WWDC 2013 on the day after the quarterly earnings conference call with analysts. The gist of which has been generally interpreted as “loosing steam”. Tim Cook seemed to imply that Apple would not be releasing any significant hardware products before the fourth quarter of 2013. This was further underlined by Apple giving guidance that sales would be slow for this current quarter.

Last year WWDC sold out in under two hours, much to the chagrin of many developers from the west coast of the USA because it was all other before many of them could get out of bed.

Much had been speculated how Apple would counteract an even faster sell out of tickets for WWDC 2013. One unexpected move had been Apple inviting a few select companies to send people to key Apple subsidiaries for design and tech reviews of their most important apps. They did that instead of doing a road show, which had served as a “WWDC Mini” for many people.

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DTCoreText 1.4.2

Apr 23, 2013

I forgot about posting a summary of the changes and updates in 1.4.1, and now I needed to release 1.4.2 as an interim release because I am working on a few improvements for 1.5 that are also potentially breaking some usage scenarios related to text attachments.

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AutoIngest for Mac

Apr 19, 2013

In this weeks Friday Labs session I created a Mac status bar app that I call AutoIngest for Mac. This uses my Objective-C re-implementation of Apple’s Java-based AutoIngest.java downloader as static library.

This first version is as functional as I was able to get it. Now I need your help. It is on GitHub, awaiting your input.

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Private Pods

Apr 18, 2013

You probably have looked at CocoaPods by now and found it to be a great way to quickly pull together all your favorite Open Source components for an app. After our recent move to Git I researched some more and found that it is exceptionally easy to also provide specs for your closed source private code.

Update: Updated Resource Bundle generation use the new syntax of CocoaPods 0.18.

23 Comments

MyAppSales Open Letter

Apr 13, 2013

This article it is about a suggestion I want to make to you: I want to create a well documented brand new platform-independent ReportCore framework and you build apps that leverage it to use and sell. Read on for how I plan to make this app store legal.

I sent out the following email to people on the MyAppSales Google group.

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Report Downloading Update

Apr 12, 2013

Fascinated by the Cingleton talk given by Michael Jurewitz (full video) on pricing elasticity I decided on a new project for my Lab Friday. Those are the 20% time where we try to explore something else than the nitty gritty we are working on all the other time.

It was in May four years ago that Apple had rejected my original MyAppSales app for scraping Apple’s site to get sales data. Shortly thereafter I started a Petition for Apple to give us an official API for downloading sales data. The bug report rdar://6807195 is still in status “Open” ever since April 20th 2009, its the oldest open Radar I have in my list.

Apple finally caved (a little) when they released the Autoingest.java tool for downloading some forms of reports in early 2012. Which I promptly decompiled and rewrote in a sensible language: Objective-C.

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Reuters Uses DTCoreText

Apr 09, 2013

The universal Reuters App makes use of DTCoreText. To see the attribution tap on the settings button, Open-Source Licenses and scroll down to the BSD 2.0 section.

Thanks to @iPhoneHelpr for reporting it to us. And thank you to Reuters for entrusting their news texts to DTCoreText.