I read an article by Michael Abrash on the Valve blog that he signed up with Valve to investigate Augmented Reality. At the end of his article he mentions that Valve is hiring.
This prompted me to send him the following long email. And as I like for my writing to not go to waste I am posting it here as well.
Episode 34, recorded Saturday April 21th, 2012
We can learn about cool company philosophy from the Valve employee handbook, Objective-C is creeping up to C++ as the world’s almost most favorite programming language. And iOS 4 can now be retired.
Podcast: Download (13.8MB)
I reported a while ago that I was forced to tag the current state of the DTCoreText master repository as 1.0.0. The reason for this was that CocoaPods was starting to gain lots of momentum and several people wanted to use DTCoreText via a podspec.
You can have podspecs point to the master branch as well, but then you never really know what you get. This can possibly cause many headaches especially in larger projects where you cannot track the state of each individual sub-project.
Therefore it is generally recommended – if not required – to make use of tags in GitHub.
Episode 33, recorded April 14th, 2012
Everybody still waiting for WWDC. My MacBook Air misbehaves and thus I have no show prepared. But Kevin Smith from Dootrix saves us this week from having no show: we chat about Rich Text and the Simpl app which they made.
Podcast: Download (51.4MB)
For a project that I am currently working on I needed to implement a custom container view controller. I was feeling my way forward in the dark for the most part because this does not seem to be a widely used technique. Developers – understandably – favor reusing and skinning existing view controllers over creating new containers.
However there are some scenarios where you should prefer to make your own container because it greatly simplifies your code over trying to bend a UINavigationController or UITabBarController to your will. Do you remember the times when those two where the only two containers available?
I distinctly remember using a UINavigationController with hidden nav bar as a view controller to contain multiple full views. And you probably had do do your own view juggling and animations because for the most part the standard transitions would be useless. Fortunately we can no file this as a fond memory of the past and move on to implementing our own containers.
Episode 32, recorded April 8th 2012
Does Radar need to be fixed or not? Apple increases developer share for iAds. And we are on tenterhooks waiting for WWDC tickets to become available.
Podcast: Download (20.7MB)
I reported late in 2011 on what the process is to move from an individual to a company developer account. One effect of this change is that you are getting a new developer account identifier which is a long number beginning with an 8. The main advantage of this move is that you can have multiple team members.
Having been on a company account for a couple of months you might notice that you get daily, weekly and financial reports for both the old and the new account. On iTunes Connect you have a selection to choose the old and the new account. While you cease to receive entires on the daily and weekly reports after a very short transition period you will see financial reports to go on in parallel quite some time longer.
I have been wondering why this is and through probing inquiry with Apple’s Finance Team I managed to uncover the reason for this.
Inspired by the Gmail Tap April Fools joke by Google I felt inspired to program the same thing for iOS. There we have custom input views as well as the UIKeyInput protocol and so I figured it should be an easy undertaking.
The whole affair took slightly more than one hour and I was hoping to record it in 1 second intervals with ScreenNinja. Unfortunately it seems that this otherwise fabulous app crapped out on me. I later discovered that the MOV file had actually finished before the crash, so to my delight (and hopefully yours too) you can follow this tutorial on YouTube.
I was already packing my suitcase for my vacation next week when I learned about the makings of the biggest scandal that is about to happen on the Apple campus. And I am not talking about AntennaGate or WarmGate, this is a REAL scandal! I just had to sit down and document the facts – as we know them so far.
A source close to the matter informed me (on condition of anonymity) that Apple CEO Tim Cook has set a plan in motion that will – so he fears – dramatically tarnish Apple’s reputation and throw them back to the technological stone age … at least when it comes to social media.
Episode 31, recorded Saturday March 31st, 2012 – UDID FIre
Mach ado about UDID, jobs for iOS developers abound and my guest today is Appsfire Co-Founder Ouriel Ohayon.
Podcast: Download (43.7MB)
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