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)
Getting Double Financial Reports
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.
DTMorseKeyboard Tutorial
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.
OMG! SocialGate!
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.
Podcast #31 – “UDID Fire”
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)
UDID … or Didn’t U?
Developers all around are struggling to update their ad network libraries as a reaction to rumored app rejections. It has been reported that apps which access the unique device identifier are getting semi-randomly singled out.
But, in light of recent revelations this apparently is not entirely true. Here’s a quick rundown of what is actually happening and what companies seem to be beginning to agree that the best solution is going forward.
Beware of NSString Optimizations
There are some scenarios where NSString acts as a class cluster internally to optimize handling of certain strings. One such case bit me today, and so I want to tell you about it.
Class clusters work such that you think you are always dealing with just instances of NSString, but in reality the runtime goes and chooses different subclasses for certain tasks. You might have already seen some effects of this behavior when debugging and the debugger actually showing you something other than NSString as the type of a variable.
DTCoreText Feedback
Always lovely to get Feedback for my work. Here’s a nice e-mail I got from Mustapha Ben Lechhab, a freelancer, who is successfully using DTCoreText to display arabic rich text and an embedded audio player.
DTCoreText lets you easily render HTML text (via NSAttributedString) in your apps without having to use UIWebView. The cool feature this guy used was that you can easily embed your own custom UIViews in the text, for playing an audio or video file.
In his own words …
iWoman 2.0.6
I thought I was smart when refactoring some code in DTAboutViewController to use block-based animations. Turns out that I had not considered backwards compatibility for 3.x when doing that simple change. This caused some unlucky users (still on iOS 3.1.3) to get the update pushed via iTunes, but then finding themselves unable to launch the app.
I do plan to cease supporting 3.x sooner or later, but not like this. The proper way is to raise the deployment target when implementing features that require 4.x. This way people unwilling (or unable) to update their devices just won’t be receiving those new updates but will still be able to continue using the old version.
Changes
- Fixed: Incompatibility with 3.x causes app to crash
- Added: Alert when user tries to send support e-mail but has no account configured
- Fixed: Tapping on today button in cycle view would show the wrong day in cycle view.
- Fixed: Tapping on the calendar button in Wheel View would lead to the wrong day in calendar view (in some time zones)
The update has been submitted to Apple and should be available soon.
Update April 4th: … the update is now available on the App Store.
Podcast #30 – NSConferencing
Episode #30, recorded Saturday March 24th, 2012. “NSConferencing”
First time visit to NSConference. Apple implements design that Steve Jobs called shit 5 years ago. And they sell more than 3 Million new iPads in 3 days.
Podcast: Download (20.7MB)
