Category Archive for ‘Apple’

Apple Earnings Call

Jul 20, 2011

Apple had their quarterly earnings conference call yesterday, here are the highlights:

they continue to far surpass analysts expectations
for the first time iPad sales revenues surpassed the Mac ones
there is some accounting magic necessary, something to do with the expected earnings from people upgrading to Lion
Lion ships today
AppleTV continues to be a “hobby”, but they continue to invest in it because they believe there’s “something there”.
Regarding patent disputes, all they said ways they “like for people to invent their own things” and they will continue to protect their portfolio
A note that there will be a “product transition” (which they are not discussing yet) that will the affect the earnings of the coming quarter.

One of the perks of paying for both the iOS as well as the Mac development program is that you get early access to the latest OSX beta versions. (Apple abhores the term “BETA” and thus calls everything “Developer Preview” lately)

I’ve been running my MacBook Air on most of the preview builds of OSX 10.7 “Lion” and so I was exited to move to the Gold Master version as well. My SSD was partitioned in two halves, one for 10.6 “to be safe if I need it” and one for 10.7. Now with Lion being final and working well I wanted to reclaim the entire SSD for the new and shiny cat.

But something went horribly wrong. Let me tell you about that and raise your awareness for a couple of precautions.

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Releasing release

Jun 17, 2011

One of the new developer APIs presented at WWDC was something called Automatic Reference Counting. This term also was on this slide visible during the Keynote, so it’s no longer a secret.

ARC might just be the single piece of technology which excited WWDC attendees the most. We cannot discuss the details of what was presented during the conference, but there is already quite a bit of public information available. Enough to get every iOS developer excited.

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Gamification of Bug Reporting

Jun 16, 2011

I’ve been recently submitting a great deal of bug reports for iOS and OSX. I asked myself: “why does submitting these reports have to be so tedious?”

So I submitted the following as feature request for Apple’s bug reporter as Radar #9622340.

Problem: currently submitting bugs is a tedious process, browser based, non-social and you rarely feel that a bug report or feature request has made any difference.

Solution: A suggestion with the goal to make submitting bugs and feature requests more fun. More fun = better quality and more buy in from developers and users.

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WWDC Plague

Jun 15, 2011

There’s an addendum to my previous WWDC Wrap Up article that might come to you as a surprise, being a first-time attendant. Sudden debilitating sickness…

If you search twitter for “WWDC Plague”, you find a great number of people who have apparently caught it. Here’s a summary of the symptoms to help you diagnose it as well as some tips to avoid it next year.

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WWDC 2011 Wrap-Up

Jun 11, 2011

The 2011 Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conferences has come to a conclusion, with the final day passing by in light speed. My eyes are burning from being tired, my legs hurt from sitting and standing in line and my brain has turned into a mushy substance. Yet I feel like I have to sum up a couple of things I learned just so that I might anchor this experience just a little bit more deeply in my memory.

Hey you, Apple PR guy, don’t you worry about me revealing any details, this post is mostly about the emotional side of attending one of the most useful and exhilerating … pardon THE most useful and exhilarating experience that’s available to a Mac/iOS developer. This being my first such conference I think I have found a couple of strategies that might severs as a reference in future years.

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On “Getting Sherlocked”

Jun 07, 2011

I learned a new term today, “being sherlocked”. At first I found myself slightly giggling, because we named the dog “Sherlock Holmes”. How can that be a verb?

This verb was widely used together with various app names. Instapaper? Sherlocked! Dropbox? Sherlocked! And even Apple’s competitors. Amazon/Google? Sherlocked. Doubly so.

Now I cannot stand if somebody tweets smart things without explaining them, so I looked it up. I could only find one suitable explanation. UPDATE: Actually there’s another one which implies malvolence by Apple. See bottom of article.

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WWDC 2011 Keynote

Jun 06, 2011

When I queued in the morning at about 4 I was around number 270 in line. That landed me a seat in the back third of the largest of the conference rooms of the Moscone Center, called Presidio. Which is weird, because Steve told us that 1500 people made it into the room. But hey, I was there, great success for my first WWDC.

Let me give you a quick summary of what we saw, as all of this is public knowledge and not under NDA. For the remaining sessions I am unfortunately bound by the NDA. Also – while I was on fire tweeting like crazy – I got stopped dead by Twitter which suddenly started to tell me that I cannot tweet any more as @Cocoanetics, I should wait for a couple of hours. So I had to switch to my personal account @OliverDrobnik to finish reporting.

The big three items to be discussed had been already pre-announced: OSX Lion, iOS 5 and iCloud.

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Most Amazing Keynote Ever

May 31, 2011

Apple PR just confirmed that this year’s WWDC keynote will go down in history as the most amazing keynote ever, and your’s truly will be in attendance. Unfortunately I am not prepared for camping out to get in the main conference venue to make sure I can see that with my own eyes. Oh, how much I would love to be able to make it…

The four pillars of amazingness have been confirmed to be:

The Amazing Steve Jobs himself
Lion “Unveiling”
iOS 5, Codename “Fleeting Image”
iCloud, the amazing cloud service with the extra i

This effectively rises my excitement level to new heights. Apple had kept their iOS 5 plans really close to their chest to avoid Google stealing the coolest ideas and thunder.

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Locating Controversy

Apr 27, 2011

Now that most everybody is buying into the (probably false) rumor that the iPhone 5 will be coming in Fall, the news media were only too happy to latch onto the fact that there is a database of locations on user’s desktops that could be used to infer his location information.

Last week a young cousin-in-law of mine came to me touting “did you know that the iPhone tracks you everywhere?” to which I already had formed an opinion and response. The iPhone does not track YOU. And on famous podcasts like the ones of the TWIT network you keep hearing the false information that it is indeed GPS locations that are recorded. Not so.

In this article I will debunk some of the myths so that you don’t have to stand idly by while people are talking nonsense and thus might be tarnishing the otherwise squeaky clean image of our beloved iOS platform.

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