One fine day, late summer 2013, I noticed that Apple had added a ton of new functionality to iOS, in particular related to barcodes. This set a train of thought in motion, the fruits of which are just now beginning to show.
Category Archive for ‘Business’ 
Mysterious Sudden Twitter Fame
Monday afternoon, in the Cocoanetics offices. Colleague René is discussing with us an approach how to centralize some code without inheritance and is drawing on the whiteboard. Suddenly my iPhone begins to vibrate.
My first thought was that this must be the silent ringing when there is an incoming voice call. It didn’t stop even though we tried to ignore it for a few seconds. Then I glanced at the phone and noticed that I was getting a flash flood of push notifications from Tweetbot.
Update: JustUnfollow posted an interview with me.
Peer Assembly acquires Linguan
Drobnik KG, Austria and Peer Assembly Ltd., Ireland – We are announcing that effective today Peer Assembly has acquired the Linguan Mac app.
Linguan is a Mac-based tool for comfortably editing localization strings in iOS and Mac apps. It is used and loved by more than 10,000 users. Linguan also verifies that when new languages or features are added to localized apps that there are no translations missing.
Linguan was developed and marketed by Drobnik KG in partnership with Byte Poets GmbH, also based in Austria. Both companies had too much else on their plate to be able to put the amount of time into Linguan that it deserved. Therefore the decision was made to search for a buyer.
Aviation Authorities Allow PEDs On Plane
The safety of airplanes travelling is generally overseen by two major agencies: the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA). The country where airplanes are registered – the so-called “tail number” – decides which of these administrations’ rules you need to follow. There are many more, almost each state has their own, but these are the ones that everybody is copying the rules from.
The FAA being the oldest such agency announced on October 31, 2013 that they are going to relax the rules on the use of personal electronic devices. So it came as no surprise that the EASA essentially copied the recommendation and published their own press release on November 13, 2013.
Linguan Acquisition Update
Earlier this year we announced that we are now looking for somebody to acquire our Mac app Linguan.
We had half a dozen interested parties inquire, but in general our initial price target of 10000 Euro was too steep for all. So my partners at BytePoets and I discussed this matter and we are now dropping the price.
Selling Linguan
It is with a heavy heart that today we’re announcing that we are looking for a buyer interested in acquiring our Mac localization tool Linguan.
International Internship Fail
When I read this article about Unpaid Internships back in May I got a feeling that I should try to do something about this injustice. In fact I know of several companies here in Austria who are also receiving cheap labor from college students who just need a place to do some “research” for a paper or degree.
This article summarizes what I learned about Internships and some of the pitfalls when trying to do International Internships from the point of view of an Austrian company. Most of this probably applies to companies globally.
QA: Consultant or Employee
Over my iOS developer career so far I’ve had several people ask me in one way or the other if and how I would want to work for them. This includes several international corporations, though I’d prefer to not name names. The range of such questions ranged from asked if I wanted to join a specific team all the way to an acquisition-hire.
Just this morning I found this email in my inbox:
Oliver, would you prefer to be “consultant” or part of a team. Here is our vision, its […]
I had begun to compose a lengthy e-mail, but my efficiency sense tingles when I pass a certain threshold. So I figure I want to document my thoughts on this question for future generations and interested readers.
Reuters Uses DTCoreText
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.
Parts Store Spring Cleaning
We received an overhaul of our WordPress template today which allows for a better shopping experience if you buy components on our Parts Store. The new system allows us for showing the price calculation and also lets us show an arbitrary number of options.
