Development

The developer iTunes connect snafu

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Dave Verwer, writing for iOS Dev Weekly:

From what I can determine from the tweets, there was about a 30-45 minute period when people logging in to iTunes Connect were seeing other random accounts instead of their own.

On leaving the Mac App Store

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Last May, Cabel Sasser, co-founder of Panic, announced that the team was pulling Coda, their highly regarded web development tool, from the Mac App Store, primarily due to sandboxing issues.

Yesterday, they published the results of this experiment.

iOS 8 App Development Becomes a “Bring Me a Rock” Game

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Adam Engst, writing for TidBITS:

The common thread that ties these disparate apps together is that all are trying to take advantage of iOS 8’s new Extensibility features. Those include custom keyboards, Notification Center widgets, custom Share actions and extensions, photo and video editing extensions, and document provider extensions — iMore has a comprehensive explanation of Extensibility.

The problem is that Apple has not published clear guidelines about what is acceptable.

There are a lot of issues related to the App Store that are troubling developers.

Off to work at 

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Jeremy Foo writes about his 4 year pursuit of a development job at Apple.

The true nature of the pixels on an iPhone 6 Plus

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Ole Begemann used a closeup camera rig to take pictures of the iPhone 6 Plus screen doing its downsampling magic. Pretty pictures, and he published all his code on GitHub for folks who want to try this themselves.

Apple Watch, WatchKit and iOS

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What OS is running on the Apple Watch. There’s some clues that say it’s a slimmed down version of iOS.

Build your own Apple I from scratch

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I love to build stuff, especially if it involves circuit boards and solder. I’ve made my share of guitar interfaces (some of which actually do what they are supposed to!) and gadgets of all stripes.

In the video below, Ben Heck from Element 14 talks you through the first part of the process of building a working Apple I computer, complete with peekable, pokable ROM. Part 2 is scheduled to be released Friday night, November 14th.

15 year old Google Science Fair finalist, an iPhone, and a huge boost for Alzheimer’s patients

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[VIDEO] 15 year old Kenneth Shinozuka lives in New York City with his parents, aunt and grandfather. He’s one smart kid.

Kenneth’s grandfather suffers from Alzheimer’s and tended to wander out of their apartment at night, getting out in the streets of New York City, causing a number of accidents, not to mention a lot of worry.

Kenneth’s solution won him one of the 15 finalist slots at the 2014 Google Science Fair. Watch the video. Incredible work.

MIT’s slick new UI merges your iPhone and laptop interaction

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[VIDEO] MIT’s experimental THAW UI project lets you overlay your iPhone over your computer screen, capturing data from your computer and interacting with objects, creating a single, fluid environment. To get a sense of it, watch the video below. The real fun starts about 45 seconds in.

Terminal tricks

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Terminal is the Mac OS X command line tool that gives you access to unbridled destructive power (i.e., step carefully). You’ll find it in Applications / Utilities. If you are brand new to Terminal, here’s a very gentle intro.

If you use Terminal on a regular basis, take some time to dig into Craig Hockenberry’s fantastic Terminal tricks blog post. Some of these you’ll know, but some will likely be new to you. It’s deep, it’s long, and so well written. Pass this one along to your tech friends.

Google’s attempt to solve their jarring fragmentation problem

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There are a number of reasons developers develop for iOS first, or avoid Android completely. Perhaps the top two reasons are OS fragmentation and device fragmentation, both of which drive up the development costs (more use cases to build for, more use cases to test for).

This post from GigaOM makes the case that Google has solved these problems, at least in part. The key is Google’s Play Services.

Play Services, introduced in 2012, is effectively a background download of core services required to run apps on Android. Putting the OS install numbers to one side for a moment, this is the stat that matters to developers – over 93 percent of all Android users are running the latest version of Google Play Services.

More importantly, Google has been slowly moving core Android features, APIs and app elements out of the OS and into Google Play Services — meaning developers can ensure their apps run smoothly (with all the new features they plan to implement) across all devices carrying the latest infrastructure.

On making a living from the App Store

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David Smith:

This past week has seen an explosion of writing and discussion about the business of making software for sale on the iOS App Store. Personally I love it when these little bubbles of discussion appear. If you’ve listened to me for any period of time you’ll know that one of the things I really like is being a student of the App Store. These discussions provide the opportunity and motivation for all sorts of anecdotes which help expand my view on where things stand.

This post is a trifecta. There’s a link to the Developing Perspective podcast, where David Smith lays all this out verbally. There’s the post itself (which really clicked for me). And there’s the wealth of related links at the end of the post.

Google woos select developers with Startup Launch

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Google has created a new, invitation-only program that gives selected developers access to:

• Mentorship from our Google Developer Experts and Developer Relations
• Exclusive invitation to networking events
• Access to free training, startup bootcamps and resources
• Featuring in our spotlight section

Think Apple should do something like this?

Android Wear fail, no way to install paid apps

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Android Police:

App Encryption was added to the Play Store to encode paid apps with a device-specific key, making them more difficult to crack or transplant by would-be pirates. Despite some early issues that lead Google to temporarily take App Encryption offline, it has gone mostly unnoticed since it was re-enabled. That is, until now. It seems the Android Wear install process runs into a road block with paid apps because it doesn’t know how to extract the file of the encrypted apk. Since the installer fails to recognize the payload, it assumes there is nothing to install and silently aborts. This behavior appears to match another known issue that occurs if the Wear app is compressed more than once before it is published.

Seems to me, this is a real weak point in the Android Wear testing methodology.

Apple is a company made of people

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Allen Pike writes on the cultural shift within Apple:

With the WWDC NDA lifted, other Apple employees, from the creator of Swift to various API maintainers, took to Twitter to gather feedback on all the goodies they’d dumped on developers. In the web community this would be expected behaviour. In the Apple community, it’s a delight.

Terrific read.

This is what it feels like when your startup fails

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This is a heartbreaking story, made harder by the fact that I met one of the principals of this story, Marcin, when I was in New York visiting another startup. I liked Marcin and I liked the concept. Unfortunately, the business model was just not strong enough. Lessons here for everyone.