Tag Archives: Apple

Roundup of Swiss Companies Writing Mac Apps

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A lot has been said and done about the iPhone, but there’s much more to Cocoa and Objective-C than our beloved pocket device.

During a chat session with Stefan Fürst from Media Atelier we put together a quick list of significant Mac applications created in Switzerland (and southern Germany), and indeed the list (in no particular order) is nothing short of impressive; check it out:

It really looks like the Swiss enjoy writing Mac apps (I certainly do and will publish mine soon!). Have I forgotten anyone? Please don’t be upset, and feel free to leave your links in the comments below. I’d love to know who else is creating killer apps for the Mac in a radius of 300 km around Zürich!

Disclaimer: I’m not affiliated with any of these companies (I’m just a friend of Stefan). And if you’re more into “enterprisey” stuff, here’s the “Swiss-Made Software” label site that you migth find more interesting ;)

Update, 2009-10-23: Some more applications added after the publication of this post:

  • Luscious SMS, the SMS client for the Mac;
  • Special mention for Cyberduck, an open source FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Cloud Files & Amazon S3 Browser for Mac OS X, or “the poor man’s version of Transmit” :)

Update, 2009-10-24: Sophie Teuschler tells me not to forget the multiple Apple Design Award winners SubEthaEdit and BoinxTV by The Coding Monkeys, not far from Switzerland, in Bavaria…!

Update, 2009-10-25: I’ve just received an e-mail from Cyril Pavillard about his company Mnemis and their product Uniboard which looks absolutely awesome by any standards. Be sure to check out this cool Swiss project!

Update, 2009-11-12: Just found out about noidentity and their MoneyBook iPhone application. It seems that this application is just a copy from another one called “pennies”. Shame on you noidentity.

iPhone and Mac OS X Developer Conference Roundup

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Here’s a quick review of the most important iPhone and Mac OS X developer conferences I’ve found on the web (in no particular order). Definitely, there’s no shortage of conferences when you need information about the latest Cocoa, Mac OS X and iPhone technologies; check this out!

  • Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference or WWDC, held every year in San Francisco, CA (USA), usually around June, and featuring presentations from Apple employees; if you’ve never been to one, believe me, you should;
  • Voices That Matter iPhone Developer Conference to be held in Boston, MA (USA) next October 17th and 18th, with (among others) Erica Sadun, Aaron Hillegass, Stephen Kochan and Marcus Zarra;
  • NSConference, to be held from January 31st to February 3rd next year near Reading (UK), and from February 21st to February 24th in the Georgia Tech Institute, GA (USA), featuring (among others) Matt Gemmell, Marcus Zarra and Aaron Hillegass;
  • The 360|iDev conference that just finished in Denver, CO (USA), which featured (among many others) Bill Dudney, Brent Simmons, and Marcus Zarra (definitely, Marcus Zarra is everywhere!);
  • The iPhone Developer Summit in Santa Clara, CA (USA) next November 3rd;
  • The iGames Summit, a conference targeted to iPhone game developers, held last March in San Francisco, CA (USA), featuring (among many others) Neil Young (from ngmoco), Andrew Lacy (from Tapulous) and Mike Mettler (from AdMob);
  • The Macoun Entwicklerkonferenz which happened last September 26th in Frankfurt (Germany);
  • The iPhone developer conference in Köln (Germany), in December 1st and 2nd;
  • And finally, the JAOO iPhone Dev Day in Zürich (Switzerland) next October 8th, featuring Raven Zachary, Alex Cone and… many others ;)

Also noteworthy, but not so much about software development I think, is the Mobile Enterprise Conference in Amsterdam (Netherlands) on November 3rd, which has a couple of tracks about the iPhone in enterprise.

Feel free to add links to other similar events elsewhere in the world!

Update, 2009-10-02: Here’s the link to Jonathan ‘Wolf’ Rentzsch’s C4 Independent Developers Conference.

Update, 2009-10-03: The Øredev 2009 Developer Conference in Malmö (Sweden) next November has iPhone / Mobile tracks too. And so will the Scandinavian Developer Conference 2010 in Göteborg (also in Sweden).

Risk Management in iPhone Projects

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Let’s be frank: it’s not the best time to be an iPhone developer right now. In just one year of existence, the App Store seems to have evolved from the hottest to the lamest status, without any time to breathe in the middle, but with some warning signs every so often.

appstore

Several iPhone developers have publicly stated their opposition to the Google Voice fiasco (starting with Riverturn themselves, the developers of the application), and many have simply stopped creating iPhone OS applications altogether; just to name a few, Fraser Speirs, Steven Frank and Andrew Wulf have publicly stated that they don’t want to deal with the App Store process anymore. And I’m sure that there are many more developers evaluating this very possibility out there; when you have Om Malik or Michael Arrington bashing the iPhone, it sure creates a lot of buzz and uncertainty in the market.

However, and this is my official position, even if I do not agree with the current App Store policies, I’m not quitting the iPhone OS platform anytime soon. I’ll build more applications for the iPhone in the future – heck, I’ve got 2 already approved and 3 more on the approval process pipeline, with at least 3 more in the development phase. My plan, and what this article is about, is about managing the risk represented by Apple in this business. It might be hard, but it’s not impossible, no matter what others say. Continue reading →

Myself on the Swiss Press

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This is something that does not happen that often to me, so it deserves a blog post of its own: here’s two appearances of yours truly in the Swiss press last week. The first one is an article in the Tages Anzeiger of last Wednesday (full text available online), and the second one is an article (with photo) on the SonntagsZeitung last Sunday. Since the SonntagsZeitung article is not available online, here’s the scan of the article.

Yay! :)

WWDC 2009: a message for Scott Forstall

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I won’t go into details into all the stuff shown during the keynote; this is just a single comment for Scott Forstall: STOP THE BLOODY DEMOS. Last year it was pretty unbearable, yet this year you managed to make it even worse.

Thankfully I am not the only one who thinks that the interminable series of demos is just a waste of our time, when all we want is to see new stuff in the SDK. We’re developers, not marketing people.

iPhone SDK 3.0: A New Beginning

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Last year I blogged about the upcoming SDK 2.0 for the iPhone 3G, and boy did it change my life. For those who haven’t followed closely everything that happened in this blog lately, there’s been this (that’s me in the WWDC keynote main room at the Moscone center) and then that (yours truly talking at the first ever European iPhone conference). All of this has been the result of going to San Francisco last June. That particular trip changed everything; I never thought that a simple plane ticket could generate this much.

The iPhone has literally changed my professional life. But it was only the beginning. Last Tuesday, Apple announced the iPhone SDK 3.0, and I’ll expose here some thoughts about what’s coming next. Continue reading →

That iPhone Keypad

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Finishing my series of copied flattered UIs, like that Facebook thingy or that Twitterriffic gadget, here’s Apple’s own iPhone keyboard, in a really sloppy implementation that has been blatantly and horribly copied, with awful sounds that pop when you tap the numbers and such. The Fring iPhone application uses a similar keyboard, but with a different color set.

This code, apart from showing the keyboard and playing those sounds, it doesn’t do anything else, even if a simple “tel:” URL call might suffice to turn it into a real dialer. As usual the code is on Github; feel free to play with it, extend it, and do what you want.

Asynchronous Loading of Images in a UITableView

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This is one of the most common scenarios for network- + UITableView-based applications; a UITableView instance whose contents come from the network; not only the text, but also the images! Somehow we all want to reproduce the behavior of the App Store (or of the iTunes) iPhone application, where the icons (or covers) of the apps (or songs) are downloaded one by one, as you scroll the table, without crashing nor opening 1000 simultaneous network connections.

My solution (there might be many others!) consists in the following key elements:

  • Avoid loading images right after the RSS feed is parsed; instead, use the -tableView:willDisplayCell:forRowAtIndexPath: delegate method in the controller to trigger the loading of the image for cells that become visible; this ensures that only the cells that are visible will receive the order to load images from the network;
  • Use a “model” class for each element of the table, and make the custom UITableViewCell subclass a delegate of this model object; then, the model object is responsible of loading its own image, and will tell the UITableViewCell when done;
  • Use the ASIHTTPRequest framework, with a shared download queue in the application delegate, so that all of the requests are properly queued, and network resources are properly used;
  • Show feedback to the user with scrolling wheels whenever and wherever appropriate;
  • Use the Reachability class from Apple’s own sample code to see if we’re really connected to Flickr, and otherwise show an error to the user.

I have created a sample project, as usual in Github, where I gather RSS data from Flickr’s public feed, and then I download synchronously the preview images of the feed. I even included a very simple Core Animation effect which reminds me of how the iTunes iPhone application allows us to hear previews of the songs we want to buy (the image flips and shows another view “behind”).

Feel free to contribute, fork, enjoy, read, use in your own projects, as you want. As I said, there might be many other (and most probably better) approaches to do this, so feel free to leave your comments below, as usual.