Mobile Couch

Jake and Jelly are joined by Stuart Hall, co-founder of Discovr and creator of AppBot to discuss the story behind his Seven Minute Workout experiment, but not before they followup on health and NSURLCache (not to mention caching in general). They discuss the mindsets of people who buy apps when they”re dropped to free, adding in-app purchases to apps, and the differences between launching apps now, compared to the early days.

More Xamarin talk, as the boys discuss its cross-platform benefits, the impressive IDE, and how it compares to native cross-platform development; Jake requests help with a problem he”s having with collection views in Xamarin; staying healthy when you spend so much time hunched over a keyboard, while also improving your workflow; and what the best practice is for caching downloaded data.

With his interest officially piqued, Jake is looking into Xamarin, and so the boys discuss making apps in alternative languages and the pros and cons attached to that. Afterwards, they share their origin stories, including Jake’s desire to be an actor, Jelly’s short-lived stint in theatre, Ben’s dream of being a pilot, and why freelance work is so dang addictive. Finally, they discuss the shortcomings of UICollectionView and what the best way of containing “hack” code is.

Casey Liss - co-host of the hugely popular ATP and Neutral podcasts - joins the couch to talk about being recognised by strangers, what the schedule is like doing a podcast while working a day job, and the difference between travelling to WWDC from Australia and from the East Coast of the US. Somewhere in-between, we find time to discuss Visual Studio vs. Xcode, writing and wrapping APIs, and the cross contamination of coding languages.

We answer questions about the best way to learn OpenGL, and what would we want to be working on if we worked Apple; we follow up on the status of our own recent App submissions and discuss the appeal system; and we discuss some of the differences between developing for Android and iOS.

Dealing with rejection and the app review process in general; how the review process works, review times, tricks for managing timing your app’s release and the difference between personal and enterprise developer accounts; and Ben gives an introduction to making mobile games by discussing some of the game engines that exist out there and reasons why you would choose one over the other.

An explanation of Objective C++; what ARC is and the gotchas you need to look out for when using it; reasons why now is a great time to get into making apps for iDevices; Jake talks about his experiences trying out Windows Azure, and looks at what sort of uses it’s designed for; and MoodStocks, an image recognition API you can use in your apps.

With WWDC over for another year, Ben and Jelly discuss some of the new technologies that you”ll be able to use with your apps and the sessions you should watch so you can make your apps shine on iOS7; and Jelly explains an app he recently discovered called Oyster, which is a tool for testing regular expressions and even writing the code to use them. 101: Platforms State of the Union 400: What’s New in Xcode 5 228: Hidden Gems in Cocoa and Cocoa Touch 204: What’s New with Multitasking 206: Getting Started with UIKit Dynamics 502: Introduction to Sprite Kit 210: Introducing Text Kit 220: Advanced Text Layouts and Effects with Text Kit 217: Exploring Scroll Views on iOS 7 218: Custom Transitions Using View Controllers

Following up on asking for reviews and how it makes users feel; a comparison of ways to pass messages back and forth between classes: delegates, notifications and blocks; some speculation on what additions iOS 7 will bring which we can implement in our apps; and a little overview of Reveal from Itty Bitty Apps.

One More Thing conference is over and Ben and Jelly give their in-depth recap, touching on interesting (and helpful!) talks from Amanda Rösler, Simeon Saëns, Dave Wiskus, Lex Friedman, Maggie Steciuk and Jaimee Newberry. Jake talks about his experiences with Mapbox and Tilemill, a set of services that allow you to easily use custom maps in your iOS applications.

The top 25 apps of all time, and what can be learned from them; skeuomorphic design vs. flat design, choosing the correct icons, and what good design really means when it comes to building your apps; guided access, the system feature that nobody knows about; a handy method for using vector icons in your app by utilising PDFs; and some tools to help you prototype and test your apps: Heatma.ps and Briefs 2.

Why you would go to WWDC (assuming you manage to get a ticket); a new plugin manager for Xcode, Alcatraz, is released; techniques for debugging your apps, including a discussion about profiling using Instruments and how it helps you track down issues. Also this week, we”re joined by Ben Trengrove, who is taking over hosting from Caleb.

The importance of user-testing apps and some techniques for testing with users; making apps accessible for vision-impared users; using plugins with Xcode; and the team behind CocoaPods releases CocoaDocs: a single source for open-source library documentation.

The Pebble smart watch and the development possibilities of Google Glass and Siri integration; Caleb”s plans for making money from his new free app, Cute Fruit; places for learning about new techniques and frameworks in the Objective-C frameworks; releasing open source projects and how CocoaPods is a great tool for discovering them; Jake gives a general overview of how to use bitmasks in your own projects.

Filing Radars for SDK bugs, the usefulness and importance of Open Radar, dynamically overlaying your app”s details directly on the icon, Caleb”s new app Cute Fruit and marketing your app through video, word of mouth and advertising. Plus an interview with Russell Ivanovic (@rustyshelf) of Shifty Jelly.

Developing with multiple versions of your app on your test devices, advertising your app and tracking the success of advertising (without having your app rejected), and setting up a server backend to add server functionality to your app, including persisting your Core Data storage in the cloud, sharing data via a simple API, and adding the ability to remotely update your app”s settings on user”s devices.

Follow-up on Hola! Unblocker, automating build numbers and Nimbus (with a short discussion about CocoaPods and whether it’s good or not), the pros and cons of using Storyboards in your app from prototyping to full-blown app, and how to approach version targeting with your app. Please note: there is some unfortunate noise and echo present in this episode. We apologise for this. Please know that we are doing our best to ensure that the show is the best quality that it can be.

Superbowl 101, Superbowl ads, the Apple TV, and content distribution. In more on-topic conversation, Jelly gets suggestions on how to deal with a new project, and Jake, Jelly and Caleb discuss useful third-party libraries, issue tracking and distributing test builds. If you”re not interested in hearing the casual banter about non-development topics, the boys start discussing the podcast itself and the development related topics at 0:23:44. This sort of behaviour where they blatantly disobey listener”s requests may or may not continue in the future. Stay tuned to find out!