One of the topics during the Reverse Q&A Panel at CocoaConf Columbus last weekend was how people felt about the Mac App Store and selling apps on it. Now that Apple is enforcing the sandbox requirements, some Mac developers have stopped selling on it and others are considering it. Read More
Here’s a tip I picked up last night at our local Cocoaheads meeting: if you have a lot of RAM in your machine and a decent chunk of it is not currently in use, create a RAM disk and mount it at ~/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData. Read More
CocoaConf is returning to Columbus August 9-11, 2012. They have a great line-up of speakers again this year and Light Year Software is proud to be a sponsor of this year’s conference.
It is common for conferences to offer a full-day beginner’s tutorial the day before the full conference begins, but being a beginner’s tutorial, there isn’t anything to draw in the more experienced developers. CocoaConf is trying something new this year. Chris Adamson, the author of Learning Core Audio, is doing a full-day deep-dive on Core Audio.
I’m returning to do a pair of talks on networking, expanding on last year’s single session. The first will cover NSURLConnection and other basic networking APIs, plus a discussion of tips you can use to make the best use of the network and keep your app feeling fast and responsive. The second session will cover more advanced material, including how to use raw TCP and UDP sockets with Cocoa and discover services on the network with Bonjour and GameKit.
Paid upgrades in Apple’s App Stores has been a topic of some debate since the App Stores launched. Wil Shipley stoked the fires back in March, arguing that the Mac App Store needs paid upgrades:
Right now developers selling through the Mac App Store face a lose/lose choice: either provide all major upgrades to existing customers for free (thus losing a quarter of our revenue), or create a “new†product for each major version (creating customer confusion) and charge existing customers full price again (creating customer anger).
If you’re considering syncing Core Data to iCloud in your app, Drew McCormack of The Mental Faculty has a terrific series of articles discussing the difficulties he encountered while adding support for it to Mental Case. Read More
My friend Ben Lachman (@blach) has started a new venture called Nice Mohawk and they released their first iOS app yesterday: Ita. Ita is a universal, Retina-ready list-making app that syncs across all your devices with iCloud.
It’s available at an introductory price of 99¢ for the next two weeks. I’ve been beta testing it for the last couple of weeks and it is a beautifully designed and finely polished app.
If you have a VPS for web applications, it’s relatively easy to set up your own L2TP/IPsec VPN for use by Mac OS X or iOS clients. When you’re away from your home or office on someone else’s Wi-Fi (at coffee shops or a conference), it’s a good idea to use a VPN to keep your network use secure and private. While there are free VPN services (Cloak is one), the free plan is time and bandwidth limited. You can pay to lift the time limit, but why pay for another service if you can piggyback on another you already have? Read More
Yesterday, Laurent Sansonetti announced RubyMotion, the first product from his new company, HipByte. Laurent is the creator of MacRuby and worked on it part-time while an employee at Apple.
RubyMotion is interesting, but I don’t have any plans to use it myself, especially for client work. There are two reasons. Read More
I am not an artist, but a fact of life when creating apps in 2012 is that Apple’s standard Cocoa controls don’t provide everything. PaintCode is perfect for those times when I need a relatively simple icon that can be composed from shapes and I don’t have the budget to hire a designer. Read More
Here’s one thing to do with an older iPad if you recently replaced it with the new Retina model:
Get Air Display on the iOS App Store ($10) and use that older iPad as a second display when you’re working away from your regular desk. Read More