Mobile Couch

Basil Shkara - indie developer and creator of Bee - joins Ben and Jelly to discuss succeeding as an indie developer, marketing your app, and the scary world of SEO optimisation.

Ben, Jake and Jelly discuss access control, using target/selector style method calls, and avoiding retain cycles in Swift (with a recap on how to debug them with Heapshot Analysis). They then take a look at test-driven development, asynchronous tests, and learning on-the-job. Plus, Moodstocks’ new pricing structure, the competitive GIF app market, and the failures of voice command interfaces.

Jelly hasn’t had enough discussion of diversity yet, Jake discusses whether Apple should use a stick or a carrot to try to enforce accessible apps, and Ben explains how the Swift runtime works. Meanwhile, Jake talks about GovHack, a hackathon based around open data from services like data.gov.au. Plus, he and Ben have just shipped a new app for multiple platforms, and it spurs a discussion about the best method for targeting the various platforms. Not to be outdone, Jelly discusses his QA “experiment”, looking at the benefits of having other people provide feedback on your code, and the wide variety of approaches to developing apps.

Jelly talks about his new open-source library (and its terrible name), which leads into a discussion about the differences between table and collection views in iOS. Jake discusses his recent work with user testing, accessibility and the various ways that vision impaired users navigate their iDevices. The couch then talks about adaptive layout, what it could mean for future devices and why it has a different name to “responsive” design for the web. Finally, they touch on Google I/O and Android L’s new design direction, as well as the diversity amongst presenters during their keynote.

Swift: everyone’s excited about it, but that doesn’t mean it’s without oddities, shortfalls and issues. The couch attempts to cover as much of what they’ve learned so far about Apple’s new programming language, and in the mean time, discover that there are some things they simply cannot understand about this language.

Russell Ivanovic joins Jake and Jelly to discuss the fall out from this year’s WWDC: the things they’re excited about, the things that are going to change the ecosystem, and most importantly, the story of Rusty’s visit to Noosa with Google Now. 402: Introduction to Swift 403: Intermediate Swift 223: Prototyping: Fake It Till You Make It 211: Designing Intuitive User Experiences 226: What’s New in Table Views and Collection Views 235: Advanced Scrollviews and Touch Handling Techniques

Following up on the discussion about auto layout in the last episode, Jake and Jelly team up to compare it with manual frame management in a view from one of Jelly’s projects. Then come the WWDC predictions for language, frameworks, and even hardware as the couch attempts to peek into the future for what awaits us in the next couple of weeks.

It’s a rapid-fire episode, as the couch discusses follow-up about replacing Objective-C, C#’s async/await feature, supporting iOS 6 and 7’s UI, using Auto Layout to simplify UI layout math, the benefits of using Magical Record with Core Data, when to use Expedited Reviews, and variability in Beacon signal strength.

Instead of learning enough to talk about it himself, Jake probes Ash Furrow – author of Functional Reactive Programming on iOS – about functional programming, ReactiveCocoa, and the future of Objective-C. Meanwhile, Jelly sticks his head in occasionally to make terrible jokes, and Ben just simply doesn’t show up.

Creating an inclusive and flexible culture, whether it be through the way you speak, or simply by understanding the differences between people’s personal priorities. Follow-up about code-style leads into a discussion about code-folding, laying out your methods within a file, and the battle between useful features, extensibility and bloat in an IDE. Finally, WWDC tickets and whether the improvements have really made a difference.

The couch discusses about code styles and conventions: using tabs or spaces, casing in class names, and how to name consts. Along the way, Ben, Jake and Jelly touch on whether consistency is important for teams, judging people based on their style choices, and getting Xcode to enforce your own specific style.

Jake and Ben tell us all about their experiences using Bluetooth LE beacons as part of their most recent joint project: how beacons work, triangulating a user’s location by laying out a series of beacons, plus iOS7’s iBeacon API, and issues you’ll run into in real world usage. In the meantime, Jelly updates everyone on how GIFwrapped is doing, and we discuss a bunch of completely unrelated topics, like geoblocks, House of Cards and fake phone numbers.

Lessons learned from the launch of Jelly’s latest app, GIFwrapped: expedited reviews, asking for reviews within the update notes, helping users, enabling and setting up iAd, as well as disabling Ads for beta testers. Plus, ranting about how iAd isn’t as easy as it says on the box, the goto fail debacle, and replacing Objective-C.

Marc Edwards - designer and podcast co-host - claims a spot on the couch to share how Bjango got started building Mac and iOS apps, as well as some insight on Skala and its place in the world. We also talk about reducing the build-adjust-build cycle, the importance of having some technical knowledge when designing software, and wax lyrical about the future of user interfaces.

Feedback about asking for ratings prompts a discussion about when alert views should be used and when a different approach might be better; dealing with personally identifiable data within Australia, how and what you need to be doing when dealing with it; open-sourcing an entire app, why you would (or wouldn”t) want to do it (and how you should approach that decision); using Parse to quickly build cloud infrastructure for sophisticated apps; and layout-to-layout transitions in iOS7.

The benefits (and the costs) of open sourcing your code; using HockeyApp to track beta testers, why you might want to do such a thing (or not), and a discussion about the various methods of learning about how people use your apps; getting feedback, offering support, asking people to rate your app and where you draw the line; a quick discussion about AngularJS, a nifty little javascript library for creating web apps; and finally, some recommendations for books you might like to read.

Ben and Jelly travel to Kinglake, Victoria for NSCamp: a long weekend of coding and hacking for mobile devices. While they’re there, they do a special episode for the attendees, conducting lightning interviews with several of the developers in attendance; Sean Woodhouse from Itty Bitty Apps; Gerald Kim, who worked on the iPad app, Cook; Chris Miles, the man behind Reveal’s 3D view; and Armin Kroll, the organiser of NSCamp itself.

The effect that NDAs have on a project, do they help an app succeed, or are they unnecessary? Ben asks for some freelancing tips, which leads to a discussion of how to quote on work and what to do to find work as a freelancer. Jake introduces AFNetworking 2.0, and discusses one of the new features, URL sessions.

With Jelly’s need for a new Macbook Pro and the recent Apple event, now is as good a time as any to discuss the fallout, including new hardware and the consumer expectation of free software; Jake presents an idea for another app involving iBeacons; and Ben announces some news that gets the couch talking about making the choice to go freelance.

Jake’s excited about iBeacons, and so he discusses use cases, implementation and where to get actual beacons from; and we follow it up with a discussion about Core Data: what it is, what it’s useful for and some of the useful tools and add-ons that will help you manage your Core Data app.