For those who don’t already know, I have Repetition Workout Counter in the AppStore for iPhone and iPad. The most recent release – version 2.0 – added support for Apple Watch from day one. I didn’t quite know what to expect out of the Apple Watch. It’s quite an elegant piece of hard ware and software …
Category Archives: Apps & Software
July 2014: We Noticed Indie Died
It seems July 2014 may go down as the month when we realized being an indie (iOS) developer is no longer feasible. It’s not that something suddenly happened, rather, we collectively realized the same thing: there’s no way to make a living doing this. Rather than making a living off of developing one or two …
An Overview on Providing OAuth for Your Mobile App
I was recently playing around with an idea – a proof of concept – for an mobile app API. If you’ve never done this before, keep reading. The high-level requirements: A mobile app that you have control over An API you’re working on Users must be authenticated As I am the app and API owner, …
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Underwhelming Android Experience
Ryan Heise summed it up nicely in Four Months With Android. I used an HTC incredible for 11 months. There are some great things about Android, but the negatives far outweigh the benefits for me. Android was just underwhelming. The UI and UX isn’t as nicely polished as iOS. Android apps, on average, just aren’t …
Will Hybrid Mobile Apps Prevail Over Native?
I’ve been wrestling with this question for some time, and I thought this post may help sort out my thoughts and opinions while giving you some important insight. Are hybrid mobile apps going to become the developer’s choice anytime soon? The debate can be pretty heated as companies choose one technology over the other. Hybrid, …
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Catching Android’s Back Button in PhoneGap
This little bit of code is going to be useful to those of you developing a “singe page” app inside of PhoneGap. This applies to Sencha Touch (big fan), but doesn’t as much to jQuery mobile and jQTouch, as it’s a multi-page/navigation based event framework (it uses the app’s url string to do things like …
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Mobile Platform Detection on the web
I had a use case recently where I need to determine whether the client browser was a desktop/laptop/etc or a mobile device that supports tap events in JS. This will be useful to people who are dynamically binding different events to elements. var tmpElem = document.createElement(‘div’); tmpElem.setAttribute(‘tap’, ‘return;’); clickEvent = (typeof tmpElem.tap == “undefined”) ? …
Case in Point: Orbital iPhone App
Check out this article in TUAW about how an iPhone app, Orbital, isn’t really making it for the developer after less than (nearly?) 100,000 units sold. The article suggests it’s just a case of bad luck. True? I’m not so sure. Here’s why. Saturation It seems to me that the App Store is pretty saturated. …
Thoughts for the App Store
With regards to last night’s post on App Store pricing itself into an unprofitable wasteland, I thought of something. What if there were two versions of the App Store? One for inexpensive, useless, or just plain bad apps, and another for apps that met certain price, quality, or other criteria? For those wishing to make …
Race to the Bottom: iPhone App Store Pricing
I’ve had a notion for some time that the price wars on the app store may be detrimental to the community. I know I’m not alone in this feeling, and have found others online who would agree. Finding like-minded developers isn’t my goal. I’m wondering when, or if, the App Store will begin to resemble …
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