February 2012
1 post
2 tags
What is your true purpose in life?
I have been thinking quite deep nowadays… Here are some of my recent thoughts and the things I keep saying to myself for the last couple of days.
Believe that you are on this earth, and you are who you are because of a specific reason. You have a reason to live and if you discover your life’s true purpose, all of your decisions will be much easier and your path will be clearer.
...
December 2011
3 posts
2 tags
While loading a custom UIView from a xib
Instead of this:
NSArray *bundle = [[NSBundle mainBundle] loadNibNamed:@”CategoryView” owner:self options:nil];
CategoryView *categoryView = (CategoryView *)[bundle objectAtIndex:0];
for (id object in bundle) { if ([object isKindOfClass:[CategoryView class]]) categoryView = (CategoryView *)object;
}
Isn’t this nicer and shorter?
CategoryView *categoryView =...
2 tags
Overload
I have 500+ friends on Facebook.
I am following more than 350 people on Twitter.
I have 1000+ unread items in my Google Reader account.
I have even more unread items under my Flipboard account.
I can’t stop checking my email every 1-2 hours.
I have tens of unread books on my book shelf.
I have tens of unread iBooks on my iPad.
I have hundreds of bookmarks on Safari that I saved for...
4 tags
SESpringBoard is now paginated!
I just added some paging support to my new iOS control. Now if you have more than 12 items in your stack, it is gonna get paged beautifully and will have a page control in the bottom of the screen.
You can grab SESpringBoard from GitHub and use it in your projects freely. Be sure to fork it if you have some ideas for any additional functionality :)
November 2011
3 posts
4 tags
Decided to learn Objective-C and iOS?
So you are learning Objective-C and all about the iOS framework to create iPhone apps. Keep in mind that you are investing in a closed platform and it might not be as valuable as today in 2-3 years time.
Investing in HTML5 and being able to create multi-device apps faster than writing ObjC, will be much more important in the future.
In the end, everything is about user experience and about the...
How much does it cost to develop an iPhone app?
Many times we are asked how much we would charge for developing apps like X, Y or Z in the App Store. This is quite an immature question.
If you want to get a house built you don’t ask the builder how much it will cost in total. You might build a pre-fabric hut with no windows or doors or you might want to get a huge medieval castle. In the end, both are “houses” that you can...
SESpringBoard: A customizable launcher for your...
I have decided to release as open source, a part of the latest app we are developing for a client at Apperto.
It is a custom springboard for you to use in your iphone apps. Although it is quite against Apple’s user interface conventions, it might come handy especially when you need have lots of menu items and don’t find the classic Tab bar big enough.
Anyway, grab SESpringBoard...
October 2011
1 post
The URL is dying
I am almost certain we will not be seeing an address field in web browsers in like 3 years time.
How many of you are actually typing a site’s url to the address field? What you do is to just Google it even if you know the address perfectly well. Or you use your bookmarks.
We are living in the era of smartphones and apps. The web is not dying but it is changing form. Instead of individual...
August 2011
4 posts
2 tags
Homebrew and PIL on Snow Leopard
Installing the python imaging library has always been a PIA for me after something screws up in my Mac OS X setup and I do a total reinstallation. I am still sticking to Snow Leopard because I do not trust Lion’s stability especially for developer tools for the upcoming 6 months or so.
So this weekend’s small task was to install Snow Leopard and everything all over. This included...
1 tag
Writing easy to change code
Although I couldn’t attend WWDC this summer, I have been spending quite some time watching some of the sessions over iTunes nowadays.
So far my favorite has been Ken Kocienda’s talk about “Writing easy to change code”. It gives some great tips even if you are not an iOS developer. Here are my notes:
Clear code is easier to change. Write clear code.
98% of time, you debug...
4 tags
3 app releases in 1 weekend
This weekend has been quite exciting for me and my colleagues at Apperto. 3 apps we have been developing for the last couple of months have hit the virtual shelves of Apple’s App Stores.
The first one is a Mac app I was doing for the European Tech Blog: The Next Web. I worked together with the chief editor of the blog, Zee M. Kane and a designer friend Ryan Downie from the UK. The result...
3 tags
Stripping ppc support from your Mac apps
For the last 2 days, I have been going crazy with getting a recent Mac app I developed accepted by Apple.
For those who have tried submitting apps to the new Mac App Store, you know Apple has a bunch of rules for you to obey. One of them is that the list of valid architectures supported by your app should not include “ppc”.
The important thing to note here is that although you only...
July 2011
3 posts
4 tags
The bigger, the slower.
I really become sad when I see that the more a company grows, the slower and less productive it gets. There is lots of talk and there is so little action because of bureaucracy, over planning and over staffing. And they lose incredible amounts of time and money because they are spending time on things that never really matter.
Poor, cumbersome companies drowning in their own corporate policies...
Specialism vs Generalism
I am a generalist more than a specialist.
I have a software engineering background, I love to code.
I absolutely want the apps I code to have great, simple interfaces. I mastered, PhotoShop, HTML, CSS and JavaScript good enough to amaze a good percentage of people around with the UI designs I make.
And I am a thinker and a starter. Throughout the day, new ideas pop-up in my head. I read...
iMessage vs WhatsApp - Who will be the winner?
Apple’s new mobile operating system iOS will be bringing many exciting new features with its 5th version. iMessage is one of them.
There are two reasons why I think iMessage will have trouble gaining market share among other messaging apps when iOS5 is released.
1) iMessage is built inside the existing messaging app. I know Apple did color coding and stuff but people just may not...
June 2011
1 post
Ciao Apperto!
The formations for my new software development business is almost complete. I have chosen a hybrid way of working further on GrupGuru.com and related services while creating iOS apps in the short term.
The work “aperto” comes from Italian and means “open”. Spelling it with two “p”s, I think Apperto has been quite a good name for an app development service...
May 2011
2 posts
Dealing with leaks and growing real memory issues...
One of the most scary parts of iOS and Mac OS development has been the issue of managing memory, allocs, retain counts, releases and all that stuff.
Being a developer who has started building apps for the Mac after learning Objective-C and its fundamentals with the iOS SDK, cocoa’s automatic memory management and garbage collection always made me feel weird and insecure about the stability...
Hello World
I had tried opening up a few blogs before. The hardest thing is to keep up writing and sharing frequently. I hope this time it will last longer than my previous attempts :)