Mobile Couch

Giovanni Lodi (@mokagio) joins the couch to teach Ben and Jelly about the automation of tasks, and especially about the automation of the build and deploy process for iOS apps. Together, they look at the various Fastlane tools and what they each do, why you would automate these parts of your process, and how to recognise when something should be automated.

• mokacoding
• mokagio (Twitter)
• Fastlane
• Apps for Hockeyapp
• Felix Krause (Twitter)
• Fastlane Acquired by Twitter (Felix Krause)

We'd love it if you got in touch! We are @_mobilecouch on Twitter and you can even email us at [email protected], if you're so inclined!

Jelly’s been using JetBrain’s AppCode to get some work done in the last few weeks, and he and Ben go over the overall experience. Together, they discuss some of AppCode’s best features: inspections, the incredible level of customisation it provides, and best of all, Swift refactoring. It wasn’t all happy though, and Jelly also spends some time unloading on Ben about the issues he faced, how he dealt with it, and what JetBrain’s support is like.

• AppCode
• Melissa
• Jelly's AppCode Notes

We'd love it if you got in touch! We are @_mobilecouch on Twitter and you can even email us at [email protected], if you're so inclined!

This past week, Ben attended the Apple TV Tech Talks in Sydney. Meanwhile, Jelly didn’t get the opportunity, so Ben covers of a lot of the major points he learned on the day, covering concepts like the “Focus Engine”, and discussing talks like the one given by the App Store Review team (a.k.a. the best talk ever). It turns out there’s a whole lot of stuff that can be easily missed when creating apps for tvOS, and if you missed the tech talks, you’ll want to listen to the end!

• Apple TV Tech Talk Resources
• Apple TV Tech Talk Videos
• tvOSBrowser (steventroughtonsmith on GitHub)

We'd love it if you got in touch! We are @_mobilecouch on Twitter and you can even email us at [email protected], if you're so inclined!

Ben’s been working on a side-project over his break, and wants to actually flesh it out into something complete and polished. There are a few things he’s not sure about, however, so he gets Jelly’s advice. Should you consider the monetisation of an app for version 1.0? How finished does an app need to be to be placed in the hands of testers? How do you get past the ever-growing list of bugs and get to the point where you can release?

• Streaks
• WWDC 2014, Session 223: Prototyping - Fake It Till You Make It
• WWDC 2015, Session 801: Designing for Future Hardware

We'd love it if you got in touch! We are @_mobilecouch on Twitter and you can even email us at [email protected], if you're so inclined!

Russell Ivanovic jumps on the couch to chat about what makes code good or bad, and how the perception of code changes over the years. They look at how they’ve learned to approach both their own and other people’s code, helping others learn and grow their skills, and most importantly, whether code style is important or not.

• Topical 44: Living Overseas (feat. Ben Trengrove)

We'd love it if you got in touch! We are @_mobilecouch on Twitter and you can even email us at [email protected], if you're so inclined!

Ben and Jelly take a look back at the things they’ve learned over the past year with their approach to work as well as with the technical side of development. They reflect on what’s changed for them, and look forward to next year to consider things they’d like to approach and try in the future.

• iPad Pro, for Illustrators (JellyStyle)
• Protocol-Oriented Programming in Swift (WWDC 2015)
• Episode 70: Communication Makes it Happen (Dealing with Clients)
• __attribute__ (NSHipster)

We'd love it if you got in touch! We are @_mobilecouch on Twitter and you can even email us at [email protected], if you're so inclined!

Christmas came early this year as Apple followed through on their promise to open-source the Swift language. Ben and Jelly take a look at all the things that have been included in this somewhat unprecedented release (it may even blow your mind) and look at what this might mean for the future, both for the platforms Swift now extends to, and for its predecessor, Objective-C.

• Swift.org
• Apple on GitHub
• Objective-C 2.0 Runtime Source
• Swift Development Visualization (YouTube)
• Partial FreeBSD Support (Pull Request on GitHub)
• Static (GitHub)
• Swift @ IBM
• Chocolat (GitHub)
• Episode 62: Google Your Problem (Discussion of framework/dependency managers)
• Episode 60: Automated Monkeys (Discussion of Radar vs. Google Bug Reporter)
• How to run Xcode with Swift 2.2

We'd love it if you got in touch! We are @_mobilecouch on Twitter and you can even email us at [email protected], if you're so inclined!

After talking about dealing with — supporting — clients, Jelly thinks it’s worth touching on supporting the users of your app. He and Ben talk about his experiences with GIFwrapped and get into why it’s important to be positive, how to improve your app to get in front of support requests, and why support can be part of your marketing strategy.

• Mobile Couch 18: The Cache They've Got in Their Pocket (feat. Stuart Hall)
• Duct-Taping The Gates Of Chaos Shut - Halle Winkler (Vimeo)

We'd love it if you got in touch! We are @_mobilecouch on Twitter and you can even email us at [email protected], if you're so inclined!

If you deal with clients, you’ll discover that there’s a lot of ins and outs to working with them on a project. Ben and Jelly talk about how they deal with clients, from the refining the app idea, through scoping and quoting, to communication and running the project. Along the way, they cover finding the email sweet spot, dealing with clients who want everything, and coming up with your hourly or daily rate.

• Tacking (Sailing)
• Financial Independence (Reddit)
• Agile Is The New Waterfall (Medium)
• Cooperation Makes it Happen by Sesame Street (YouTube)

We'd love it if you got in touch! We are @_mobilecouch on Twitter and you can even email us at [email protected], if you're so inclined!

In response to a topic suggestion, Jelly draws on his recent experiences with GIFwrapped to discuss ways to ensure an app’s architecture is loosely-coupled, thereby making it easier to extend and maintain it’s functionality. He and Ben go into several important techniques that they use in the apps they write, and back each up with examples to show the benefits of approaching your code in these ways.

• Objective-C: how to group a series of string constants?
• The Pragmatic Programmer

We'd love it if you got in touch! We are @_mobilecouch on Twitter and you can even email us at [email protected], if you're so inclined!