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.

• Basil Shkara's Twitter
• Basil's Development Blog
• Bee
• Moz.com
• Episode 193: Update Treadmill (Developing Perspective)

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, 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.

• Access Control (Swift Blog)
• Instance Methods are Curried Functions in Swift (Ole Begemann)
• Heapshot Analysis (Ben Trengrove)
• I Wrote My Own C String Library (Mobile Couch)
• Testing with Xcode: About Testing with Xcode (Apple Developer)
• AltBeacon - The Open Proximity Beacon
• Moodstocks

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 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.

• Apple Leadership Bios
• Google Management Team Bios
• British Film Institute Enforcing Diversity Standards (The Mary Sue)
• Apple’s App Review Should Test Accessibility (Marco.org)
• ALDColorBlindEffect (andydrizen on GitHub)
• StaticTables (jellybeansoup on GitHub)
• Energy Ratings Mobile App
• Google Design
• GovHack
• Accessibility Beacon (GovHack)
• data.gov
• data.gov.uk
• data.gov.au
• Swift Blog (Apple Developer)
• Fetching and parsing JSON with Swift (Stripy Sock)

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 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.

• Session 232: Advanced User Interfaces with Collection Views (WWDC 2014)
• Episode 88: Tuple for Your Thoughts? (Edge Cases)
• 7 Cool Features in Swift (Drewag)
• Session 223: Prototyping: Fake It Till You Make It (WWDC 2014)
• Vision Australia
• Episode 71: Security By Guilt (Accidental Tech Podcast)

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!

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.

• The Swift Programming Language (iTunes)
• Notes on CloudKit (Inessential)

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 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.

• Vitamin Water Meme Advertisement (Vimeo)
• Maps Connect
• CompactConstraint (GitHub)
• WWDC 2014 Session Videos

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!

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.

• Jelly's UIView Layout Math (GitHub Gist)
• Jake's UIView Auto Layout Constraints (Vimeo)
• Auto Layout Test Project (GitHub)
• Masonry (GitHub)
• Stripy Sock Objective-C Style Guide (GitHub)
• Smarty Ring

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!

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.

• Exploration (Bjango)
• Debug 31: Miguel de Icaza on Mono (iMore)
• Technical Q&A QA1809: New default journaling mode for Core Data SQLite stores in iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks
• Which iBeacons have the most consistent signals? (Stripy Sock)

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!

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.

• Ash Furrow on Twitter
• AshFurrow.com
• Functional Reactive Programming on iOS by Ash Furrow (LeanPub)
• ReactiveCocoa (GitHub)
• AFNetworking-RACExtensions (GitHub)
• ReactiveCocoaLayout (GitHub)
• ReactiveCoreData (GitHub)
• C-41 (GitHub)
• We Need to Replace Objective-C (Ash Furrow)
• mogenerator

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!

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.

• Sweden introduces a six-hour working day with full pay (Mail Online)
• Git Stash Documentation
• Enso Locate (Art Processors)
• BlueCats
• Qualcomm Gimbal
• StickNFind
• Nomi
• Radius Network
• ATP 60: The Great Odwalla Flavor Change of 2013
• YOW! Connected Conference

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!