Mobile Couch

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.

• Triangulation (Wikipedia)
• Trilateration (Wikipedia)
• UIDocumentInteractionController needs a method for excluding activity types (Open Radar)
• iBeacons Aren't Just For Retail: Placed Lets You Use Them As iPhone Quick Launchers At Home (TechCrunch)
• Code Conventions for the Java Programming Language (Oracle)
• Objective-C Coding Guidelines (Apple Developer)
• Debug 30: Casey Liss on C# and .Net (iMore)
• C# Coding Conventions (Microsoft)
• Objective-C Style Guide (Google)
• Objective C Conventions (GitHub)
• Preprocessor Macros are Evil (Parashift)
• ClangFormat-Xcode by travisjeffery (GitHub)
• Xcode-4-Uncrustify-Automator-Services by tonyarnold (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!

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.

• Discovering Art with iBeacons (Stripy Sock)
• Enso Locate by Art Processors
• Estimote Beacons
• Location and Maps Programming Guide: Region Monitoring and iBeacon

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!

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.

• Download Stats for GIFwrapped
• AppBot
• App Flipping - How To Make Money With Apps (Blue Cloud Solutions)
• Episode 53: There's Gonna Be Some Flapping (Accidental Tech Podcast)
• We Need to Replace Objective-C (Ash Furrow)

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!

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.

• Marc Edwards on Twitter
• Marc Edwards on App.net
• Bjango
• Skala
• Accidental Tech Podcast
• Jeff Han: The radical promise of the multi-touch interface (TED)
• Tavis Rudd - Using Python to Code by Voice (YouTube)
• Mobile Couch T-shirt (Cotton Bureau)

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!

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.

• Linking to the App Store Nicely (Stripy Sock)
• Mobile privacy: a better practice guide for mobile app developers (OAIC)
• Concurrency (GitHub)
• Parse
• Mapbox

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!

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.

• FileDrone (GitHub)
• Authenticating users with HockeyApp for tracking purposes (HockeyApp Support)
• Heatmaps for iOS
• AngularJS video training (egghead.io)
• Functional Reactive Programming by Ash Furrow
• NSHipster: Obscure Topics in Cocoa & Objective-C by Mattt Thompson

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 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.

• Reveal
• Cook
• Killer UX Design by Jodie Moule
• Flow
• iOS 7 Blur Views Without the Hacks (Slideshare)
• iOS Blur Masking Example (Github)
• OpenGL ES 2.0 for iOS, Chapter 1 - Introduction (iPhone & Mac Development)
• OpenGL ES from the Ground Up: Table of Contents (iPhone & Mac Development)
• EasyRes

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!

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.

• Codecademy
• AFNetworking
• NSCamp

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!

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.

• OS X Lion: Use another Mac as a display (Apple Support)
• Chromecast
• ChromeCatch for Mac (Mac App Store)
• Base (Mac App Store)
• Core Data Editor 5 (Mac App Store)
• Pygg
• Square Cash
• NSCamp

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!

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.

• What's New in Core Location (WWDC 2013 Videos)
• RedBearLab
• Estimote Beacons
• Android iBeacon Service (GitHub)
• mogenerator
• AFNetworking
• NSIncrementalStore (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!