Release Notes

Today we finally get to announce Release Notes, a conference about the business of iOS and Mac development. Release Notes will be held in Indianapolis, Indiana, USA on October 21-23, 2015, and we hope that you’ll plan to join us. In this week’s episode we talk about our motivation for hosting a conference, what Release […]

Today we take a look at Merchant Consumer Exchange (MCX) and CurrentC, the contactless payment system that is positioned as a competitor to Apple Pay. We use MCX and CurrentC as a lens to examine our own behavior and customer hostile behavior. What responsibility does an independent software developer have to make design choices that […]

We’re joined again this week by Justin Williams to continue our postmortem of Glassboard, the messaging service that he recently shut down. This week we talk about the importance of solving customer problems with your product, paying attention to business operations, the moment when he knew that Glassboard had to be shut down, and things […]

Understanding why products fail is often just as valuable as knowing why they succeed. To help us with that, we’re joined today by Justin Williams who recently shut down the Glassboard service which he owned. We conduct a postmortem on Glassboard and try to figure out what went wrong, why it went wrong, and what […]

Joe recently returned from speaking at the inaugural CocoaLove, held in his old stomping grounds of Philly. Sadly, Charles wasn’t able to attend, so we use this opportunity to let Joe share his experience at the conference. We discuss the conference itself, but Joe also shares the summary version of his talk in which he […]

James Dempsey of James Dempsey and the Breakpoints joins us today to talk about his history working at Apple, his transition to life as an indie contractor and trainer and, oh yeah, his new hit album Backtrace. Backtrace is the #1 comedy album on iTunes and just hit #5 on the Billboard comedy charts, and […]

With stories of declining iPad sales in the headlines, Apple last week announced its refreshed iPad line-up as well as some other new hardware. Today we discuss this event, the absence of a coherent iPad use story from Apple, and the future of iPad software. Mailing List Every month there are more great articles and […]

Every year, just like clockwork, Apple releases new features for iOS. And every year, just like clockwork, developers have their apps rejected from the App Store for using these new features in ways that Apple didn’t anticipate. So today, we discuss the trouble that developers can run into when their creativity gets ahead of Apple’s […]

Today we look at the new iPhones, our reaction to them now that we’ve actually held them, and how we think the new display sizes will affect what and how we develop. We consider the nature of the iPhone 6 Plus, our predicted demise of separate iPhone and iPad versions of apps, our frustration with […]

Today we talk to Matthew Bischoff about his iOS studio, Lickability, and its founders’ goal of building Lickability into a full-time job. Along the way, Matthew shares the story of Lickability’s start on Broadway, reflects on balancing client work with product work, and considers the importance of having the right mix of talents in a […]