For Aspiring iPhone App Developers

by byamabe on July 30, 2010

I would like to see a lot more iPhone apps that entertain, encourage, and educate from a confessional perspective. To that end, I would like to encourage anyone who’s interested to start developing some apps and I’d be willing to help to the best of my abilities. One book I can recommend on the subject that I just finished reading is Tapworthy: Designing Great iPhone Apps. It’s not an iPhone programming book, it’s about how to design the look and feel of and interaction with an iPhone app. It’s the first technical book I’ve read from cover-to-cover in a while.

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BDD an iPhone App?

by byamabe on June 4, 2010

I read an article on the state of testing in Cocoa. The author, Alex Vollmer, paints a pretty dismal picture of BDD in Cocoa community and I’d have to agree with him. In my decision to use Ruby over Python for my web apps, I mentioned that BDD (Cucumber and RSpec) and the Ruby testing culture was a major reason I went with Ruby. I would really love to see that aspect come over to the Cocoa community. Alex believes that snobbery and elitism are dominant attitudes that prevent the community from adopting testing practices from other environments. I haven’t dealt with the Cocoa community at large, so I can’t comment on the snobbery and elitism, but I do know that XCode and the various Cocoa frameworks didn’t grow up in a BDD world and the fact that the community didn’t grow up with BDD, like Ruby and Rails, makes it a lot harder to inject.

I know there’s been some work to use Cucumber with the Simulator, but that requires you to drop out of Xcode. I’ve gone down this path before, I don’t want to switch between editors and shells for my development environment. I want to see Cucumber and RSpec equivalents that can be run from within XCode. For me, it was running those two in combination while going through The RSpec Book that was my aha moment for BDD and I think it would be the same for the entire Cocoa community.

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“Build and Analyze” is your Friend

June 3, 2010

While tracking down a memory leak in my latest app, which looks to be a known problem with the simulator, I ran into someone suggestion to run the “Build and Analyze” (B&A) command from the Build menu in Xcode. Being an Xcode novice, I had never tried this before. Well, I would just like to [...]

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$9.99 eBook from O’Reilly

May 21, 2010

If your a tech person, you probably have and buy lots of books. Since getting the iPad, I’ve been buying more eBooks if they are priced reasonably. Reasonably to me means they are less expensive than their paper counterparts as I can sell the paper version if it isn’t up to snuff or I no [...]

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Has the TV Become a Personal Entertainment Device?

May 21, 2010

I saw that Google annouced Google TV. The idea of searching my recorded shows and other sources to find programs to watch is kind of interesting except I have enough trouble keeping track of the 2 remotes and now I have to keep a keyboard laying around to watch TV? The final pitch was an [...]

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Triglotta – The Book of Concord

April 2, 2010

My second iPhone app is available on the App Store. “Triglotta – The Book of Concord” is a version of The Book of Concord that is designed for the iPhone and is also optimized to work with the iPad. The idea was suggested by Frank Gillespie on Twitter and I picked it up and built [...]

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The Kind of Book that gets Me in Trouble

March 24, 2010

I just got an email announcing “Seven Languages in Seven Weeks” from the Pragmatic Programmers. This is exactly the kind of book that calls to me. Man, it would be so cool to learn 7 languages at a more than superficial level. My problem is that I have ideas for 7 projects that would actually [...]

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Cwirla goes Worldwide

March 1, 2010

What follows are the download statistics for the first full week that “Cwirla” was available. I have no idea what they mean. I’m just surprised that France and China were 2nd and 3rd in downloads. Title Units Country Code Cwirla 46 US Cwirla 37 FR Cwirla 36 CN Cwirla 22 IT Cwirla 22 BR Cwirla [...]

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The Cwirla iPhone App

February 22, 2010

I received approval last Friday evening for my first two iPhone Applications (they work on the iPod Touch and should work on the iPad when it is released). The inspiration for the Apps came from Pastor Todd Wilken when, after discussing the video I made “There’s a Pastor for That“, wished for a “Cwirla App” [...]

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The Clock is Ticking

February 18, 2010

My urge to try a new kind of development got to me again and I’ve jumped on the iPhone development bandwagon. The nice thing about iPhone development is that the definition of a proper application is a lot more basic than a web or desktop application. I started my dive into iPhone development last week [...]

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