Mobile Couch

Creating great apps for Apple’s mobile devices.

This podcast is no longer in production.

18: The Cache They’ve Got in Their Pocket

Published 1 October 2013 • 59 minutes, 58 seconds

Jake and Jelly are joined by Stuart Hall, co-founder of Discovr and creator of AppBot to discuss the story behind his Seven Minute Workout experiment, but not before they followup on health and NSURLCache (not to mention caching in general). They discuss the mindsets of people who buy apps when they”re dropped to free, adding in-app purchases to apps, and the differences between launching apps now, compared to the early days.

17: Infinitely Slow Acid Man

Published 17 September 2013 • 55 minutes, 12 seconds

More Xamarin talk, as the boys discuss its cross-platform benefits, the impressive IDE, and how it compares to native cross-platform development; Jake requests help with a problem he”s having with collection views in Xamarin; staying healthy when you spend so much time hunched over a keyboard, while also improving your workflow; and what the best practice is for caching downloaded data.

16: Romeo Was a Drunk

Published 3 September 2013 • 58 minutes, 16 seconds

With his interest officially piqued, Jake is looking into Xamarin, and so the boys discuss making apps in alternative languages and the pros and cons attached to that. Afterwards, they share their origin stories, including Jake’s desire to be an actor, Jelly’s short-lived stint in theatre, Ben’s dream of being a pilot, and why freelance work is so dang addictive. Finally, they discuss the shortcomings of UICollectionView and what the best way of containing “hack” code is.

15: Infected or Influenced

Published 20 August 2013 • 59 minutes, 20 seconds

Casey Liss - co-host of the hugely popular ATP and Neutral podcasts - joins the couch to talk about being recognised by strangers, what the schedule is like doing a podcast while working a day job, and the difference between travelling to WWDC from Australia and from the East Coast of the US. Somewhere in-between, we find time to discuss Visual Studio vs. Xcode, writing and wrapping APIs, and the cross contamination of coding languages.

14: Thinking of Retiring, Thank You

Published 6 August 2013 • 1 hour, 7 minutes

We answer questions about the best way to learn OpenGL, and what would we want to be working on if we worked Apple; we follow up on the status of our own recent App submissions and discuss the appeal system; and we discuss some of the differences between developing for Android and iOS.

13: Danger is His Middle Name

Published 23 July 2013 • 54 minutes, 30 seconds

Dealing with rejection and the app review process in general; how the review process works, review times, tricks for managing timing your app’s release and the difference between personal and enterprise developer accounts; and Ben gives an introduction to making mobile games by discussing some of the game engines that exist out there and reasons why you would choose one over the other.

12: You Probably Can’t Escape

Published 9 July 2013 • 1 hour, 2 minutes

An explanation of Objective C++; what ARC is and the gotchas you need to look out for when using it; reasons why now is a great time to get into making apps for iDevices; Jake talks about his experiences trying out Windows Azure, and looks at what sort of uses it’s designed for; and MoodStocks, an image recognition API you can use in your apps.

11: I’m Still Jet Lagged

Published 25 June 2013 • 51 minutes, 39 seconds

With WWDC over for another year, Ben and Jelly discuss some of the new technologies that you”ll be able to use with your apps and the sessions you should watch so you can make your apps shine on iOS7; and Jelly explains an app he recently discovered called Oyster, which is a tool for testing regular expressions and even writing the code to use them.

10: Speculate Wildly About Things

Published 11 June 2013 • 1 hour, 16 minutes

Following up on asking for reviews and how it makes users feel; a comparison of ways to pass messages back and forth between classes: delegates, notifications and blocks; some speculation on what additions iOS 7 will bring which we can implement in our apps; and a little overview of Reveal from Itty Bitty Apps.

9: We’re Gonna Put a Couch on Stage

Published 28 May 2013 • 54 minutes, 28 seconds

One More Thing conference is over and Ben and Jelly give their in-depth recap, touching on interesting (and helpful!) talks from Amanda Rösler, Simeon Saëns, Dave Wiskus, Lex Friedman, Maggie Steciuk and Jaimee Newberry. Jake talks about his experiences with Mapbox and Tilemill, a set of services that allow you to easily use custom maps in your iOS applications.