Mobile Couch

Creating great apps for Apple’s mobile devices.

This podcast is no longer in production.

52: It’s a Dubbit

Published 9 March 2015 • Hosted by Ben Trengrove, Daniel “Jelly” Farrelly and Jake MacMullin

Jelly’s had some wine, and a long day to boot, so after a failed first attempt at recording the episode, the couch talks developing for Android, goes into more detail about the value types discussion from the last episode, discusses the Blue and Black/White and Gold dress dilemma, and makes predictions for the “Spring Forward” event.

In the past week, the Australian media have been shocked to discover that you can send iMessages to people if you know their email address, much to Jake’s annoyance. Meanwhile, Jelly takes no stock in the mainstream media’s ability to report accurately on technology issues, citing people’s tendency to blame technology for things that are actually user error. This leads to a quick discussion of how old devices are treated and Ben’s inability to keep one charged off of the cable.

Ben then starts to give a bit of a primer for getting started with Android development, including which IDE to grab and how to get the emulator running. This is soon somewhat derailed as Jake begins to list features he likes in Android Studio, and the discussion devolves into a comparison between it and Xcode. Of course, it doesn’t take much to go from there to talking about Swift, and Ben ends up talking more about the video from Andy Matuschack mentioned on the last episode.

After Jelly does the intro at this point, and it’s revealed that this is the second attempt at recording the episode, Jelly brings up the topic of the Blue and Black/White and Gold dress that recently took the internet by storm. The couch first discusses the science behind the phenomenon, and then Jelly attempts to spin off onto accessibility, and how some users see your app differently.

This prompts Jake to talk about some accessibility weirdness he recently came across with working on a kids app: not only does the app read out instructions for accessing the parental features, but the gestures used become impossible with accessibility gestures turned on.

Having officially given up on the show at this point, Jake then turns the couch’s attention to the rumoured Apple car (the most mobile of devices), and specifically, the reasons he thinks that it’s an actual thing that Apple are working on. He then moves on to predictions for the imminent Apple event, including things that might be announced alongside the watch.

Download Audio (31.83 MB)

Show Notes