Published 31 March 2014 • 1 hour, 14 minutes
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.
Published 17 March 2014 • 1 hour, 16 minutes
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.
Published 3 March 2014 • 1 hour, 19 seconds
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.
Published 17 February 2014 • 1 hour, 8 minutes
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.
Published 3 February 2014 • 1 hour, 2 minutes
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.
Published 20 January 2014 • 49 minutes, 37 seconds
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.
Published 25 November 2013 • 42 minutes, 8 seconds
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.
Published 12 November 2013 • 1 hour, 5 minutes
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.
Published 29 October 2013 • 1 hour, 32 seconds
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.
Published 15 October 2013 • 55 minutes, 52 seconds
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.