Ramble

Back in 2014 (and earlier) there was a kerfuffle about the practice of apps being in your face with requests for reviews: Wil Shipley @ The Loop John Gruber and suggesting one star reviews as a response Marco Arment suggesting that a popup request for review should go away entirely Todd Zarwell on being somewhat better behaved and showing a popup dialog only on new versions, and after a certain number of launches I was thinking about this while noodling around with a couple of improvements for Repeat, which has an unobtrusive rating link in the about screen. Whilst wanting to be well behaved, at the same time I think about the number of times I’ve rated apps by using a link in the about screen. I try to rate apps I like fairly regularly since I’m aware the reviews go away when new versions appear on the store, but even so I just don’t think about it when using apps. ...

Becky Hansmeyer posted a couple of items recently on app pricing (and a followup) which I thought fit in with my thoughts on pricing pretty closely. She also goes into some stuff I didn’t know (but I guess makes sense in retrospect) about the non-restorable nature of repeatable IAPs, meaning if you use a tip jar method for unlocking content, if you install the app at a later date, you would need to pay again to regain the benefits. ...

This morning I hit the release button on my holiday project, Repeat. As part of my marathon of listening to every development podcast I can, I was recently catching up on the backlog of Release Notes episodes, and in particular the two episodes with guest Justin Williams, where he joked that like every other developer, he started out with a notes app, a task manager and a bug tracker. Repeat is my task manager (at this point I don’t plan on making a notes app or a bug tracker though…). ...

Since hitting Submit for Review for my side project app, I’ve been having an interesting time. My first version was rejected in review due to a “bug” (actually an intended feature - a disabled button control which became usable once initial setup was completed, which goes to show that even Apple testers don’t read the help docs ;), and I did some cleaning up of my Core Data code, made some graphic changes to make things look nicer, tested some more, and then resubmitted. ...

I tend to collect software. I read about things that people I follow recommend and if it’s free or affordable and looks interesting I’ll usually get it. It gives me an opportunity to look at different paradigms, recommend alternative software to students who might be on different platforms than what they use at school, and generally nerd out. As a result I have a bunch of graphics software sitting around either in the Mac App Store or installed on my laptop (mercifully the Adobe suite is licensed through work so I don’t have to buy it myself or make space on my own machine). When it came time to sit down and “design” (the air quotes are deserved) the graphical assets for Repeat, I had plenty of software to play with, if not a surfeit of talent. ...

This is a post about the process of developing and posting an app on the iOS App Store for the first time. It’s is a long one, sorry. There will be another post looking at toolsets later on. Background I write code pretty frequently. I’ve always been interested in technology and the best way to learn about it is to tinker. I write small programs to automate my own tasks, I look at the way that different languages work and I write snippets of code just to try out new things. Of course being an ICT teacher I also teach my students how to get into programming themselves as part of their courses as well as running a code club for some self-directed learning. ...

This has to be one of the best ads I’ve seen in a long time: Introducing Vector Networks. Playing with vectors a lot at home and at work recently, it’s interesting looking at another approach to composing vector images. The things which really kill the interest for me (when looking at the Figma site, not the nicely crafted ad on Medium) is the fact that it’s just another SaaS product. No mention of final pricing of course (“Free during the Preview Release”), just a big fat sign up button for a spot in the release queue. ...

As mentioned in a previous post, I’ve been working on an iOS app over the holidays. A topic for another post is all of the hassle with getting to the point where I can actually release it for sale, but while I’ve been sorting all that out I’ve been noodling around with new features to keep myself interested (although going back to work has gotten in the way ever so slightly). ...

Wired made a post in which the publication outlines what it is going to do about the ad-blocking situation. They acknowledge that readers either want to view content without all the cruft, or are concerned about the fact that advertising is as much about tracking as about actually putting ads in front of your eyeballs. They are moving to restrict articles from those who use ad blockers, with the promise to visitors that if they whitelist the site in their ad blockers they will only see “standard display advertising”. Of course they don’t say what “standard display advertising” actually means to them. I suspect it just means that they will choose to serve ads that are not visually intrusive (e.g. Popovers, popunders, interstitials etc), and fine, that can appeal to their first group of readers who only care about not having lots of rubbish shoved in their face while they are trying to read. The issue is that they specifically point out that some people are very uncomfortable with the amount of tracking that goes on by advertisers, nothing is said about choosing advertisers based on their privacy policies. ...

As usual to keep myself sane during the Summer holidays I’ve been doing some coding on project ideas that have come up over the year. After over a year or so of tinkering I’m starting to feel like I’m getting the hang of the way that iOS does things with MVC (although I still have trouble reading Apple’s documentation), and these holidays I think I finally got something useful finished which I might get around to publishing. ...