Category: Indie

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#twitter Indie Mac

On Tweetbot for Mac

I'm a Robot Bird, not a chicken.The Next Web: He says that Tapbots will continue to support the app, even after it cannot sell any more copies to new users, but that has forced them to charge more for the app, which runs $19.99 on the Mac App Store. “We know some will not be happy about Tweetbot for Mac’s pricing,” says Haddad, “but the bottom line is Twitter needs to provide us with more tokens for us to be able to sell at a lower the price.”

Given that statement I wonder what the pricing will be for Appbot for Mac, if they decide to create it? It’s obvious they’re limited to 100,000 tokens for Tweetbot, but App.Net has no such restriction and is being built as a communication service. Since Twitter changed direction to become an ad/sales/marketing tool App.Net has emerged as our next best bet and has been gaining traction ever since.

With Twitter recently breaking Twitter for Mac, and no apparent fix in the works, Tweetbot for Mac adds a fresh face to client app choices available to Mac owners.

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#twitter Indie iOS Social

Iconfactory on the future of Twitterrific

Ollie!Iconfactory: “For the past several months, we’ve been working on a major update to Twitterrific that we’re very excited about. There were concerns that this new version might end up on the cutting room floor prior to Twitter’s announcement, but after reviewing the new restrictions and speaking with the team at Twitter, we’re pleased to report that our plans remain unchanged.”

Very exciting news!

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Indie iOS

My @Twitterrific for iOS Wish List

It’s no secret I’m a big fan of Twitterrific from The Iconfactory. I’ve tried a number of Twitter clients, but I keep coming back to Twitterrific. I think it has a lot to do with the minimalistic design. It just works and doesn’t have a lot of extraneous features. But, and there’s always a ‘but’, there are some things I’d like to see. Mostly I’d like a small change to the user interface. It’s something I’ve designed in my top secret design notebook, but since I’ll never create my dream Twitter client, I might as well share these minor UI tweaks in hopes someone will do it. Hopefully, The Iconfactory does it. You never know, it could happen.

Oh, please forgive the mess. I can’t spell Photoshop, much less use it. At least this hack should get the idea across.

Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s all hacked up, but it’ll do.

On the left Twitterrific as it sits today, on the right is what I’d like to see. What’s different?

  1. The account back button is gone.
  2. The title “All Tweets” is gone, replaced by the account name.
  3. The Profile Icon, gone. Replaced by the “Compose Tweet” button.
  4. The bottom bar/toolbar, gone. No replacement.

Since the back button is now gone for choosing an account it’s replaced by the account name in the top bar. Tapping on the name allows you to choose which account to view or what you’d like to view for the current account; All Tweets, Mentions, Messages, Favorites, or Search.

In the upper right corner we’ve replaced the Profile icon with the Compose Tweet icon. To show your profile you can tap on your avatar in a tweet, which works today.

In the lower left corner the refresh button has been removed. I kind of like having an explicit refresh button, but “Pull to refresh” is ubiquitous. If you’d like to have a refresh button, put it in the upper left corner.

The purple bar across the bottom works as it does today. It pops up for a few seconds after a refresh, then goes away.

I think that does it for now.

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Development Indie iOS

Get Shacked

Get Shacked: “If you are a web / mobile designer, and would like to come out for a few months, and work on one of our many app ideas, send us a link to your portfolio. If we like what we see, we will fly you out and put you up in your own grass shack (it will have a roof, don’t worry). What better way to try out living in Hawaii then cruising out here for a 3 month workcation. We work hard and play hard also!”

Who’s with me? Let’s go to Hawaii! I’ll bet it would be easy to convince my wife to spend a bit of time there.

The company is Shacked and I discovered them because of this great little app, TeleTweet. How cool is that?

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Design Indie Life

Illustrator Joey Ellis on Dribbble

Dribbble Blog: “My tools are my red and black Polychromos pencils, Illustrator, Photoshop—all the usual suspects. My studio is in a room above the garage. It’s not cool or glamourous and is filled with crap. It’s kinda like an episode of Hoarders, but there aren’t any dead animals in here yet. I have my iMac and an old Wacom along with a few iPads for iOS stuff. I have tons of toys and half-filled coffee cups strewn about.”

I love reading stuff like this. It’s interesting to see the process others use and how they structure their work environments.

One of these days, when I grow up, I want an actual desk with a big display, or two. Some day. Until then, it’s the couch.

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Apple Core Labs Business Indie iOS iPad iPhone

Diving into the deep end

Anyone that knows me, knows I love movies. I love to watch them, talk about them, I even quote movies. What in the world do the movies have to do with this post? I’m glad you asked.

In the movie The Sandlot there’s a young man in love with the beautiful older woman. His name is Michael “Squints” Palledorous, her name is Wendy Peppercorn. To make a long story short, one day while swimming with his buddies at the local public pool, Squints, reaches the point where he can no longer stand watching Wendy, a lifeguard, from afar. He decides to take a drastic approach to get Wendy to notice her. He jumps in the deep end of the pool, sinks to the bottom, and waits for Wendy to rescue him. She does.

“Michael Squints Palledorous walked a little taller that day. And we had to tip our hats to him. He was lucky she hadn’t beat the *crap* out of him. We wouldn’t have blamed her. What he’d done was sneaky, rotten, and low… and cool. Not another one among us would have ever in a million years even for a million dollars have the guts to put the move on the lifeguard. He did. He had kissed a woman. And he had kissed her long and good. We got banned from the pool forever that day. But every time we walked by after that, the lifeguard looked down from her tower, right over at Squints, and smiled.”

Squints and Wendy go on to marry and live happily ever after.

Get on with it man!

All that backstory, for what? Three years ago I formed Apple Core Labs to go indie. At the last minute I got cold feet and decided I’d do it on the side. In July of that year my brother, Jay, and I released RxCalc. Later I worked with my friends at Hundred10 to deliver the Fresno Grizzlies app and more recently I’ve done some work for a company in Washington state to help them create their first iOS application.

What I’m trying to say is, I’ve loved every minute of it. The thought of going indie has been my Wendy Peppercorn. After three years, I’ve finally decided it’s time to leap into the deep end of the pool.

Beginning May 1, Apple Core Labs will be my full time job.

If you need an iOS developer, get in touch, we’re open for business.

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Apple Core Labs Indie iOS

Esoteric iOS

Apple Core Labs: “Since we have to integrate with multiple scanners we have to decide at runtime which scanner is being used. Using the SDK’s we could take a stab in the dark at initializing each one in turn and the one that succeeds to initialize is the winner. Not such a great way determine the one to use, but it would work.

What if there was a way to determine you had connected external devices without using a third party SDK? There is.”

I’m not sure many people know about the External Accessory Framework. If you’re working with third party devices that work with iOS give the piece a read.

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Development Indie Life

For Posterity

I started down the Mac Development road last night.

By this time next year...

Categories
Development Indie

Friday the 13th, bad for iOS Devs

It’s a beautiful day here in San Luis Obispo, the sun is out and there’s a cool breeze blowing, but there’s something bad afoot in the iOS Development world.

As of this writing two Indie iOS Developers, James Thomson and Patrick McCarron, have been hit with patent infringement papers. The really strange thing is they’re going after the developers, not Apple. In app purchase seems to be what triggered the threat.

From Twitter

Hopefully Apple will step in and help them out.

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Indie

Working from the Coffee Shop

The Atlantic: “In many ways, however, the golden age of the coffeehouse workday is now, as any barista can attest. Over the last decade, I’ve done a fair amount of work in traditional offices, where I am least efficient, various apartments, where I tend to work longer and more productive hours, and a string of coffee shops, the places where I’ve turned out the most usable words per working minute.”

I’ve only done this a few times. Starbucks didn’t really do it for me. The one I was in didn’t have a nice comfy spot to sit. I did, however, had great success adding new features to RxCalc while sitting in Cappella Coffee House when we lived in Exeter. They had a nice squishy couch to sit on, and just enough background noise to make it the perfect setting.

Hashtag Fresno; Work. Play. Create.Speaking of perfect settings. Are you in the Fresno area? There’s a new co-working shop called The Hashtag you should visit if you’re after that coffee house feel and would like to be around other creatives.

Want to know what it looks like? Go check it out.