Episode 32: Chomp

February 7th, 2010

Chomp is a “social app discovery” iPhone app. It’s a bit like Yelp for the App Store. In this interview with its creators Ben Keighran and Cathy Edwards we talk about the app, the momentum its building, the recommendation algorithm that makes it tick and how app developers can use it to build buzz for their own apps.

Episode 31: Best App Ever Contest

January 25th, 2010

The Best App Ever podcast episode. Features interviews with: Jeff Scott, creator of the Best App Ever contest and founder of 148 Apps; Garret Murray, creator of the aptly named “Ego” app; and Yuanzhen Li and Michael parker on their TrueHDR photography app.

Episode 30: Flurry

January 10th, 2010

In this episode, I speak with Peter Farago, Flurry’s VP/Marketing and Greg Yardley, former CEO of Pinch Media now VP/Products at Flurry. We discuss their merger, their App Circle app recommendation engine, their new relationship with comScore and what’s really important about the Google Nexus One.

Episode 29: Henry Balanon + Panel on Marketing

December 6th, 2009

Henry Balanon is part of the writing team for Giga Om’s “The Apple Blog” and co-founder of the iPhone app development shop Bickbot. This podcast features Henry’s speech on iPhone marketing and the panel discussion he organized for his segment at the 360iDev conference.

Henry’s speech if filled with goodies, including glimpses into how sought after media properties like The Apple Blog decide what to cover and this tactical gem: a timeline/calendar to follow for folks trying to concentrate their PR to coincide with an app’s launch.

The panel discussion features: Rana June, former VP/Marketing for Medialets and author of O’Reilly’s forthcoming “Marketing iPhone Apps” book; Natalia Luckyanova, co-founder of the multiple-hit game studio Imangi; David Whatley, creator of the top selling geoDefense games; PR firm TriplePoint’s Chris Heintz; Matt Drance, formerly of Apple, now founder Bookhouse Apps; and me, Dan Grigsby.

Episode 28: iPhone Wax Creator Corey Johnson

November 17th, 2009

This interview is with Corey Johnson, creator of iPhone Wax.  iPhone Wax is an open-source project that lets developers build native CocoaTouch based applications using Lua.  Lua’s an expressive scripting language with dynamic language features familiar to Ruby and Python developers.  The interview includes content on iPhone Wax’s genesis, the Lua language, embedding and bridging Lua and the Objective-C runtime, performance, debugging, App Store policy and interpreted code, and what’s next for the project.

Episode 27: 360iDev - Chris Heintz, Mike Clark, Jessica Kahn, Jake Behrens, Peter Bakhirev

November 1st, 2009

The second and final podcasts recorded at the 360iDev conference. Features interviews with Chris Heintz of Triple Point on PR, Mike Clark of the Pragmatic Studios on iPhone/Ruby On Rails integrations and REST, Jessica Kahn of Tappulous on code reuse, Jake Behrens on performance gains from coding interfaces by hand, and Peter Bakhirev on Game Kit and CFNetwork.

Episode 26: 360iDev - Matt Drance, Kendall Gelner and Greg Yardley

October 18th, 2009

The first of two podcasts recorded at the 360iDev conference. Features interviews with well known Apple evangelist and WWDC planner turned indie iPhone developer Matt Drace, twenty minutes of advanced debugging with Kendall Gelner, and a talk on category/price performance and piracy with Pinch Media’s Greg Yardley.

Episode 25: Dan Grigsby / Warm, Clothed and Fed: Developer Run iPhone Businesses

October 4th, 2009

This episode of the podcast is a little different than usual: there’s no guest. Instead, it’s the audio from a speech I gave last week at the 360iDev conference titled “Warm, Clothed and Fed: Developer Run iPhone Businesses.” The speech takes apart the iPhone market and looks for opportunities for developers to earn a sustainable comfortable living without turning into something they’re not — e.g., sales people. I gave the speech to an overflow crowd and, I’m pleased to say, it was well received. So I’m sharing it here.

Episode 24: Marcus Zarra / Core Animation

September 20th, 2009

Marcus Zarra is a well known Mac and iPhone developer and blogger at Cocoa Is My Girlfriend. He’s the author of several books, including “Core Animation: Simplified Animation Techniques for Mac and iPhone Development” due out in early 2010. In this interview, we talk about Core Animation on the iPhone. Topics include its programming model, view translations, Core Animation internals, implicit and explicit animations, hints that Core Image might be coming to the iPhone and user interactions with Core Animation.

Episode 23: Mike Ash On The Objective-C Runtime, Objects and the Runtime, Message Sending And “No Such Method”

August 30th, 2009

Mike Ash’s “Friday Q&A” series of blog posts is a staple for anyone wanting to master iPhone (and Mac) programming. In this interview — inspired by a handful of his posts — Mike describes the Objective-C runtime. The runtime makes Objective-C dynamic. Mike describes the runtime in broad terms, dives into how objects are created and managed at runtime, details what happens when you send a message to an object, and explains how to can handle “no such method” cases dynamically at runtime.