iPhone 3.0 has arrived, and with it push notification and in-app purchase. In this interview, Scott Kveton, Michael Richardson and Steven Osborn of Urban Airship talk about the ins and outs of these new capabilities, the challenges of maintaining server infrastructure as an iPhone developer, and their services that seek to alleviate those pain points.
In this interview, Stephen Lombardo and Billy Grey of Zetetic talk about SQLCipher, their transparent OSS encryption add-on to SQLite. SQLCipher encrypts/decrypts just above the write-from/read-to disk level which keeps the SQLite programming model unchanged. You do queries as you normally would, and all of the functionality is retained: your selects, inserts, updates, indexes, etc. all work as with an unencrypted database. Stephen and Billy also talk about getting an app with crypto into the store, including their experiences with the US Department of Commerce and the NSA’s technical review.
In April the number of third-party apps downloaded/installed by iPhone/iPod touch users surpassed one billion. The billionth app installed: Bump, an app lets you swap business cards by bumping two iPhones together. In this interview, we talk with David Lieb and Andy Huibers — the team behind Bump — about how the app works, the boost created by being the billionth app and the steps that preceded this success.
Joe Hewitt is best known as the creator of Firebug. For more then the last year, though, he’s been heads down in iPhone land. In this interview, we talk about creating the Facebook’s iPhone application and his most recent work: the Three20 project and FaceBook Connect for iPhone. Three20 is an expansive, open-source collection of UI components and HTTP/web inspired architectural elements. Facebook Connect for iPhone allows apps to access Facebook friend lists, publish items and update statuses.
There’s a lot to be learned about marketing an iPhone game from the story of Dapple as told by its creator Owen Goss of Streaming Colour Studios. In March Owen made headlines with “The Numbers Post” in his blog; summary: Dapple cost $32K to build;$535 first month’s revenues. In this interview, Owen talks about what he’s learned since then, his challenges adapting his initial idea to match existing game genres, the risks trying to build one game to appeal to two distinct gamer-audiences, the importance of concentrating your buzz around an app’s launch day, the critical “pick up and play” requirement for iPhone games and more. Almost everything we talk about applies to creating success in non-game categories to.
Noel Llopis became an indie after spending 10 years building large scale console and PC games. In this interview, Noel talks about what it’s like going from a team of 200 on a three year release cycle to being a lone gunman developing his no-gunman Flower Garden iPhone game in six months. Flower Garden is remarkably detailed, with some intricate tech behind the scenes, including flowers generated procedurally from a DNA-like structure. The interview also features insights into the differences between building for consoles/PCs and the phone: Console/PC games are often termed “appointment games,” games on the phone are played more frequently, but for smaller intervals. The iPhone is hardware-equivalent to the 10 year old Dreamcast; learn what it’s missing vs. a modern console, and some of the methods — including assembly language optimization — to make up the difference.
Bill Heyman and Damon Allison of CodeMorphic created the Public Radio Tuner. Currently the #1 free audio application, the Public Radio Tuner lets iPhone owners listen to live streams of hundreds of public radio stations. This interview features detailed instructions for creating streaming applications, and some of the similar-but-different challenges they faced when creating a forthcoming media center application for Cisco. Finally, we talk about creating “Obamify” — an app that transforms images into those iconic 4-color posters from the campaign — and the problems they ran into getting it into the App Store.
In this interview, Paul Cantrell describes how the iPhone composites the UI using off-screen buffers for every view; the performance benefits from this approach, particularly given the relative low horsepower of the CPU; and how this forms the basis for much of the iPhone’s programming model.
Dave Mark and Jeff LaMarche are the authors of “Beginning iPhone Development.” In this interview, Dave and Jeff talk about what you should learn before you start coding for iPhone, connecting interface builder components to code, how interface builder differs from “code-gen” style UI builders, Objective-C message passing patterns, delegates and protocols, and differences between Cocoa and web MVC implementations.