Mobile Orchard: iPhone Developer Podcast

Episode 33: Oceanhouse Media

Mobile Orchard Team — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 21:41:23 +0000

Oceanhouse Media has an enviable track record: For almost the entire lifetime of the App Store they’ve consistently had a handful of apps in the top-100. Their apps beat the averages for both volume and unit price; in fact, they won’t build an app unless they can sell five to ten thousand units at $4 to $7 each. Just before the holidays they landed the license to create apps under the “Dr. Suess” brand; their Grinch themed Christmas offerings were a hit and were widely covered by CNN, CNET and others. In this interview, I speak with Michel Kripalani, Oceanhouse’s founder and President, about the plan behind their success.

Episode 32: Chomp

Mobile Orchard Team — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 03:38:13 +0000

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

Mobile Orchard Team — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 05:14:11 +0000

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

Mobile Orchard Team — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 01:52:02 +0000

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

Mobile Orchard Team — Mon, 07 Dec 2009 00:52:59 +0000

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

Mobile Orchard Team — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:41:37 +0000

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

Mobile Orchard Team — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 03:11:16 +0000

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

Mobile Orchard Team — Sun, 18 Oct 2009 18:15:02 +0000

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

Mobile Orchard Team — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 02:26:21 +0000

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

Mobile Orchard Team — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 19:34:16 +0000

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”

Mobile Orchard Team — Mon, 31 Aug 2009 02:36:19 +0000

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.

Episode 22 - Bill Dudney on Map Kit and his book “iPhone SDK Programming”

Mobile Orchard Team — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 20:23:21 +0000

Bill Dudney of Gala Factory is the author of the “Using Map Kit” screencast and co-author of the Pragmatic Press’ book “iPhone SDK Programming.” In this interview, we talk about map kit, its programming model, map annotations, routes, terrain maps, optimization similarities with table view programming and Google and Apple’s collaboration. We also discuss the treacherous path getting his book to market including shelving the mostly finished project when it seemed the NDA would never be rescinded and having Apple announce 3.0 just as the book was ready to go to press.

Episode 21 - Rhomobile: GPL3 Cross-Platform Mobile App Development In Ruby

Mobile Orchard Team — Sun, 02 Aug 2009 20:33:42 +0000

In this interview with Rhomobile founder Adam Blum we discuss their GPL3 framework for creating cross-platform mobile apps, their GPL3 mobile data sync-server, their hosted offering to simplify cross-platform mobile app builds, and the work they did to get Ruby onto an iPhone.

Episode 20 - PhoneGap: Cross-Platform App Development Using HTML, CSS and JavaScript

Mobile Orchard Team — Mon, 20 Jul 2009 03:06:20 +0000

PhoneGap offers a way of creating iPhone apps using HTML, JavaScript and CSS. PhoneGap provides JavaScript interfaces to location services, accelerometer, contacts, vibration and sound. What’s more, PhoneGap is cross-platform, so apps can run with little or no modification on Android and BlackBerry too. In this interview, Rob Ellis and Brock Whitten talk about how PhoneGap works, the mobile aspects of the HTML 5 spec, how to get started with PhoneGap, issues surrounding getting PhoneGap apps into the store and more.

Episode 19 - Corona: Easy-To-Implement, High Performance, Native iPhone Apps Written In Lua

Mobile Orchard Team — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 04:09:39 +0000

Carlos Icaza and Walter Luh are the co-founders of Ansca Mobile and creators of Corona, a new & much talked-about Lua based kit for building native iPhone applications. This interview includes details about creating Corona; a comparison of the programming model, memory management, performance and optimization using Corona/Lua vs. Cocoa Touch/Objective-C; and Adobe’s upcoming iPhone Flash products.

Episode 18 - Urban Airship

Mobile Orchard Team — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 05:02:41 +0000

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.

Episode 17 - Transparent SQLite Encryption With SQLCipher

Mobile Orchard Team — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 02:08:03 +0000

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.

Episode 16 - Bump, The Billionth App

Mobile Orchard Team — Tue, 26 May 2009 02:19:15 +0000

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.

Episode 15 - Joe Hewitt - Creator of Facebook’s iPhone app, the Three20 project and Facebook Connect for iPhone

Mobile Orchard Team — Mon, 11 May 2009 04:34:21 +0000

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.

Episode 14 - Owen Goss - Lessons In iPhone Game Marketing

Mobile Orchard Team — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 04:44:44 +0000

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.

Episode 13 - Noel Llopis - Indie iPhone Game Development

Mobile Orchard Team — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 05:20:11 +0000

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.

Episode 12 - Streaming Audio App Development & Obama Drama

Mobile Orchard Team — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 14:57:11 +0000

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.

Episode 11 - Paul Cantrell - iPhone Internals: high-powered graphics, low-powered CPU

Mobile Orchard Team — Mon, 16 Mar 2009 04:35:41 +0000

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.

Episode 10 - Michael Tyson - Creator of the audio mixing app “Loopy”

Mobile Orchard Team — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 05:08:50 +0000

Michael Tyson is the creator of “Loopy,” a very cool audio mixing application. In this interview, Michael talks about (1) the seven different implementations it took (starting with straight-views, ending at OpenGL) to finalize its unique — and Best App Ever award-nominated — UI, (2) the four different architectural approaches he made (starting with audio-queue and ending at the low-level, sparsely documented, Remote IO system) before finalizing audio subsystems, (3) the travails of echo cancelation, and (4) the business of making a living off of a $10 app.

Episode 9 - Dave Mark & Jeff LaMarche - Authors of “Beginning iPhone Development”

Mobile Orchard Team — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 06:48:07 +0000

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.

Episode 8 - The Tapbots, creators of Weightbot, winner of Best App Ever’s Most Original UI award

Mobile Orchard Team — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 04:04:29 +0000

Mark Jardine and Paul Haddad of the Tapbots talk about Weightbot. Weightbot is both a commercial success — having sold over 100,000 copies — and a beautiful example of creating a custom UI on the iPhone. The interview is in three parts: (1) the origins of the app, (2) creating custom UI controls and (3) promoting the app. This last part is virtually a step-by-step guide to successfully promoting an app; be sure to catch it.

Episode 7 - “Cocoa With Love” blogger Matt Gallagher on programatic iPhone UI testing

Mobile Orchard Team — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 06:21:47 +0000

Matt Gallagher’s “Cocoa With Love” blog is one of the finest advanced Cocoa resources. Matt recently posted a pair of articles demonstrating how to simulate touch events and programatically drive the iPhone UI for user interface testing. In this interview, he describes how it’s done, talks about implementing Apple’s hidden/private touch APIs, and points out that, under the covers, iPhone apps run in the sim are actually native Mac apps.

Episode 6 - Glen Low, Creator of Instaviz, a Mind-Mapping/Graphing app

Mobile Orchard Team — Mon, 05 Jan 2009 05:53:37 +0000

Glen Low is the creator of Instaviz. Instaviz is a graphing and mind-mapping application with a novel, Newton-like shape drawing interface.

In this interview, Glen talks about shape recognition and endpoint/edge connection algorithms using Bayesian classification, graph rendering and layouts using a port of the OSS library Graphviz, and limitations of the mailto-protocol handler.

Episode 5 - Brent Simmons, Creator of NetNewsWire

Mobile Orchard Team — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 06:06:34 +0000

Brent Simmons is the creator of NetNewsWire for the iPhone and Mac. Time Magazine named NetNewsWire one of the top-10 iPhone apps.

In this interview, Brent talks about adapting a desktop app’s UI for iPhone, has advice for indies making a living selling iPhone apps, describes how he successfully split MarsEdit from NetNewsWire, gives some examples of cool iPhone apps, talks about his “anti-packrat” compulsion, and chats about the complexity of syncing iPhone and desktop apps.

Episode 4 - Padraig Kennedy’s iPhone Backup Extractor, Pete Schwamb’s Clever iPhone Thermometer

Mobile Orchard Team — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 20:36:36 +0000

This episode features two interviews:

The first interview is with Padraig Kennedy, author of a very useful iPhone/iPod Touch backup decoder. Have your customers run it to get you their app-state to help track down bugs, or use it to just mess around and see what kind of info and data the apps and Apple have got stashed on your phone.

The second interview is with Pete Schwamb, creator of an app that can tell you the temperature by analyzing the sounds of crickets chirping by using a Fast Fourier Transformation on audio captured by the microphone.

Episode 3 - Neil Mix - Creating the Pandora iPhone Player

Mobile Orchard Team — Sun, 23 Nov 2008 20:36:37 +0000

In this interview, Neil Mix talks about creating the Pandora iPhone application, challenges building a streaming player that works over the EDGE network, parallels between Ajax/JavaScript and Objective-C programming and iPhone UI conventions shared with Tivo and — fire up the Internet time machine — Gopher.

Episode 2 - Dr. Nic Williams - iPhone SQLite schema migrations, Ruby on iPhone, unit testing iPhone Objective-C using Ruby

Mobile Orchard Team — Mon, 03 Nov 2008 06:38:09 +0000

This episode features an interview with Dr Nic Williams from Mocra, an iPhone/Rails consultancy.

Dr. Nic talks about his migration manager for updating SQLite iPhone databases, trying to get Ruby onto an iPhone, using Ruby to unit-test Objective-C iPhone code, his company Mocra, and the Mobile Orchard Podcast’s lavish recording studios.

Episode 1 - Hampton Catlin - Creator of iWik

Mobile Orchard Team — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 15:53:53 +0000

This inaugural episode of the Mobile Orchard Podcast features an interview with Rubyist-turned-iPhone mogul and iWik creator Hampton Catlin.

iWiK, now renamed iPedia, is a 99-cent Wikipedia companion. It has sold over 50,000 copies, appeared in Time Magazine and has been a “featured app” in the App Store.

Hampton talks about creating the v1 app in just three days; trademark issues and the name change; marketing in the App Store; Apple taking more than a month to approve the latest version; and his upcoming dictionary application Dictionaire.