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.
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path getting his book to market including shelving the mostly finished project when it seemed the NDA would never be rescinded and having Apple announce 3.0 just as the book was ready to go to press.
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.
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.
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.
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.