Why App Stores SUCK – Segregation

I was recently going through the Blackberry developer forums and stumbled across a thread that is all too common. A developer had an app on the market and was doing well until a negative comment was posted and sales stopped.

It’s possible that the app in question wasn’t any good and the loss of sales had nothing to do with the comment. . . but, for the sake of this article, I am siding with the developer because when it comes right down to it, app stores kind of suck.

Get the Tide out because it’s time to air some dirty laundry.

How To Make Graphics Without Being An Artist

If you were to look at the following drawing, you might think it to be the doodles of a 4 or 5-year-old child.  I mean, what the heck is it?  Is it a crazy alligator crawling on a globe?  Is it a bat carrying a piece of fruit?  No and no, it’s clearly a dragon perched atop a magical ball and quite clearly the sad artistic maximum of this 31-year-old man.

A dragon, ferociously perched on top of a magical ball of epic power.

As an artist, I have clearly failed.  But where artistry has failed, geekery has prevailed.  Even with my lack of artistic ability, I am able to take the previous sketch and turn it into the below image:

iPhone/iPod/iPad Automation Basics

This post will describe the basics of iPhone automation using the Automation instrument found in Instruments. Many of the existing articles in this infant space are targeted at developers. If you are a developer, you might want to read some of Alex Vollmer’s articles, he has done a great job describing how application developers can add tags and names to help make the automation process easier.

What about folks who are handed untagged app builds who can’t modify the source? This article will approach iPhone automation from the perspective of a fictional QA Engineer who needs to automate untagged code as-delivered. If you aren’t yet familiar with how to use the Automation instrument in Instruments, have a read through Alex’s post.

The outline for this post is:

• A Map of Types & Methods
• Using Types & Methods
• Exploratory UI Discovery

The Busy Coder’s Intro to Objective-C

Smalltalk (left) and Apple (right) pretend like no-one is going to notice.

I have delayed learning Objective-C for as long as possible.  In the last 3 weeks I have been coming up to speed on the language and frameworks involved for the iPhone.  What follows is the quick reference guide that I couldn’t find when I started learning this awkward language.

This guide won’t make you an expert but it explains enough so that you can crawl through some Objective-C and understand what is going on.