If you want facts, Indie, I've none to give you, at least not yet.

As I’ve written before, I’m very optimistic about the state of iPhone and iPad App development. I’ve published several apps on the side, and while I’ve worked on several Apps at my day job, Apps was only part of my day job, and I didn’t get a chance to focus on mobile the way I really wanted to. Well, today, that all changes. My last day at my day job was the last day of June, I took a long 4th of July weekend off, and now I’m moving into App development full time.

Published at July 5, 2011 ·  2 min read

DIY Standing Desk Round 2 - Home Edition

I wrote previously about the Standing Desk I use in my cube at work. Recently, I decided that it was working so well for me that I wanted one at home, too. At home, I didn’t have a cubical I had to work with, so I went for a different design. I wanted something adjustable so I could get the height exactly right, but I didn’t care about being able to adjust it on the fly (once I got the right height I knew I wouldn’t care about sitting down at it or anything).

Published at May 19, 2011 ·  2 min read

How can you edit, build and install iPhone and iPad Apps without being near a Mac?

I’m going to walk you through the process that XCAB uses (These steps are taken from this SlideShow). I have a refurb mini in my Living Room that I bought to be an Home Sharing server, and it’s more than up to the task. I’ve run it on my laptop, too, from time to time. As far as the iOS device, an iPad is obviously better to use for editing, because of the screen real estate, but the process is the same for both.

Published at May 18, 2011 ·  2 min read

Video Demo: How to program an iPad by using an iPad, no jailbreak required

Here’s a video I put together to demonstrate how to use the code that I wrote that I blogged about last week to program an iPad with an iPad, without having to lug your laptop around with you (or jailbreak your device): Please excuse the fuzziness, I recorded it from my iPad 2 using a setup that converted it to a Standard Definition Analog TV signal along the way. Hopefully, it is close enough that you can get the idea of how it works.

Published at May 17, 2011 ·  1 min read

Programming an iPad with an iPad: Putting the "Mobile" into Mobile App Development

This is a talk I gave on Thursday at the Austin CocoaCoder group (and here is the PDF if you don’t do Flash): Developing iOS apps on your iPad with XCAB View more presentations from Carl Brown The code is here on GitHub, and you’ll need this version of iOS-BetaBuilder and accounts with Boxcar and Dropbox. It’s not perfect, yet. There’s no provision for managing XCode projects or xib files (you’ll still have to do all that on the Mac), no auto-complete or refactoring or debugging or instruments and the lag and long cycle time gets old.

Published at May 15, 2011 ·  1 min read

Blog Moved to SquareSpace

Even though Blogger is back now, I’ve moved my blog to SquareSpace. Truth be told, I was never particularly happy with blogger.com anyway, and I don’t mind paying for decent software and services, and the SquareSpace iPad app is the best blogging experience on the iPad I’ve found, so the Blogger Outage was the kick in the pants that I needed to make the switch. Glad I did.

Published at May 14, 2011 ·  1 min read

Mobile Apps - Boom or Bust? Sherman, please set the Wayback Machine for 1994, and then 1853

In the last few days, I’ve seen reports that Mobile Apps are repeating the 1996 expansion, and reports that Mobile Apps don’t provide a viable business model. I think that there are elements of truth in both articles, but I don’t think either is an adequate depiction of what I’m seeing. Let me see if I can explain. Like others, I feel like I’ve been here before, but for me the year wasn’t 1996, but 1994.

Published at March 9, 2011 ·  2 min read

Fixed Price iPhone App Proposals - One Contrary Consultant's View

I’ve seen a some traffic lately about billing and proposals for writing iPhone apps. Most of what I’ve seen revolves around hourly rates, but I think that’s not a helpful way to go, so I thought I’d chime in with my opinion. I’ve been a consultant off and on for the better part of my career, starting with EDS in 1993. I’ve worked for different consulting shops and independently and I’ve read extensively on the topic.

Published at March 7, 2011 ·  4 min read