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.  I’m still working on turning my " write iOS Apps from an iOS device" project into a shipping application, and I want to get iCloud-enabled refreshes of some of my existing apps ready for the iOS 5.0 launch this fall.  Hopefully along the way, I’ll find some contract work to help pay the bills.  Please let me know if you run into someone who needs to get an App built.

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). I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. That year, I was a consultant in Dallas Texas, mostly hooking up Internet connectivity and web servers for companies that nothing to do with technology. At one point I literally couldn’t introduce myself to people without having them say, “Did you say that you do websites? I’ve got to get a website for my business. Can you help me?”

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. Lately, I’ve been applying a lot of that experience to consulting for companies who want iPhone apps created.