Development

 

The news about Siri not being able to find abortion clinics when doing a search broke a few days back, so this post is not to 'break' the news as much as to ask the question; is Siri's inability to find an abortion clinic purposeful programming or just an glitch?  I grabbed a 4G and did some testing myself and confirmed what has been reported.

Some of my recent tips you, assuming you're interested in programming mobile devices, may be interested in.

Ruby

HERE, I've answered a question on whether it's possible to run Ruby (a dynamic, reflective, general-purpose object-oriented programming language that combines syntax inspired by Perl with Smalltalk-like features) scripts under iOS. It is.

Today, I've decided to completely abandon the “old” 3.x series of Xcode, the development environment for iOS (and Mac OS X).

Up until now, I didn't want to switch as moving to the new Xcode required an almost complete re-learn of the system – even the basic keyboard shortcuts have been changed, to my “delight”.

If you come from Windows Mobile and are into playing MAME arcade games, you may well remember my full article dedicated to the emulation of arcade machines, including MAME, on the platform. (Note that the linked article doesn't show inline images; if you need them, check out THIS instead.)

Fortunately, on the iDevice, it's also possible to play MAME games. No, unlike on Windows Mobile, not the newer, vastly superior (NeoGeo / CPS), “only” the older ones, but it's still more than nothing, isn't it? And it's free – and is also compatible with several Bluetooth game controllers (see below).

If you're an app developer, as I am, once you start to get a decent amount of sales, you start looking for a way to track those sales so you can do some analysis.  For a long time, I tried various web services.  They had a nice advantage as they automatically downloaded your sales reports and created charts, without your having to do anything.  But if you have a lot of apps, as I do, web services can be expensive, as they typically charge per month and per app... even for free ones.  So a friend told me about AppViz from IdeaSwarm, and I've been using it every day for a couple of years now.

With the release of iOS 5 today, there has been some debate at my organization of which OS version we should build for in future iOS apps, iOS 4 or iOS 5. Building to accommodate multiple OS versions is more time consuming which translates to greater costs, and is not always an option. In general, we lean towards the safe side and build to accommodate more users by building for an older OS. However, this also limits what new APIs we make use of in development.

UPDATE: We have had a tremendous response to this webinar so far. If you can't make it Wednesday at 8 PM ET, still sign up because we will be playing replay at a later date.

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