According to TechCrunch article Apple’s App Store saw $1.7B in billings transaction in July 2015 alone. To date, the company has paid out $33 billion to App Store developers, it said – $8 billion of which was in 2015 alone. Large chunk of growth has come from China. In fact China has overtaken U.S as number one source of downloads. And its now number three country by revenue. This explained my continuos puzzlement by downloads stats for Memory Game. I though it was some sort of outlier, or possibly due to the popularity of Apple Watch in China. Not so. China truly is market not to be ignored. Business model for this particular game is first two levels are for free, then £0.79 (tier 1) to unlock all levels. Alternatively you can share on social media to unlock level three for free. My (more…)

It’s quite handy to have multiple builds of same app on one device for developing purposes. I usually setup three different builds. I like to have AppStore version alongside βeta version that is distributed to testers, as well as having separate debug builds. Last is only used when I directly build and run from Xcode. This involves having different bundle ids. Therefore there will be multiple app ids and provisioning profiles that will need to be created. It’s a drawback, but one well worth the costs. I hate when I want to show off the app to someone but build I have on the device is buggy development version. Or when tester is trying to show me bug he/she found, but I haven’t got the same build as he/she does, on my device. All that is gone with multiple bundle ids setup. I also like to render version and build numbers (more…)

Memory Game – Maiden Voyage. Take on a voyage through the memory frontier. Explore its wondrous tiles… We would like to consider Memory Game Maiden Voyage the most gorgeous memory game on AppStore for iPhone, iPad and  Watch and would love to hear form you on wether you think we have achieved that goal. We think you are going to enjoy our game when you have a few moments to pass and would like to see something delightful. Perhaps you are stuck on crowded public transport, holding the bar with one hand. It is so crowded you can’t even pull out your iPhone. You can keep holding the bar with one hand and taping with the other. We have put a lot of effort into design and bringing almost impossible animations and responsiveness to Apple watch, as we wanted to create bitesized delightful experience. We would like to consider Memory (more…)

I collected a few talks in this post that I consider particularly interesting, educational, enlightening and thought provoking. Now almost 8 months on from Swift announcement, with vibrant community, there are plenty of talks to choose from. I feel like we as a community (or at least me) are still working out what will the standard practices be when it comes to structuring and developing software in Swift. I think this might not truly change until Apple rewrites / replaces Cocoa. Talks below are some of the ones that shape my thinking on that topic. If there are any talks that gave you “aha moment”, or made you think about Swift in whole new light. I would love to know, feel free to tweet links at me. (more…)

Let’s start with quick summary in first paragraph and explain details later on. Apple only offers Retina on iMac because they plug screen directly to PCI ports on motherboard. Current generation of chipsets does not have ports with big enough bandwidth to handle 5k resolution at 60Hz. HMDI 2 is not yet supported, Thunderbolt 3 will be coming out in Intel’s Skylake chipsets, due late 2015 – early 2016. However if you own 2013 Retina Macbook Pro, 2012 Mac Pro, or Retina iMac (😄 I know) you can get close enough today by using 4k display. Before I delve into details let me point out, there are quite a few of them out there, but not very many actually support 4k at 60Hz, be sure to get one which does it. It will have to have DisplayPort 1.2 input, not 1.1. I list some suggestions further down. Lets dive into details by defining what does retina for (more…)

SnowGlobe.framework its easy to use, open source iOS framework written in #swift. It allows you to ad delightful / cheesy Christmas easter egg to your awesome app for holiday season. When user shakes the device, your app “turns into a snow globe”. Leveraging CAEmitterLayer to create snow fall, snow globe like animation while device is shaken. I am a sucker for that kinda of thing. I don’t see anything wrong with falling for spirit of the holiday season and getting bit cheesy. (more…)