The future may well contain fewer signs and billboards. We can hope. It is odd how we worry about being bombarded with ads online but ads already bombard us everywhere in our environment, along with increasingly unnecessary signage to direct us to destinations our mobile devices can take us to with less confusion.
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Google’s industrial espionage potential
We all know that Google “reads” all gmail. Let’s assume for now that all commercial Google Apps content is secure and not viewed by Google. What may not have occurred to you is that, like Slice Intelligence who have recently been in the news for extrapolating Apple Watch sales data from willing users’ email accounts — this means they can tell what you are buying, and this is incredibly valuable information.
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Bitcode. I just don’t buy it.
At WWDC 2015 Apple introduced the concept of Bitcode, which essentially means we will in future compile our code to an intermediary binary represetation (IR) and uploaded to this iTunes Connect in this device-agnostic form.
This has been sparsely publicized as an optimisation strategy for iOS and watchOS apps, allowing Apple to apply hardware-specific micro optimisations after your app has been released to the store.
Perhaps they will use it for this, but I call disinformation on the whole thing.
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The Microsoft years – don’t be mad John
On episode 125 of ATP, John Siracusa was goaded into spelling out his hatred of Microsoft, where as a young Mac enthusiast he felt Microsoft unjustly “won” the personal computing market.
This was very interesting for me to hear as I had never really given it much thought. At that time in the mid 90s I was a Windows user because, pre-OS X, only crazy musicians or designers used Macs. Until Windows 95 came out, MacOS was arguably aesthetically better than Windows but was soon technically and visually crushed by Win95.
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Interview – “Revealed: Soundproof”
Our music practice app Soundproof has some cool custom user interface elements that we spent a lot of time getting right. The good people at Itty Bitty Apps interviewed me about this and how we use the excellent Reveal app to debug and design these elements.
You can find the interview here
You may find it interesting to find out a bit about how we work, and how Reveal is worth every penny if you’re an iOS developer. Buy it now if you haven’t already. It does stuff Xcode can only dream of.