I decided to write a blog post about becoming an uber neato iPhone developer and about all the fame it has brought me, but i can't bring myself to lie to people. So i decided to write about my experiences with iPhone App development so far.
I find myself talking to people a lot about my iPhone apps, it's something i'm proud of, not because they are sheer awesome because that wouldn't be the truth, but just how many people your app can target and having just hit the 20k downloads mark what time would be better.
So earlier this year @scottdrinksbeer showed me an article called "The Easiest Way To Build Your First iPhone App" on NetTuts+, which explained the easiest way to create an iPhone app using HTML and PhoneGap. Using PhoneGap was great and i was able to get some results with it, but it limited me slightly and the app i created using PhoneGap was rejected on the grounds it was useless, i agreed.
I'm not the kind of guy to give up on something so instead of going down the easy route i thought learning actual iPhone App development using Objective C was the grown up thing to do, so that's what i did, because i'm a grown up now.
In March 2010 i received an email from V Festival who didn't want me to carry on development of an iPhone app i had been working on, in these emails legal action was mentioned in an effort to scare me, this is my story.
I personally don't think it is an unfair assumption to believe that most big corporations use questionable methods to make the little people, who threaten their profits, go away. Methods that i'm sure everyone back in reality would see as bullying, a way of throwing around their "big boy" name to make you stop what you're doing.
You would have to do something rather special to get yourself into a position where a big company would want to stop you from doing something they thought could damage them financially, something quite sizeable to even be noticed by these people.
Apparently i've managed to get myself into a real pickle of a situation with Virgin Media because of an iPhone app i created called iFestApp something that, at the time, seemed innocent enough but apparently threatened a few pennies in V Festivals pocket.
So let me tell a little story about a nice young developer who just wanted to share his love for a music festival with like-minded people through the "geeky" means of iPhone App Development.
Of late i have become increasingly tired with Facebook, the increasing use of Farm Ville by people and daily horror scopes is becoming a bore, the most annoying thing is that Facebook is going to stick around for a while, maybe it's primary use wont.
So to be fair to some of people on Facebook who don't use FarmVille and use the service for keeping in touch with old friends is great, that is what Facebook is about, and you are using it like a normal person so you can be exempt from this rant.
As for the rest of you, well you can go fuck yourself you self indulged pieces of shit with nothing better to do than grow a fake farm in a fake world with fake people, i care nothing for you and you drag down the rest of Facebook you big bunch of bastards.
Well as you may have read from my last blog post, i created my first iPhone app which was a rejigging of content from this website, in an iPhone app, for free. Well that got rejected because it was useless, i quite agree, so i gave it another shot.
I decided this time it was better to go with something a little more "native" so i decided to read some articles on creating iPhone apps and they were very helpful in teaching me the basics allowing me to create something useful.
I wouldn't say i was the only person on the internet who has a problem and tweets about it in the hope that venting the anger will speed up the resolution, it never does. This type of action is something i find interesting because lately tweeting about your problems can help resolve them quickly.
This article is about how Twitter can be the tool that saves your brand as a company, it is also an article about how Twitter can help you solve problems faster, and lastly it's a post about the damage Twitter can have on your brand.
The inspiration for this article comes from my experience with companies on Twitter and personally the majority of companies i have had contact with have been very helpful and their help has restored hope in their brand, for others it has not been quite a picnic.
I have been considering a review of my current hosting package for quite some time because i find that their service is often highly reliable but with some problems i have been having lately i didn't want my opinion to be skewed.
It has been a few month since then and i have decided that it is probably better for me to review them so that the same people don't get stung by the same problems that i did, time and time again.
Recently Lily Allen made a splash in the online media when she started a blog where she posted a letter regarding music piracy and how it affected smaller artists, she then went on to post replies she got from other artists.
The letter raised some interesting points from the perspective of the artists which is a new perspective because normally you only hear from the ISPs and record labels. The main point the letter makes is that piracy is not alright (probably why the blog got its name) and it only damages the music industry making it hard for smaller artists to make it big.
Incase you didn't know already i'm a web designer (and developer) and something all web designers come across at least once during the design of a website is cross-browser compatibility and i'm sure you can ask any website designer what they think of IE6 (Internet Explorer 6 - keep up with the acronyms) and they would throw so many obscenities at you that you would most likely cry.
It's no lie that web designers hates Internet Explorer especially Internet Explorer 6, simply because it has trouble rendering the simplest of things and when it does it normally renders them incorrectly. Below is my breakdown of common problems i face with the 3 versions of IE.
In the last couple of months Microsoft launched a new campaign to try and tempt Internet Explorer users to upgrade to the latest version of the browser, when you did Microsoft would give 8 meals to hungry americans and if you upgraded from Internet Explorer 6 they would double that to 16 meals.
This obviously is a good cause because I certainly don't want any fat american to have their body start consuming the large amounts of food stores around the body, so I immediately i jumped onto the cause and used it as a good way to get people to upgrade from the dreaded Internet Explorer 6 browser, a web designers worse nightmare.
As some of you may remember back in October of 2008 my beloved iPhone went into be fixed, this was done by Carphone Warehouse under the 12 month warranty because the screen went all weird and the accelerometer went all funny. Some of you may also remember i wrote several posts about how Carphone Warehouse sucked balls, today i follow that post with more Carphone warehouse failings.
So apparently something quite common with White iPhone 3Gs is cracking, these are small little hairline cracks in the areas where plastic is thin, typically around the speakers or headphone jack. My iPhone began to develop them around 4 months ago and it wasn't really a massive problem for me, however on Friday one of the cracks go worse, up to the point where the iPhone was almost in half.
Well it's been almost 1 week since i posted my disgust at The Carphone Warehouse for their poor customer service and repair package. Since then i have learnt new facts which only add to my annoyance.
First let me start by saying I have my iPhone back and it works like a treat but apart from that i'm disappointed at The Carphone Warehouse for their piss-poor customer service.
Sunday 2nd November 2008 - I gave them a call asking where my iPhone was and when i would have it back and they told me Wednesday which was 3 days overdue from the 14 days they promised me. Wednesday came along and i had heard nothing, but i waited for the length of the day to see if i got a text or phone as promised by the sales rep i called. No call ever came.
Let me set the scene. Sunday 19th October 2008, i spent the prior Friday in Burnley on one of my regular night outs taking various pictures with the piss-poor 2Mpixel camera on the iPhone 3G. Saturday i awake with a somewhat bad hangover (not the worst hangover), i come to marvel at the pictures i took the night before. I find myself looking shocked as my iPhone flips the photos around in any direction. The cause. A broken accelerometer inside the iPhone meaning that it didn't know what direction it was facing.