Alterplay

A few months ago I suggested ShareKit community to create ShareKit 2.0. The only reason was ShareKit is highly demanded and the original author had no time to develop the project — last commit by Nov 22 2010. There are 289 forks and tens of ignored pull requests and many–many issues generated by community. All these had proved situation was deadlocked.

So I posted a suggestion and sent a few private messages to most active participants. Fortunately some good people found idea worthy. ShareKit/ShareKit was found as a community and just gathered core team defined Policies.

4 months later. Read more…

We’ve released a tiny app. It’s based on of multiple-choice questions designed to revise your knowledge and readiness to pass ACCA F3 Financial Accounting. You will get feedback on your answers, breakdown of your score and process of your revision.

The main target is to increase your chance of success on yours force coming exam. Tests are provided by our ACCA certified friend.

It’s an experiment app in two senses. Firstly we tried our force to design and develop very quickly and efficiently. I’d say it’s achieved by 80%. Secondly we want to get a proof of concept. So if the hypothesis confirmed, we will develop a set of applications in more interesting forms.

Good luck on your exams!

We want to keep all users and readers in one place and since Blogger doesn’t support subdirectory publishing we’ve moved to WordPress.

To make it easy for readers and save Google traffic and references we’ve made 301 redirections for all previous posts. Also we’ve updated RSS channel so I hope to see this post in my Google Reader soon.

So our website and both russian blog and this one are in one place from now.

We were busy last months but will try to post more useful info next year. I’d like to see more code snippets shared, and maybe 3d party libs and open source libs review.

We’ve finally started blogging in Russian.

And the second reason is we’re hiring, as you’d probably know. And the person we’re searching for has to speak russian. So it’s quite weird to hire a russian guy by publishing vacancy on english, isn’t it.

This month I prolonged my iOS Developer Account for 4th year. This is kind of anniversary. So to celebrate I decided to move from Individual to iOS Developer Company Account.

After reading the post iOS Developer Program: from individual to company I was ready for everything.

My experience wasn’t so bad I’d say it was really flashy and joyful.

Transition

Before start I had a registered company, bank accounts and all papers in digital format. The main difference from past years is you need to be verified by voice – every important confirm is made by phone call where you need to know your name, surname, company name, email, working phone number and EnrollmentID if any. It takes about 5 minutes to spell all those info if you’re from not english native country as me. Only patience.

So my process was:

1. Called to Apple Developer Support USA. They girl said that my account including Provision Portal had to be not available while transitioning and I could do nothing during this time. Confirmed two times that I’d got all her warnings. And confirmed that had prepared everything including company details papers.
2. After 10 minutes I had an email with Enrollment ID and a link to a form to launch moving process to the Company Developer Account. The form had a few standard fields like company name and business address. 
3. A few hours after I had second email with asking to call back to any support phone numbers. The transition process was launched.
4. In the morning I called to the Apple Developer Support UK because US and AU was sleeping already. The girl with very clear voice asked for full name, mail, enrollment id and company name. The girl said OK and asked to wait an email soon.
5. 5 minutes after I got email with link where I set two check–points and press OK.
6. Then I got an email with “Request for Company Assignment Complete” and Developer and Provision portals had started to work immediately.

I spoke on quite middle “russian–English” but surely and clearly. 

To increase focus on more difficult, principal and conceptual things we are searching for a second UI/UX designer now.

The main responsibility is to draw cool app designs according to wireframe–mockups. So it’d be a Photoshop guy with experience and passion for design. All work will be related to iOS apps user interfaces.

We need a russian speaking guy to join our team remotely or in Kiev.
In return, we offer real challenges and knowledge sharing.

This is a russian version with test job.

Colleagues,

for the past 2.5 years we’ve been working on more than 40 iOS applications and 100+ their versions. During this time, we saw thousands of billets, mockups and final designs. With every project we assimilate more and more the importance of design in the iOS application development process. Therefore we ventured to create a product that I want to tell you today.

Mockup.io – service for iOS design mockups demonstration

It makes really easy to demonstrate mockups in a browser or directly on the iPhone and iPad. View mode automatically adjusts to the client device adding a device frame if necessary. You can keep a project as a webapp on your device by adding icon to the springboard.

Foremost we tried to solve our actual internal problems. We already use Mockup.io to show mockups within the team and customers, and friends to get feedback.

The current version is simple, but already useful.
Please send us your experienced feedback. We appreciate that.

Mockup.io

This post describes how we support multiple builds. Most-often you need this if you work for enterprise or release own product line.

We follow these notes to add new builds to one product which has multiple targets/builds. The product is one Xcode4 project. Each build may have own graphics for a customer and may have some special settings like server settings via preprocessor and user-defined variables.

How to Make a New Build

1. Copy existing Target – select main project file and find targets sections, then duplicate by right click menu
2. Rename target according to customer name
3. Remove and recreate Scheme – goto “Product > Manage Schemes …”, finds your’s and remove it, it usually looks like “copy of Main Build”; then press “Autocreate Schemes Now”
4. Rename *.plist file, change its name in Target settings, check if *.plist file has “Relative to Project” Location in file settings in File Inspector on the right side of Xcode
5. Add necessary Icons, Splash screens and graphics to the project

Not obvious, but quite easy. I’d not publish this note if it’s so simple. We faced to problems that prolong this process from 10 minutes to about 30–40 minutes.

That’s why I want to give you a list of notes that makes things solved faster by reading this:

• When splash screens are not shown it’s need to check names. For example for product name of customer-X we have ProductX target/build: “ProductX-Default.png” – is right settings for iPad in *.plist, but file names are “ProductX-Default-Landscape~ipad.png” and “ProductX-Default-Portrait~ipad.png”. They’re recognized automatically.
• Entitlements file must be written with its extension – “Entitlements.plist” – in the Target settings
• Files like *.plist must have according Target membership settings – look at File Inspector “Target Mambership” section.
• Location of files must have “Relative to Project” but NOT something like “Absolute”. It’d be a problem when you share project code.
• ${EXECUTABLE_NAME} settings must be present in *.plist file. Other way app just doesn’t run and nobody knows why
• if on launch you see Running or Attaching and nothing is happening, it’s better to remove your user settings inside Project File. Do it carefully by right clicking on project file in Finder then press “Show Package Contents” and find your name inside “xcuserdata” directory. Remove yours subdirectory and run cleaned project again. If it’s helped then it means the EXECUTABLE_NAME settings wasn’t renamed while you copying Target and Xcode was waiting for wrong EXECUTABLE_NAME to be launch. Good if it works now.

I’d very recommend to go through the list if you have really strange or unclear problem.

Happy building!