Developing iPhone apps

All apps submitted to the App Store go through an evaluation process. Sometimes it takes 2 days and sometimes 15 days. You can’t estimate what could possibly happen because the process is not transparent. Even updates go through the full evaluation process. You have a critical bug in your iPhone app and you changed only one line and submitted an update, now you have to wait about a week to get it fixed.

True story, a complete one or two weeks to submit an update for an app in year 2012. This is what happened to us, a small but critical bug delayed our app launch 7 days. Thankfully it is on App Store now. I am not sure if that expensive company accounts have some privileges or not.

Developing Facebook apps

Facebook API is crap. You must have balls if you are building a serious business on top of the Facebook Platform. And by the balls, I mean you should have serious contacts at Facebook or you should be a part of Facebook partnership program.

One reason is Facebook platform is full of serious bugs that could possibly block your development. Even I found several of them. [1][2][3][4] and waited a long time to get them fixed. Can you imagine a bug that affects Login with Facebook that will cause 50% decrease in your sales/signups? It is quite possible and as you might expect Facebook wouldn’t care, why would it?

Another reason is about Open Graph. We are heavily using Open Graph protocol to publish user activities on Facebook timeline in a fashioned way. However Open Graph actions do have an approval process which is not transparent. Some of our actions got approved in 1 or 2 days, however we have a “buying” action that is stuck at Approval Pending state (not rejected or approved) for months even we resubmitted it several times. It is just annoying.

Our use of “listen” action is another story. As you may know, only chosen partners (Grooveshark, earbits, Spotify etc.) – yeah, those who have balls are allowed to use this action. In our case, we don’t stream any music in our service but we only publish that our user is now listening to that song. We applied Facebook with a detailed explanation then they responded with a questionnaire form full of DMCA, copyrights and other crap that we have nothing to do with. We explained our situation again and as you might expect they could not get it. We are still posting “listen” action as traditional wall post and hopefully it will change in a few god damn months.

Don’t rely on others if you have an option to not to.

iOS 5.0 SDK also comes with Core Image library which we use some of it in our app and we are planning to use more of it in the future (spoiler: image filters that we are planning to add soon). They are much inexpensive to develop in iOS 5 SDK. Another important feature of iOS 5 is seamless Twitter integration, where you can connect your Twitter account to ollaa with one click – no username, password is needed if you already using Twitter app on your iDevice.

When we look at upgrade stats of iOS, as of last month 82% of all users have iOS 5.x which clearly indicates it is growing really fast. (Trivia: 40% of iOS users upgrade in 5 days after when an update comes out.) Even if support for the 18% is pretty important (and it will decrease considerably), we currently do not have man power to do this. We are a team of 3 and only one of us is working on our iOS app.

We are really sorry for the convenience we caused for iOS 4.x users. Thanks to Ugur who made our perfect iOS app possible.

Intel and Microsoft have been keeping close cooperation [...] developing new tablet PCs based on Windows 8, with a goal of decreasing the global market share for iPad from 70% currently to below 50% by the middle of 2013 [...]

So here’s the Microsoft’s master plan. I am not sure if people are going to pay $300-$1000 for a Windows-based and probably not so well-designed and thicker device while there is iPad out there. I’m also curious whether can Windows 8 tablets from different vendors can achieve a battery life and performance as good as iPad. No need to mention usability, it is a long shot to pull iPad below %50.

• Organize your inbox. I use Gmail and for the emails I won’t read or reply immediately, I star them. If I’m not gonna need that email, I simply delete it. If I’m done with it, I archive it.
• Have To-Do lists. In fact several of them. I have lists for school-related, project-related and personal stuff.(try this or this)
• Keep To-Dos simple. Try to split them into tasks doable in 15 minutes.
• Keep iterating on To-Dos during the day, pick the ones you wish to do at that moment.
• Actually do things. Try to have several hours of time you can keep concentrated. Find your favorite place, coffee or playlist whatever keeps you on the track for a while.
• Archive Things. I visit Hacker News several times everyday, I follow many blogs on RSS. If it sounds interesting, I add this to my reading list. (try this, this or this) If you found website that may be useful someday, bookmark it and keep your mind relaxed, forgetting things won’t bug you anymore.
• Shortest Job First. When a new task takes less than 2 minutes arrives, don’t postpone it or put it in your queue; rather stop what you are doing and do this now.
• Don’t get stuck. If a todo item always stays there try to find another way of doing it or consult someone knows better than you. If you got stuck more than twice its estimated time, stop working on it.