Category: iPhone app

I am a soft spoken person. I got to know this word when a recruiter gave me feedback in 2000, when I applied for a consultant position at software company. That’s ok most of the time, except in certain cases we need to be clear: we cannot be vague, and we cannot waiver. Some examples include communicate with clients or customer when we work on a project, we need to be clear about the responsibility of each party, the expectations and the timeline or milestone.

A related topic is the “killer instinct” or “killer attitude”. We all know “killer apps”, the apps that knock the ball out of the park. Similarly, by killer instinct I meant in certain cases, we have no choice but to fix the issue, and we have to deliver. An example is the crisis situation, customer was already unhappy with the situation, we need to turn it around. I had couple instances like that recently. The solution usually involves putting head down, looking at the code, ask question or solicit help as needed. The solution will come eventually.

On the other hand, I have seen very intelligent people that are soft-spoken but don’t have the killer-instinct, or the drive to solve or fix a problem. This is ok, as long as the team has other people with the attribute above. But for the person without that trait, he/she may hit a career glass-ceiling soon. Because in real world, stressful situation/conflict arise and it usually needs that skill.

I used to listen APM: Market Place (NPR) and the Nightly Business Report (PBS => CNBC). I was a business news junkie, and was into stock market. I also listened to a more in-depth podcast: the weathtrack by Consuelo.

More recently, I expanded my podcasts a bit, as you can see from below.

NPR hidden brain: I grew interest in psychology in recent years. It’s very much applicable in the business, work place, and the home.

Developing Perspective: david smith, note he moved on to the under the radar with Marco recently. But very good stuff from indie dev perspective.

Under the radar: by david smith (web, twitter) and marco arment (web, twitter). This is the new podcast launched by David and Marco (the lead developer of tumblr and famous tech blogger).

Release notes: this one is more geared toward developing iOS/Mac apps for business.

raywenderlich.com: I used to listen quite a bit, but have not followed as close as before since I am no longer doing iOS apps.

I used the Amazon Fire phone as my personal phone for almost a year. But a recent incident made me decide to switch. I have an iPhone 6 from work since last Sept. But for all the important places such as my daughter’s school I leave my own mobile phone number there. And last week, during a time when I need the Amazon fire to work, it failed. Basically the school bus coordinator wanted to get hold of me because of a mistake on my daughter’s side (she was supposed to go home after the art club activity, but she forgot about that and took bus home right after school, which means there is no grown up to pick her up at the bus stop).

I know one reason I did not answer phone initially was these days most of my unsolicited calls are from spammers (not just recruiters, they are people who tell me I won lottery, won a cruise, or try to sell me cable or home security services). I knew this one is real because the same number called twice. But when I picked up the second call, there is no sound. After a while I did figure out, the speaker on Amazon fire phone ONLY WORKS when I plug in the headphone (the ear phone). So on my way to home, the 3rd call came, this time it worked because I have bluetooth on the car, and I picked up the phone and found out what was happening. It has been about 14 minutes since the first call.

This incident was the main motivator for me to switch back to iPhone. Since I already gave my old iPhone 5s to my wife, I decided order the new SE for her, and then get the old 5s back. Switching back was almost trivial, just swap out the nano SIM card, and also since I had the google contacts managing my address book on Amazon Fire, I just imported them when I added the Gmail to iPhone 5s. I know when switching from iPhone to iPhone, the best approach is via iCloud (to get the contacts moved over).

Now that I switched over, I was hoping this kind of thing does not happen. It could be nerve racking when taking about calls about bus accidents etc.

(Update 11-19-2015) It appears Facebook started to spam me. It sent an email saying I got a new message, which is not true. It actually sent not just one, but two messages. Also this is the second week of my pager duty. This afternoon Gas Buddy sent me an alert, and it got to my Martian Notifier. The gas price went up at least 20 cents, useful notifications, but not timingly because I don’t want it confused with the real page (text message or SMS).

(Original 10-19-2015) Just survived first week of pager duty (on-call): two sleep deprived nights, and some tense times. On the first night, around 2 am in the morning, the phone rang (paging text message came). Good thing is after validation it seems nothing horrible happened. I tried to go back to sleep, but I could not. One thing I was worried is what if I slept through the page SMS (text message) from the phone. Made sure the ring volume is maximized. I did think about a smartwatch or a wristband (Fitbit like) before starting page duty. Was debating between Apple Watch (about $400) and Fitbit Surge (about $250). Note I already have Fitbit Charge, and I don’t want to have another addictive device like iPhone (Apple Watch), plus the cost associated with it. So I did a little google and found this Martian Notifier Watch. And I ordered it via Amazon immediately when I could not feel asleep. It arrived on Wednesday and I made it work quickly: basically I updated its firmware to the latest via MacBook.

Then I saw something interesting happened: it vibrates not only when a message arrives; but also when I started driving to work or drive my daughter to ice rink/COCA, and when I complete an Apple pay transaction. Of course I know the notification is from iPhone and I went ahead and turned them off yesterday. So today is basically quite because I handed off pager duty this morning, and I turned off the two main notifications on iPhone. The first one is interesting, because it will say how long it takes to work or some other places. So apparently Apple is collecting some information about my behavior (where I go for work, what’s my weekend routine look like). One can say iPhone get a bit smarter (artificial intelligence), or put it another way, Apple is getting sneaky with iOS 9.

Back to the main topic, how much notifications do I really want? I recall when I got my first Blackberry, and have gmail installed on it. I was still excited about the device and the red flash comes with a notification (e.g., a meeting is starting in 5 minutes). So I turned on the email notification. Quickly I found this is excessive, because it will flash very often. So I turned it off. Similar goes to the badge (phone, iOS) notification comes with the Slack app. Once I got distracted, when I got home, I paid attention to that Slack notification, and I left my one year old daughter in the car for a minute and two.

We are living in a post smartphone, smart watch/wrist band world. We increasingly pay attention to the notifications from those devices, while at the same time, potentially ignore other important notifications from real people, both at workplace and home. Attention span becomes shorter and shorter at workplace too, with the instant messaging and the “high importance” emails. On one hand they are notifications, on the other hand they are distractors. Ultimately it’s up to us to decide what is truly important. Get the spam call from telemarketer who notify us “you win a lottery” or “do you want a home security system”, or just turn off all the non-sense.

(Update 11-08-2015) Some friends suggested mi band (or mi 2 band), which is much cheaper (about $16), and it also has those notifications capability. I have not tried and am not sure about the reliability of those. I noticed on my Fitbit Charge, after a while (app or firmware update), and previously paired notifications between my Fire Phone and Charge needs to be re-done. In this sense I feel good about the Martian Notifier, because so far (3 weeks in) I haven’t seen a problem.

Also I looked a bit more into the iOS notifications. Note all the Martian notifier notifications are supported by the master device, in my case iPhone 6. I mentioned earlier iOS seems guessed my routines and intentions well both in weekdays and weekends. For example, we stopped by Starbucks at Olivette on Sunday afternoon when we done with ballet class at coca (u city). The Martian notifier aka iPhone will say 8 minutes to Olivette as soon as I start the car at coca. Similar for the ice skate classes on Saturday. I think I will leave it on on none pager duty days, because I don’t want it to be confused with work related pager. 

Read also About Notifications on iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch (by Apple)

Note this is also available at github.

(10-06-2015 Update 2) Came across this one by tutsplus. Also the thoughts by Erica and savyapps.

(09-28-2015 Update) Came across this tutorial by madeupbypeople. Looks good. Also, note Xcode 7.1 beta 2 is coming out, along with iOS 9.0.1

(09-19-2015 Original) My Apple TV dev kit arrived. I haven’t done iOS dev for a while, not even get around the Apple Watch (I use a Fitbit Charge personally). But this new Apple TV thing seems really interesting, with all these TVML and TVJS things. There are not many tvOS tutorial right now, as this is really new and not many people get around it yet. But here are some I saw.

The following two both talked about TVML, TVJS and TVMLKit (the glue between TVML, JavaScript, and your native tvOS application per Kelvin Lau, see below). I know for traditional iOS developers Javascript may not be their favorite language (think Objective-C), but with the introduction of Swift, combined with the growth of popularity of Javascript in web development (both frontend and backend), we should at least pay attention to it. It’s much easier to setup a simple content navigation framework using Javascript and CSS (think websites) instead of Objective-C/Swift.

raywenderlich (Kelvin Lau @KelvinlauKL): Beginning tvOS Development with TVML Tutorial

Jameson Quave (@jquave)Developing tvOS Apps for Apple TV [Part 1] and Developing tvOS Apps for Apple TV [Part 2]

Mastering the tvOS Focus Engine: saw this at airbnb blog, this one is interesting because it talked about the focus and remote control. Note the game market is one focus of new Apple TV.

Quick Tip: How to use the remote control in your TVOS Apps for Apple TV in SWIFT

This one Hands-on with the tvOS SDK talked about porting iOS app to tvOS (note this is not a recommended approach). Nonetheless it’s interesting to see the gesture recognizer etc being discussed there.

I expect more tutorial and development on tvOS as we are close to the new Apple TV launch.

(Update 10-08-2015) The Unlocked version of iPhone 6s and 6s plus started on sale at Apple store and online. via AppleInsider.

(Original 09-10-2015)
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Reference: the verge; Apple iPhone Upgrade Plan

One drawback of Fire Phone does not come with Google Play Store pre-installed. It comes with Amazon App Store instead, which has a much smaller collection. For instance, I could not find BoA app, wechat and all the Google apps there. Fortunately there is way to get around it, with the Google Play Store the Fire Phone becomes a middle range Android phone.

Make sure you do them in the right order: Account Manager, Services
Framework, Play Services, finally Play Store.
Account Manager: https://app.box.com/s/qeetg0vfe01ri83l2e1nosl8rzmax41q

Services Framework: https://app.box.com/s/x6gkj91qkwxse2abqhz0at4uq6wtpe91

Play Services: https://app.box.com/s/cas5ctu356rnm088c6l4ngo8b5r0hd1z

Play Store: https://app.box.com/s/pjtgrmfl1t3by9tuhvb6vm5i04m7falk

The first one you try to install (Account Manager) you’ll get a warning that it’s an unknown source and offer to take you to settings. Go to settings and enable App Installation (allows installations from other sources (read: Google Play))

Courtesy of qzmtl at mitbbs. This is the most simple instructions to install Play Store on Fire Phone. And I did it in 5 minutes or so.

or MDM for the abbreviation. If you have read my blog for a while, you know I was a Blackberry fan, Blackberry was also my first Smartphone. The company (used to be Research In Motion) and the Blackberry has been in declining in recent years, and yesterday it announced buying the Good Technology (a rival mobile email technology provider). I have not used Good Technology based email myself, but have heard it being used in a few places I worked. Guess I was not important enough to carry a smartphone in those occasions 🙂

Back to topic, Good Technology operates in a large space called Mobile Device Management, with a few competitors, MobileIron and AirWatch comes to mind for startups, then we have traditional players such as IBM and Citrix. I got to know MobileIron a few years ago as I was working on iOS dev and deployment and at the time, they have not IPOed yet. I looked at its stock price just now, and not surprisingly it did not do well. Just like Alex said in this Techcrunch article, it suggested this space is not gold mine. I knew AirWatch (which is bigger than MobileIron), was bought by VMWare in early 2014. If a company can go IPO, they would go IPO instead of being bought out. Of course this does not apply to Instagram and Whatsapp, as Facebook paid handsome money for them at the time. For Blackberry, it seems like a shrewd move as all these players are down at this moment, personally I felt MDM is a niche space that big player not necessarily want to crush startup, like Box or Dropbox situation (in that case, Google, Amazon, Microsoft Azure/OneDrive, and to less extent, Apple iCloud all compete). For BBRY, it seems like they just got some maintenance revenue to sustain for a while, while they try to turn around.