051 – All Our Indie Dreams Have Been Crushed – with Stephen Coyle

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051 - All Our Indie Dreams Have Been Crushed - with Stephen Coyle
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A very special episode with guest Stephen Coyle. Stephen talks us through the development process of Tapt, WordFlash, Hyperbolizer and Déjà, and talks about his download numbers and revenue models for each app. What Apple could do to improve App Store economics. Different strategies for marketing your apps. Musical notation as a programming language. Hackintoshes. iPads Pro and shopping lists. Windows. Server side. Getting things done. Wordsnap redux. ARKit and hardware. App design. Fonts in apps. Working in your head but not in Xcode. Dave and Baz reminisce. Latex. HomePod.

Stephen’s apps

Stephen’s blog posts discussed

What’s making us happy

050 – Is it about your ears?

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050 - Is it about your ears?
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Thomas cleans AirPods. Baz wants to talk Android. Messages annoyances. AR. Teaching the next generation. Dave makes a DAWG. Building for iPad and keeping track of your children view controllers. New games. Libraries. Bidding Audible farewell. Recommendations. YouTube and their schneaky Apple TV web view. The general disappointment of Apple TV. HomePod and its niche.

What’s making us happy

Baz – ARKit
Thomas – WeChat
Dave – 100 move goals

049 – Return Immediately Or Your Tree Will Die

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049 - Return Immediately Or Your Tree Will Die
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Opinions on notebooks. Resolutions. Quitting Facebook. Planting trees. Apple slowing down your old phone. What we might spend money on next year. Raising screen quality standards. Future of the iPad. YouTube shenanigans. Developing iPad apps. Programming ≠ essay writing. Developing Mac apps. Delphi nostalgia. Cross platform desktop UI toolkits. Losing an AirPod.

Links

Rocketbook Everlast Erasable Smart Notebook

Thomas’s weekly links

Thomas quits facebook

What’s Making Us Happy

Thomas – Firefox Send

Dave – Cast and Ferrite

Baz – Shadows Remain and Million Onion Hotel

048 – Technology to enable me to use less technology

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048 - Technology to enable me to use less technology
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The latest updates to the Amazon Echo platform. Alexa now knows where Ireland is. Lifx really wants you to have colour. The state of e-reader platforms in 2017. Dopamine hits and loot boxes. Being unimpressed with Star Wars (no spoilers). Amazon’s Apple TV App. Nobody cares that the HomePod is late. The iMac Pro is not for us. A new keyboard to obsess about. Apple has some bugs to fix. Teaching taxi drivers about the innate fragility of software. Feeling meh about High Sierra. Positivity about Apple Watch. Things. Siri fighting with herself. Ignoring notifications better. Holographic Roy Orbison. Ludo trolling. Top songs of 2017. Personal analytics.

What’s making us happy:

Thomas – The Wirecutter
Baz – Moving to Cork and Gorogoa
Dave – Apple ecosystem and Playdead’s Inside on iOS and tvOS

047 – The 16th Album

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047 - The 16th Album
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Dave gets an Apple Watch. Can more technology make us depend less on technology? We talk iPad Pro productivity. We’re all on AirPods. We discuss the new Amazon echo Line-up.

What’s making us Happy

Thomas: Sleep Well Beast by The National

Baz: The Canteen Kickstarter,  The Witness

Dave: Star Trek Discovery and The Orville

 

045 – I’m drawing a blank

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045 - I'm drawing a blank
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Baz reflects on the iPad Pro with iOS 11 and the decreased use of his Macbook Air. The iPad needs a home server for long running tasks, if only there was some kind of mini Mac we could use, we discuss Raspberry Pi and some potential money saving configurations. Pencils over Keyboards. We discuss our media consumption habits as we grow up. We can’t even force ourselves to finish Planet of The Apps but Apple are going to spend 1 Billion dollars on more original programming next year. We spent some time playing video games, Irish adventure game The Darkside Detective and multiplayer deathmatch PlayerUnknown’s Battleground. We discuss games and the coming of ARKit, will we see the explosion. We went to a Docker meetup and we’re happy with the explosion of local tech meetups.

Links

The Darkside Detective
PlayerUnknown’s Battleground

What’s making us happy

Thomas – The Death of Yugoslavia
Dave – Scanner Sombre
Baz – Hellblade

044 – Live and Dangerous!

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044 - Live and Dangerous!
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It’s a beautiful sunny day and we’re live (not really) from the Wickham Tap in Limerick, a new pub from the Galway Bay Brewery. Dave is preparing a talk on Swift Enums and Thomas is half-heartedly Swifting on the server. After two and a half years Apple Pay has finally arrived at our bank and we use it to purchase copious quantities of beer! Thomas bought another vintage Apple keyboard and AirPods to drown out the sound of the mechanical keyboard. Baz bought the new 10.5″ iPad Pro with the Pencil and Smart Keyboard, we talk about his experience running it on iOS 11. We talk about the tradeoffs of buying new Apple devices vs. waiting it out. We give a six month update on our Amazon Echos and pronounce the death of Siri.

Baz and Dave (2007, Canadian Guy)

Links

Paint it Back (Picross Game)

What’s making us happy

Thomas – 16 albums! The Dø – Shake Shook Shaken. [Apple Music] [Spotify]
Baz – The Mountain Goats – Goths. [Apple Music] [Spotify]
Dave – Offa Rex – The Queen of Hearts. [Apple Music] [Spotify]

043 – Crank the Handle

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043 - Crank the Handle
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We walk through a different kind of dongle hell, adding bluetooth to a car stereo and end up going all the way back to tapes, vinyl and digital distribution. iPhone 8 rumours abound as Qualcomm debuts their through-screen fingerprint scanner, we wonder how big and expensive it’ll be. Baz informs us that you can get little hands on your fingers so you can have little hands on your fingers. We talk about the lack of WWDC video we’ve watched, and Thomas dives into server-side Swift! We discuss caching strategies and load testing. We get REALLY angry at Planet of The Apps and abandon equanimity because of Jessica Alba and her equity.

Links

Enough – DHH

What’s making us happy

Baz – GLOW on Netflix
Dave – Humble Audiobook Bundle: Hackers, Gamers and Geeks
Thomas – NPR Planet Money

042 – So many gigaflops

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042 - So many gigaflops
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Baz got bored and installed the latest beta, we discuss some of the new features and talk about the perils of public betas. We discuss the Surface and discuss if Apple users are more elitist than users of other platforms, Dave really likes Macs. We love nine year old cars and now Baz has one too, we grill him on the specs and somehow end up discussing Imperial vs Metric units. The ARKit demos are in full flow and we discuss the adoption of new technologies. We recap Episodes 2 and 3 of Planet of the Apps.

Links

Scott Forstall interview
Made with ARKit

What’s making us happy

Baz – Getting a car!
Dave – Gone Home game
Thomas – TextWrangler