Give it a try, let us know what you think. We’re busting at the gut with pride and we hope you enjoy it!

http://nvie.com/posts/a-successful-git-branching-model/

You can help enforce this practice through good discipline and by using Git-Flow. If you’re on a Mac you can use MacPorts or Homebrew. There’s also a pretty decent screencast showing you how.

Some comments from our developers and friends:

It’s easy to see Apple’s motivation to use iCloud to drive sales of their hardware but the question is is it compelling enough? They are really fighting a powerful trend (and common sense). I am one of those folks that think’s 2007 Steve Jobs was correct in seeing most people will be using web apps with their iPhone over installed apps. There’s no reason why content providers will choose to create app binaries for each platform over a single implementation as a web app once connectivity has become fast and ubiquitous. That won’t happen for a few more years, the cell networks are still to creaky to support the kind of reliable connection people will require for reliable access to their web apps and data. But if Apple can convert many of its active users to iCloud that’s worth around $1.2 billion dollars in revenue! So even if they buck the trend for a year or two, that’s serious money.

What are your thoughts?

Update:

• Here’s Slate’s thoughts on iCloud
• The trend towards web apps and away from installed apps is already beginning, check out Financial Times “App”
• Another article with a similar thesis, concentrates on Apple’s financial motivations
• Article claiming iCloud is designed to kill MS Windows (how about a side of hyperbole with your blog posting?) He goes on to say that Jobs is sacrificing the Mac to kill Windows. I disagree with this, as I mentioned in my post, he’s forcing people more into the Mac to create and maintain the content that’s going to live in the cloud. Jobs is trying to strengthen the Mac’s role in content creation in iCloud by tying people to apps that only run on Apple products. And since we know what a joy it is to create content on the iPad, people will be using their Mac for that.
• SF Chronicle also chimes in about differences between iCloud, Google, and Microsoft

So my word of advice is if you connect to an external display and usually keep your Macbook Pro closed, keep it open for better download speeds.

Here’s another good explanation:

http://www.executionunit.com/2011/03/25/xcode-4-duplicating-a-target-to-make-an-ipad-build-link-error/

Be careful out there! XCode doesn’t hate us, it just likes our attention and gets jealous when we don’t spend enough time tinkering with it…

and iPods. With a testers help we found out, that the video playback in our

Tricktionary iPhone app didn’t work on some iPod Touches and iPhones with 4.1

firmware (and probably older). The issue seemed also to be related to the

hardware as well, for instance 2nd generation iPods would not play the video.

The users were reporting that the video player would load, the controls would

appear, the progress bar would indicate playback, however the screen was blank

or black.

Was not easy to find out why exactly. Tests showed, that sample videos from

Apple worked when plugged in there, also the intro video was working most of the

time. We first changed the video encoding from H264 with MAIN 3.0 to Baseline

3.0 – this seemed to work at first, but we soon discovered that it would still

not work on iPhones or iPod Touches with FW 4.1 on. Scratching our heads, because

it was exactly the settings Apple suggested, we finally found out that the

problem was the encoder. Using Adobe Media Encoder CS4 before created the

not-working clips. Using Canopus Procoder with the same settings then helped the

issue, now the video features in our Windsurfing Tricktionary iPhone App are

working on all devices we could test them on (so far).

Who was there? Well, Ben of course, recent Minneapolis transplants (“you betcha!”) Nate and Nikki of Read It Later, Jeannie who runs product for Smule, and Kalani and Karl from Smudgeproof (awesome name for an iOS company).

Most of us left our corporate lives behind because we wanted to have the flexibility to work on projects that we could really drive both the design and the technology. The iOS and mobile projects are really perfect for that, most of these projects have a short(ish) development cycle and the scope can easily be handled by a team of 1 or 2 talented software engineers and an excellent designer. By the time your ADD starts kicking in, you’re done with the project!

One thing that I was bouncing around in my head after this get together was I had the feeling that there are A LOT of small development shops with small teams of 2-10 folks. I think the reason there’s so much productivity and creativity in this space right now is with this distributed model of software publishing (lots of individual shops cranking out apps) you have a lot of people driven by passion and flexibility. Rather then large companies with large bureaucracies with managers and marketeers who feel the need to have a finger in everything and making “small” changes that have big impacts. You have small streamlined groups with a fairly flat organization who help craft a project from beginning UX design through development, testing, and launch. Basically no BS that derail projects and crush moral. I may be a little naive but that’s my experience so far. Now I’m not saying this is a perfect world, you have clients and all their issues and expectations–but that’s for another blog entry.

EDIT: (04/08/2011)

A Cautionary Tale:

I came across this article about The Life and Death of Bing, it pretty much sums up anecdotally what I was driving at in this blog post. Article: Here

Now the trick is getting the maps to track each other and getting the correct scale/range/zoom for each of the maps as you navigate around. Here’s what I came up with:

#define kMetersPerDegree 111000

if(mMapOptions.mapType == TTMapOptions_MapType_Trails) {

	//set the center of the cloudmade map based on the MKMapKit's center

	[mCloudmadeViewController.mapView moveToLatLong:mGoogleMapView.centerCoordinate];

	//set the scale by taking the latitude distance in meters and dividing it by the width of the view in pixels

	// scale = meters/px

	float scale = (mGoogleMapView.region.span.latitudeDelta * kMetersPerDegree) / mGoogleMapView.frame.size.width; 

	[mCloudmadeViewController.mapView.contents setMetersPerPixel:scale];        

	[mCloudmadeViewController.mapView.markerManager removeMarkers];        

	[mCloudmadeViewController refreshMap];

	[mCloudmadeViewController setMapSource];

}

else {  //switching back to google maps from Cloudmade

	RMMapView *mapView = mCloudmadeViewController.mapView;

	//get the upper right and lower left coordinates

	RMSphericalTrapezium trap = [mapView.contents latitudeLongitudeBoundingBoxForScreen];

	//determine the deltas

	CLLocationDegrees latitudeDelta = trap.northeast.latitude - trap.southwest.latitude;

	CLLocationDegrees longitudeDelta = trap.northeast.longitude - trap.southwest.longitude;

	//set the span and region

	MKCoordinateSpan span = MKCoordinateSpanMake(latitudeDelta, longitudeDelta);

	MKCoordinateRegion region = MKCoordinateRegionMake(mapView.contents.mapCenter, span);

	[mGoogleMapView setRegion:region];