Daniel and Manton talk about emergency App Store releases, memory leaks, the upcoming 360macdev conference, and a listener question on the GPL.
Download (MP3, 39 minutes, 19 MB)
Links for the show:
- Using heapshot analysis — Bill Bumgarner’s blog post
- 360|MacDev — new conference in Denver
- Getting pretty lonely — Daniel’s blog post on the GPL
Daniel Jalkut is the founder of Red Sweater Software. His most popular products are MarsEdit, Black Ink, FastScripts, and FlexTime.
Manton Reece is the founder of Riverfold Software. He builds e-book software for Ingram Digital and has 2 independent products: Clipstart and Wii Transfer.
Glad you guys are back in the groove!
I’m still listening, and have a comment on the need to regularly update apps that have fragile dependencies on external content (like Black Ink).
I’ve begun to think that in such cases it makes sense to have my application speak to an “intermediate” web service under my control.
Not to pick on Black Ink, but as an example it could talk to a web service that returns a JSON blob containing the latest crossword URLs. The “fragile” code that knows how to discover/construct crossword URLs could be part of the service; emergency changes could be shipped quickly, and fewer application updates would be required.
I’m building an iPad app right now with similar “fragile” dependencies and I’ve spun up a small App Engine application to handle this. How well this works in practice time will tell…
Thanks as always for the great podcast!
Cheers,
Dave
Dave – I completely agree, and something much like this has long been on my TODO list for Black Ink. It definitely is a cool compromise, I think, to push some functionality of apps to “web-updatable” without needing to update the app as a whole.
I think that the recent news about VLC puts the GPL in a very interesting perspective. In one hand I think that everyone is a bit disappointed that we loose a somewhat good application. On the other hand I can also understand that a lot of people have contributed time and effort to the VLC project knowing that it would always be distributed without restricting its users in any way.
In order to use the App Store Apple forces users to sign an agreement that they will among other things not use the software on more than five machines. As far as I know developers doesn’t even have the option to opt out of such restrictions. I don’t like this.
While I’m sad to see VLC go I applaud the GPL for putting pressure on Apple to change its behavior and not dominate and control the users. I find that utterly important in the long run, both for the sake of users as well as developers.
I don’t expect Apple to change over night, but I think that they do listen and that these kind of things over time will influence them and make things better.