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Familiarity Breeds Contempt

This week I did a presentation at the London iPhone Developer Group meeting. Given my experience with using lots of APIs, I thought it might be a good, if dry, topic. I tried to spice it up by complaining about lots of them and trying to condense that negativity into some useful lessons to take away.

Most of the other discussions of this subject that I’ve seen focus on designing libraries but I thought the same lessons could be applied to all kinds of interfaces, from Objective C libraries to REST API’s for connecting to web services. (I don’t mean to suggest that the focus of the two articles I link to is wrong. They’re both very much worth reading.)

No Massive Google Play Privacy Issue

If you follow any iOS technology blogs you might have seen this recent scandal:

If you bought the app on Google Play (even if you cancelled the order) I have your email address, your suburb, and in many instances your full name.

This, they say, is bad because this is not what happens with Apple’s App Store.

However, I don’t think Google are doing anything weird here, and I say this as someone who is not a fan of Android. The commercial relationship between developers and Apple is different from the relationship between Google and developers1.

Olloclip

This is a long way of saying Thank You to F for the Olloclip, the ideal gadget for someone who loves both their iPhone and photography. Literally only available a couple of weeks before Christmas (for iPhone 5 at least), it still arrived before the 25th.

For those that don’t know, the Olloclip is an attachment for the iPhone’s camera. It looks like this:

IMG_1037

It sits over the iPhone’s camera. It has three lenses on two sides. On one side there’s the fish-eye adapter, on the other is a wide-angle. If you unscrew the the wide-angle it becomes a macro adapter.

2012 in review

I don’t normally do this kind of thing but I’ve been blogging a little less than usual this year so I thought it might be worth jotting down a few notes about what I have been up to. With pictures, obviously, as I’m never far from my camera or iPhone.

The theme, in case you missed, it is my son who grew from a tiny, sleeping-eating… thing to a walking, playing and noisy toddler.

War?

Eric Schmidt says Google is the new Microsoft and it’s winning the war against Apple. I think he’s missing some perspective.

One of the key things that Steve Jobs realised when he returned to Apple in the late nineties was that the industry is not necessarily a zero sum game.

We have to let go of a few things here. We have to let go of the notion that for Apple to win, Microsoft has to lose.