Nic Wise

Shock news to some, about time to others. Xamarin CTO Miguel de Icaza said: "yeah, we kind of wanted to increase the horsepower of our VS team, so we thought we might just buy the whole company". Xamarin CEO Nat Friedman continued:

The Guardian Apple has come under pressure to scrap its controversial policy of permanently disabling repaired iPhone 6s when software is upgraded, following a global consumer backlash and claims the company could be acting illegally. ... The Apple iOS 9 software update which it launched

With the stories around the 5 eyes snooping of internet traffic from the likes of Edward Snowden[1], its hard to justify not using SSL for anything which is remotely sensitive these days. Now, I don't think the content of this blog it at

We have a few WIFI-connected devices here at Casa Wise - AppleTV, printers and the like, and also a few Belkin WeMo switches which we use for outdoor lighting. We needed remotely switched lights mostly as it would defeat the purpose to walk to

Needless to say, as a bank, we need to have "Bank Grade Security". No, not THAT Bank Grade Security, but we do need to secure things which should be secret[1]. The main thing we take care to secure is our device

So I had one post, and it got too long. So while that was all tech stuff, this is more personal stuff. The main aim for coming back to NZ (rather than staying in the UK) was to explore more of this part of

"Been a while since I wrote anything here" which is sort of how a lot of posts start. No exception here. But, being it's one of the few times in the year where I get to sit down and have time to

Over Christmas (24-26 Dec), Leonie and I walked the Routeburn Track, which is in Fjordland, in the South Island. It's one of the Great Walks, a series of walking/tramping/hiking tracks in some of New Zealand's most beautiful out of the way places.

This. 100 times this. This is the age of writing iOS apps for love. Well, that’s not true for everybody. Well-established and awesome companies such as Omni, Panic, Flexibits, AgileBits, Tapbots, and The Iconfactory have a business writing iOS apps. (They do it

Disclaimer: I didn't go to WWDC, so chances are, this isn't the best of WWDC. That would be the people you - person who went to WWDC - met in the hallways, at the parties/cafe's/bars/backstreets/local Blue Bottle Coffee. But I

(Photo: nitro cold brew from Espresso Workshop in Britomart) Huge meta-analysis. 1.2 million people, 35-odd studies. But it’s way past time that we stopped viewing coffee as something we all need to cut back on. It’s a completely reasonable addition to

No, not THAT AppleWatch Edition. From Supertop, makers of Unread One Less Thing… We spent a lot of time not making a Watch app. We love our new wrist computers but they are not the place for reading articles. This. 100 times this. So

FreeAgent have finally released their mobile app! It's been a (very) long time coming, and giving the importance of mobile these days, I'm surprised it's taken them this long. To be honest, while they admit its a v1.0, it's a good looking, and

One thing I miss in iOS, which Android has, is auto expanding labels (and other views). Android has the wrap_content layout option, which works really well to flow a view. <LinearLayout android:layout_width="match_parent" android:layout_height="

One thing I really love about the new iOS devices - iPhone 5S, 6, 6+ and the iPad Air 2 - is the Touch ID sensor. I’ve always had a PIN on my devices - there is too much important information on my

This is a multipart post-mortem-style post series on the design and development of Nearest Bus. I'm planning on covering the architecture, design, code, widget (this post) and possibly some on adding a watchkit app, once I finish that off. My wife has long joked

This is a multipart post-mortem-style post series on the design and development of Nearest Bus. I'm planning on covering the architecture, design, code (this post), widget and possibly some on adding a watchkit app, once I finish that off. Ah yes. The code part.

Ars Technica: The weak 512-bit keys are a vestige of the 1990s, when the Clinton administration required weak keys to be used in any software or hardware that was exported out of the US. To satisfy the requirement, many manufacturers designed products that offered

This is a multipart post-mortem-style post series on the design and development of Nearest Bus. I'm planning on covering the architecture, design (this post), code, widget and possibly some on adding a WatchKit app, once I finish that off. I mentioned some of the

Like most of my apps, Nearest Bus (originally London's Nearest Bus) was written to scratch my own itch. We were living in Fulham, in London, and the easiest way to get to work was by bus. Around the same time, Transport for London developed,

Well, "better" is subjective, but here's the ones I subscribe to and actually read. It's nice to get it in your inbox - easier to scan than an RSS feed, less noise than twitter. Development related iOS Dev Weekly. The one that

I love it when people redesign currency. It's a project with some serious security constraints - and most of the redesigns take this very seriously - but the results are usually stunning. This one is no exception. I especially love the security "black

Big Nerd Ranch have a good article up about how ApplePay works, and why it's the most secure method of payment available. The cryptogram is a layer of security in which part of it is dynamically created per transaction; it links the token to

Xamarin have released information about how and when to upgrade to the new Unified 32/64 bit API's. Thanks to @redth, BTProgressHUD is already available as a Unified binary, but it was built against the current stable branch, 8.4, which is not compatible