The Chicken Coop

Int 2011, a friend organised a trip to Pripyat, which is the town which was evaculated during the Chernobyl disaster. It was a surreal, eye opening and wonderful trip for many different reasons. I blogged about it here and Leonie has her view here.

... which is not to be confused with the old TestFlight (which Apple bought and called TestFlight). At work, we do a pilot release of our app before we go live. This is usually part way thru regression testing, and obviously before we release to

The Air New Zealand app has come a long way - they used to just have a sticker with an RFID chip on the back, and now they have moved all of that to iOS and Android apps, with (shock horror) QR codes for

From The Verge and Macrumours: In fact, a significant number of merchants, including heavyweights like Walmart, Kmart, 7-Eleven, and Best Buy, are in outright competition with Apple Pay. The retailers, through a joint venture formed in 2012, are building their own mobile payment app,

This article (and sadly I don't remember how I got to it) really struck a chord with me today. As part of getting my feet wet, my principal suggested I “be” a student for two days: I was to shadow and complete all the

Absolutely worth a read: I remember when I first encountered a software tester. I had just signed up with a publisher, and they employed testers, and one was assigned to my product. His first report was a total shocker. He found so many problems

TL;DR: Apple announced a payment thing called Apple Pay. I've seen a few knowledgeable people talking about it recently, and apparantly either getting it wrong, or missing some of the point (or only covering half of it) Xero Blog John Siracusa on ATP,

"Interesting" is, of course, relative. Like a lot of people, I've moved to a standing desk. After 3 weeks, it's going well. I had the usual sore legs and feet for the first week (softer shoes helped, but I can go back

Two articles, next to each other, in my rss reader this morning. The first is about Facebook, via Marco Arment. Scientists at Facebook have published a paper showing that they manipulated the content seen by more than 600,000 users in an attempt to

Looks like Ben has been busy, slaving away at his Finalcut desk: all the videos for Codemania are out, including mine! Some of the talks I enjoyed the most: Michelle "Nanogirl" Dickinson - Will Nanobots Take Over the World (tho that was

I've had various apps in the AppStore for a while now - 3.5 years for mobileAgent, and over 4 for my first public app, London Bike App. Support has always been something I've prided myself in doing - if I have an issue

Last week, I talked at Codemania about cross platform mobile apps, and specifically the Xamarin tools. The talk appeared to go well (it's always hard to tell from this side of the stage), and I hope people enjoyed it and want to check out

Meat is a much debated topic. For every meat-a-holic, there is at least one vegan, vegetarian or some other -atarian. Eating it - or not eating is - so so core to our human existence that everyone has an opinion. I never used to

A while back, I asked if anyone else had done this: Anyone already done an ios7-style date picker in @xamarinhq .ios? If not I guess I need to write one. — Nic Wise (@fastchicken) December 2, 2013 UPDATE: My apologies to Kraig Spear -

FeedBin, my RSS reader of choice, is 1 year old today Feedbin launched into a market with no future. Google owned RSS and they had let it languish. That all changed when Google announced they were shutting down Google Reader two days after Feedbin

This, via The Loop: Here’s a summary of what you should do to prepare your Macs right now for the possibility of theft. It won’t eliminate theft but it will greatly reduce the damage from such events and make it more likely

So Microsoft - oops, Nokia - has released a new phone. And new Android phone, at that. It looks solid, as most Nokia hardware is, and having an almost-zero-effort porting story for existing Android apps might make it more of a hit than would

So, I got a few replies on twitter from the previous post. Most notably from Paul Betts: @paulcbetts: @fastchicken Yo I'm happy for you and imma let you finish, but Profile78 is the best profile of all time! Of all time! paulcbetts: @fastchicken (seriously.

Much to the surprise of one of my co-speakers, I've started working on my Codemania talk (which might also end up being some of the Auckland iOS Meetup talk). I wanted to try to do as pure a cross platform solution as I can,

The Verge on a topic that has bugged me for a long while: Representatives from the banking industry say chip and signature is what consumers and merchants want: convenience and speed. Customers don’t want to have to remember a PIN for their credit

Ash Furrow, one of the developers at design powerhouse Teehan+Lax, has a very relevant (to me) post titled We need to replace Objective-C. In it, he points out a number of things that bugged me - and still bug me - about Objective-C:

Two good friends are in the late stages of their new startup product Respondly which I've been using for a while to do email support for my apps. Customer support for Twitter & Email Easily stay on top of your support with a single

The list of people in the computer industry I'd consider a hero is pretty short - the usual suspects: Jobs, Woz, Gates (especially after he left Microsoft) and a few others. It's not really a hero-driven industry, which is something I like about it.

Just outside of Auckland, on what looks like a fairly normal piece of farm land on the coast, was a New Zealand Defence department base. Most people would drive past, fairly ignorant of what's there, on their way down the Firth of Thames towards

Two of the most useful, and loved, devices in the house at the moment are our Synology NAS's (yes, plural). In the past, we've stored photos, company documents and other stuff on various external sources: We used to have a Time Capsule, but it