The Chicken Coop

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

The people over at Ghost announced that Ghost 0.4.0 was out a few days ago. After a bit of a road block before, I've managed to work around most of the big issues. If this happens to produce a flood of posts

Rod recently lamented on twitter about his iPhone not being able to show whats playing on the Sonos, even tho he was using the Sonos app to control the audio: @roddrury: I imagine living in a world where Apple would allow @sonos to have

I've recently been looking at moving the blog - and the associated few static pages - from Octopress to something else. Octopress has been ok, but only just "ok" - frankly, it's a pain to write anything quickly, as there is a

Thanks to Geoff from Station Master App, I went for a hunt thru my spam folder and found I'd won an award for London's Nearest Bus! Transport for London (TfL) today named the winners of a competition to find new accessible apps to make

Today is the last day of our "holiday" - our trip back to New Zealand from the UK. It's take us almost 2 months to get here, and it's been a crazy amount of fun. Along the way, we have been to

Beyond Flat is well worth a read. It looks at the various difference and similarities between iOS and Android - excellent when doing cross platform work. Creating apps for both platforms is difficult; I have huge respect for the companies that nail it. Nailing

So, Greg, Jon and I[1] finally got off our backsides and recorded and launched the first episode of the Gone Mobile podcast. This has been a while coming - and was made more complex by me moving back to New Zealand the day

I was recently talking to a good friend about his startup and some of the technical challenges he was having. His app is a lovely SPA written in Angular with a Rails backend. The issue he was having was one of collaboration and synchronisation.

One of the main things that I wanted to do in mobileAgent 2.0 is to make everything as consistent as possible. I decided on the colour scheme early on, which was based on the same dark blue as the old one, with a

The quick bar is an idea I borrowed[1] from Citymapper, which is my current favourite iOS travel app. Citymapper used to be a fairly run of the mill iOS app, with fairly limited function - then WHAM, it became this feature-insane[2], flat-in-the-Google-style,

Huge news for the folks at Xamarin - they recevied a second round of funding from both their original investors and some new ones (for a total of $28m raised). Well done everyone over there! I hope there is at least some champaign flowing

MonoTouch.Dialog is one of the most useful, and powerful, addons in Xamarin.iOS. It's open source, very well tested and proven, maintained officially by Xamarin and included in Xamarin.iOS. I even gave a talk on it at Xamarin Evolve: Fast UI creation

I'm the first to admit I'm not a designer. I like to think I have some design sense - more User Experience than Visual design, and its getting better - but generally, my skill is fairly limited in this area. However, I recently discovered

This is the first in a series showing some of the tricks and bits that I used when moving mobileAgent from version 1.x to 2.0. In mobileAgent 2.0, one of the main changes is that the app has been totally re-skinned.

On Monday, Apple approved the latest version of mobileAgent - mobileAgent 2.0. As usual, it's available on the App Store Version 2 isn't a full rewrite. It's a reworking and a bit of a rethinking of the same, nearly-3-year-old app, with a fresh

There are a few new UI comparison pages up at the moment, comparing both iOS6 vrs 7, and Android vrs iOS iOS6 vrs iOS7 view comparison - very useful if you are looking to see whats changes, tho the detail is on how some