The Chicken Coop

The videos for MonkeySpace / Monkey Square are up on vimeo, and worth a look. MonkeySpace (run by Monkey Square - yes, it's a little confusing at the moment) is: is the official cross platform and open-source .NET conference. Want to learn more about developing

Only yesterday, Verity Stob had the continuation of her (??) long Delphi saga, with a nice dig at C# at the end.: For C# hath become a lonely path. And the Beast hath shut its gates against us, and hath broken our Silverlight into a

The Telegraph has the usual rant article about multi-nationals and the amont of tax they don't pay. This time, Googles Eric Schmidt is putting his foot in his mouth: "It's called capitalism," he said. "We are proudly capitalistic. I'm not confused

uxarchive.com is a great reference covering how a lot of the best apps handle on-boarding, exploring, search and sharing. I suspect it will grow to other areas over time, but it's a great way to see how some of the best are handling

On the latest CultCast, the guys on there were talking about a strong AppleTV TV rumour: Here’s what I heard: The software was developed at the behest of Steve Jobs himself, who persuaded FuzeBox to make the software not just for the Mac,

I've been doing some Android development work lately (more on this when it's out), so I've been collecting Android design inspiration, as a lot of the conventions I'm used to from iOS are very different on Android. Android UI Patterns is good blog for

From Christopher Mims and Stephanie Gruner Buckley on Quartz Meanwhile, a report from the US National Research Council, commissioned by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and other intelligence agencies, says the consequences of climate change—rising sea levels, severe flooding, droughts, fires, and

Fraser Spears, on his blog: It is, in my opinion, just that side of 'too small' to be a 5-days-a-week, 6-hours-a-day tool for pupils. It is in no way too weak a computer to be used that way. I just think that the more

Nice, and extreamly accurate, analogy of what it costs for an app to be developed. "I want something that works well on one platform" = 2007 BMW 335i = $20-25K. You want something solid that’ll work web/ mobile web / iOS / Android. Just one

Justin Williams has a very good article - and links off to an equally good one from Patrick Gibson - about Apple's awful record with online services: Apple has always been given a pass with the cloud stuff because they make such great hardware

Things have been a bit quiet around here - the blog - because things have been anything but quiet in real life. Last night, we launched another site. I didn't have a lot to do with it except in the last week (performance tuning

Over the past few days commute, I've been reading Peter Bright's history of the Windows APIs. It's quite fascinating, and very much worth a read. The article is quite long, but it covers everything from Win16 to WinRT, stopping in OLE, COM, .NET, DCOM

I've been a bit quiet here lately - not a lot of interesting stuff coming across my desk, and a site release for the day job (which is only of interest to people who live 60's music). And an Android app mostly finished. But

Previously, I've discussed NFC a bit, and also Passbook. I've been thinking about the whole payment thing a bit lately, and I think I might have come up with something which might work - or at least be a starting point. First up, I

Things like this make me love Dribbble. I want to encourage some good App.net apps. Here’s a bunch of images as a starter kit. If you do something interesting with them and need some more, please get in touch (I don’t

I've been trying to follow all the slides and presentations at this years MonkeySpace aka the conference formally known as MonoSpace. Looks like the content has been really good. Here's some of the deck's I've been able to track down so far: ChrisNTR -

Android Niceties is a showcase of Android design, and I'm finding it great to get some inspiration for what is possible in Android. Interestingly, Xero (which is not a native app) is featured at the top. It is a nice looking app tho. The

I have a love-hate relationship with Android (and by extension, Mono for Android). I've been a long-time iOS user, and back in the Android 2.x days, the difference was huge - in my mind, there was zero comparison. One was polished, fluid, beautiful.

Update: Roan at FreeAgent has put a post up about it. Last night at The Herald Digital Business Awards, Earnest won in the Best Application category! @kevinjmccallum: Delighted to report @freeagent wins best mobile app at @HSDigitalAwards for Earnest. Nicely done! Image To be

This is a question I've wondered about a fair bit, especially as I like everything to be digital, and mobileAgent is a great way to get your receipts into FreeAgent, digitally. The fine folks over at ReceiptBank have the answer So we thought we’

The fine folks over at BillGuard have a long post all about their implementation of Passbook, and some of the pitfalls. For the sake of those of you that decided to join in on the Passbook party and create your own passes we present

Passbook is a new "app" from Apple, which comes with iOS6. Having just listened to the latest In Beta, and various other bits around the web, there appears to be a lot of confusion about what it is, and how it works.

Like all iPhone 5 users (and most developers) I've been using iOS6 for a while now. Overall, I find it great - it's fast, consistent, and generally a good upgrade. It's more like iOS5.5, really, but thats a side point - the naming

Ryan Paul - the new Developer Evangelist at Xamarin) - has a great long-form piece up on his "old job", Ars Technica, about LinkedIn's mobile app, and how they have architected it. No one knows more about this paradigm shift than Kiran

No wonder NFC isn't quite taking off as quickly as some people want it to. Imagine is this was your Credit Card. Subway riders in the New Jersey and San Francisco transit systems can use near-field communication (NFC) Android smartphones to endlessly replenish their