Category: Uncategorized

Pokémon Go is the number one app for iOS and Android

[via Polygon] On Friday, Apple confirmed that Pokémon Go got more downloads in its first week than any other app in the history of the App Store, which opened just over eight years ago on July 10, 2008. Apple won’t get any more specific than that, Nintendo are referring all inquiries about download statistics to The Pokémon Company, and nobody’s heard anything from them. The “mium” part of “freemium” means that Pokémon Go still makes money — anywhere from $1 million daily (according to Business Insider, or whomever they’ve semi-plagiarized) to $2.3 million daily (according to Superdata Research).

At the time of writing, Pokémon Go holds the number one position on the “Free” and “Top Grossing” charts of both the App Store and Google Play. Nicolas Beraudo, the EMEA managing director for the mobile analytics firm App Annie says that “I can easily envision a run-rate of over $1 billion per year with less server issues, a worldwide presence, and more social and [player vs. player] features.”

A Pokémon Go utility is the number 3 free app on the App Store

As I write this, the number 3 free app on the App Store is a third-party Pokémon Go utility app called Poké Radar. It’s a crowdsourced Pokémon location database that lets players find or submit Pokémon encounter locations worldwide. The image above is a screenshot from Poké Radar that shows user-submitted Pokémon encounters in my stomping grounds, the Tampa Bay area.

This likely won’t be the last third-party Pokémon Go utility; the current Pokémon craze and potential $1 billion pie means that even a small slice of the business is too big an opportunity to pass up. If you’ve got the time and the resources, you should try developing a Pokémon Go helper app.

Where to go if you’re thinking about writing a Pokémon Go app

Not surprisingly, a number of online resources for developers interested in building Pokémon Go tools have appeared online. This is a hot new topic, and you should expect to see new resources spring up quite often for the next few weeks, but here are the three best starting points that I’m aware of:

• The PokémonGoDEV subreddit is a good starting point. New links seem to be appear here on a steady basis.
• The Pokémon Go Development Archive is worth checking out from time to time. Among other things, it contains links to works in progress, APIs and libraries, and reverse engineering resources.
• Awesome PokémonGo is a GitHub repo that describes itself as “a curated list of awesome PokemonGo frameworks, libraries, software, resources and links.”

A word of warning: Some of the code pointed to by these resources appears to use not-necessarily-approved access to data streams between devices and Pokémon Go servers. All the standard “I am not a lawyer” and “Caveat implementor” warnings apply.

“We’ll fix it in the next sprint.”

One of my goals for this year was to finally build a finished app (well, as “finished” as any software development project gets, anyway) and put it in the App Store. That happened this week when I finished coding Aspirations Winery’s Wine Crush — like Candy Crush, but with wine — and submitted it to the App Store for approval Tuesday evening. The approval came Wednesday afternoon, and by Wednesday evening, it was available from the App Store!

The app runs on iPhones, iPads, and iPod Touch devices running iOS 9.0 or later.

Rather than tell you what Aspirations Winery’s Wine Crush is like, let me show you in a video that runs exactly one minute and thirty seconds:

Here are screenshots of the first four levels in the game. Each one is slightly more challenging than the last:

Aspirations Winery’s Wine Crush is free as in “it will not cost you a thing, ever”, and not free as in “freemium”:

If you’d like to get your hands on this app, you can click on the graphic below, which I am now allowed to use…

…or you can simply fire up the App Store on your iPhone, iPad, or iPod Touch and search for Aspirations Winery or Joey deVilla.

My thanks to:

• Bill and Robin Linville of Aspirations Winery for going along with my “Hey, let me make an app for your business”, and for rewarding me and Anitra with their friendship and a fair bit of free wine to boot,
• Robin Linville for creating most of the game’s graphics, and
• my wife Anitra Pavka for her testing, occasional prodding to finish the app, and suggestions.

Tampa Code Camp takes place next Saturday, July 16th at the offices of KForce, located just on the edge of Ybor City. It’s an annual, free-admission, community-run learning event for programmers of all stripes, from beginner to expert, from people who code for a living to programming students to hobbyists.

Every year, Tampa Code Camp features speakers presenting developer topics — largely focused on Microsoft technologies, but there’s also a “Miscellaneous and Open Source” track — and the chance for local developers to meet and hang out with their peers. It’s an all day event, starting at 8:00 a.m. and concluding at 5:00 p.m., followed by an after-party at a nearby restaurant. They typically provide free donuts in the morning, and free subs and drinks for lunch, thanks to the support of sponsors, and the work that organizers Greg and Kate Leonardo put into it.

I’ve attended Tampa Code Camp for the past couple of years, and this year, I’ll be giving the opening presentation in the “Miscellaneous and Open Source”  track:

My presentation, titled Just enough React to get you into trouble, will be a quick introduction to React, Facebook’s library for building user interfaces. I’ll explain what React is, why you might want to use it in a web project, and how to set up your computer for React development. I’ll follow up by walking the audience through a very simple single-page app written in React, giving them enough of an understanding to start their own React explorations.

Just enough React to get you into trouble will take place during Tampa Code Camp’s first time slot — 9:00 am. to 9:50 a.m. — in the “Miscellaneous and Open Source” track. I promise that it will be packed with useful information and my trademarked entertaining presentation style.

If you’d like to attend my presentation or any other the other ones at Tampa Code Camp, please register! Once again, it won’t cost you a thing to attend; registration helps the organizers plan for space, food, and other logistics matters. Be sure to check out the agenda, sessions, and speakers lists.

The details

• The event: Tampa Code Camp
• When: Saturday, July 16th, 2016, 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.
• Where: KForce — 1001 East Palm Avenue (plenty of parking!)
• Admission: Free, but you should register!

Click the graphic to see it at full size.

I made the graphic above based on this amazing tweet by Steven Luscher (@steveluscher):

Map/filter/reduce in a tweet:

map([🌽, 🐮, 🐔], cook)
=> [🍿, 🍔, 🍳]

filter([🍿, 🍔, 🍳], isVegetarian)
=> [🍿, 🍳]

reduce([🍿, 🍳], eat)
=> 💩

— Steven Luscher (@steveluscher) June 10, 2016

It’s a geeky t-shirt waiting to happen.

This is from the preface of Amy Poehler’s book Yes Please, and it tells the truth about writing:

Everyone lies about writing. They lie about how easy it is or how hard it was. They perpetuate a romantic idea that writing is some beautiful experience that takes place in an architectural room filled with leather novels and chai tea. They talk about their ‘morning ritual’ and how they ‘dress for writing’ and the cabin in Big Sur where they go to ‘be alone’—blah blah blah. No one tells the truth about writing a book. Authors pretend their stories were always shiny and perfect and just waiting to be written. The truth is, writing is this: hard and boring and occasionally great but usually not. Even I have lied about writing. I have told people that writing this book has been like brushing away dirt from a fossil. What a load of shit. It has been like hacking away at a freezer with a screwdriver.

Coding is romanticized in the same way these days, thanks to the tech success stories we hear in the news, the increasing ubiquity of processors and the rise of the Internet of Things, concerns about job security and being “automated away”…and possibly because coding looks a lot like writing. “You must learn to code!” has been the battle cry of the White House, organizations like Code.org, tech titans, millennial entrepreneurs, and even that homeless guy:

I understand the urge to evangelize coding; in fact, it’s been a good chunk of my career. There’s nothing like the feeling you get when you run a program that you’ve written and seeing a computer or device turn your ideas into action. Even after coding for decades, I still give myself a Barney Stinson-style “self-five” when my code compiles and runs as I expect.

But as with writing, between the initial rush of setting out to code a program and the point that you declare the job done is a long journey of days, months, and even years. That journey has its moments of joy, discovery and wonder, but they’re punctuated with stretches of tedium, toil, and beating your head against your desk (usually figuratively, but sometimes literally) wondering why you can’t get the damned code to work. Like many writing projects, both professional and personal, many coding projects are abandoned. Writing and coding projects are never really finished; “done” is an arbitrary point determined by the writer or coder, and both are left with a lingering feeling that their project could benefit from just a few more changes. And that homeless coder is still homeless:

Thanks to the similarity between writing and coding, I’ve occasionally paraphrased Dorothy Parker: “I hate programming, but I love having programmed.“

Want a coding-themed blast from the past featuring Amy Poehler? Here’s the pilot for a ’90s TV series called RVTV, in which Poehler plays a hacker who’s infiltrated the NRA database. She also breaks into some old-school rap:

The next Tampa iOS Meetup has been announced for Tuesday, June 28th at 6:30 p.m., and we’re going to talk about the announcements made at this week’s Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, with special attention to iOS 10 and Swift 3.0. It takes place at our usual spot: Energy Sense Finance, 3825 Henderson Boulevard (just west of Dale Mabry), Suite 300.

At the meetup, we’ll:

• Present a review of what was announced at WWDC, with a particular focus on iOS and tvOS development
• Show you how to get your hands on the beta software, including Xcode 8 and iOS 10
• Take a look at the changes introduced in Swift 3, with an emphasis on where you may have to update your existing code
• Talk about what you’d like to see in upcoming Tampa iOS Meetup sessions

Join us on the 28th, get to know your fellow Tampa Bay iOS developers, and get ready to learn and have some fun!

Tampa iOS Meetup is a monthly meetup run by local mobile developer/designer Angela Don and Yours Truly. While Tampa has a couple of great iOS developer meetups — Craig Clayton’s Suncoast iOS and Chris Woodard’s Tampa Bay Cocoaheads, we figured that there was room for a third iOS meetup in the Tampa Bay area, and especially one that would stray into other areas of mobile development. So we made one.

The Details

• What: Tampa iOS’ Meetup’s “What’s new in iOS 10 and Swift 3.0” session. Please sign up on our Meetup page so we can plan accordingly!
• When: Tuesday, June 28, 2016, 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m. We’ll have some snacks at 6:30, with the presentation beginning at 7:00.
• Where: Energy Sense Finance, 3825 Henderson Boulevard (just west of Dale Mabry), Suite 300. See the map below.
• What to bring: Yourself, but if you’d like to follow along, bring your Macbook and make sure it’s got the latest Xcode.
• What to read in advance: If you’re one of those people who likes to do some readings ahead of a presentation, check out What’s New in Swift 3? by the folks at RayWenderlich.com.