Today a Forbes article by Tomio Geron did the rounds that compared the number of crashes in various versions of iOS with those happening in various versions of Android based on data from Crittercism. That crashes are bad is undeniably true. However, not all crashes are the same.

The implied link between OS version and the occurrence of crashes surprised me. I am not quite so sure if such a link in fact exists. I’d also argue that a higher crash rate says little about the quality of the OS version, or even of the app.

For those travelers who stop by Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, there is a big billboard promoting the RTLNieuws 365 app which I talked about in my previous post.

I have to say that it is quite satisfying to see ones work promoted on a 7 by 8 meters large display. Though not quite as satisfying as it topping the free iPad apps list in the Dutch App Store for a full fortnight already!

Excited that the iPad app I, together with the great people from Egeniq and others, have been working on for the last couple of months is out now! And we call it RTLNieuws 365.

RTL Nieuws is a well known Dutch news television bulletin by the Netherlands’ largest commercial broadcaster. By introducing this app they are embracing the new possibilities opened by the iPad. They are touting this app as ‘the first real digital newspaper of the Netherlands’.

Lately there has been some controversy regarding GoDaddy, and their support for SOPA. December 29th was set as a protest day to show our discontent with GoDaddy by moving away our domains on that day.

It felt a little too risky to do this while I was traveling, so I only got around to it last week. Anyway, I am glad that I finally got around to moving away my 3 domains, as I had been wanting to do this ever since I heard about GoDaddy’s CEO’s elephant hunting hobby. (Seriously, what’s wrong with this guy?!)

I am ashamed it took me this long to walk way from GoDaddy, so I do this as my public walk of shame.

Naked domain

Another thing I finally got around to was to have this website’s URL drop the ‘www’. From now one is it just the naked domain: ‘koolistov.net’. This website is now hosted via GitHub and no longer via Google App Engine. The combination GitHub and Octopress is certainly a more pleasant one.

Two quick tips for fixing some troubles with developer tools. I ran into both today, though they are likely unrelated. I couldn’t find much about it online, so here goes.

No false illusions, there is no one besides me who noticed the silence on this blog during the last couple of weeks. It was everything but silent behind the curtains however. Mostly rattling of my keyboard…

I have been working hard on one major iPad project together with the awesome people at Egeniq. My contribution was a significant part of the iPad app coding, but there are way more people involved for design and backend development, and not just at Egeniq either. Last Friday I had the honor of doing the last code review for build 1.0 of the app, and by virtue of approving the merge on GitHub, setting in motion the final build. Whoot!

It is a sad sad day today. We all knew it was coming. We all knew it was coming sooner than we were praying for. Steve Jobs’ passing away is still a painful stab in the heart. He was crazy enough to think he could change the world, and damn it, did he ever!

It must have been somewhere around 1991 that I for the first time got to play with a Macintosh. What got me right away was the passion that so obviously had been put into building it, into making it a joy to use, easy to use. It was not about typing ‘magic’ commands at a blinking cursor, it was about getting things done, and having a good time doing so too!

Today I am typing this on an iMac with possibilities I could not dream of in 1991. Yet it dwarfs the potential of the iPhone and iPad on my desk. Today is the future. And he is the one who made it all possible!

It is a dream come true for me that today I earn my living developing for Mac and iOS. And it is all made possible by the drive of Steve for the very best. He did not do it all by himself, not even close, but he did manage to motivate and push many, many talented people to reach beyond what they could imagine achievable.

I have not met him or worked with him. I have only seen his work from the sideline. But yet, it feels like he was my motivator too. To tell me good is not good enough, to always aim higher. I like to think some of his passion rubbed off on me.

It is a sad sad day today. Coping with the mourning is though. Humor is one of the few mechanism we have to deal with it, so I’ll end this with a lighter note:

Blessed are those who die after Steve Jobs for them awaits the perfect heaven. He is rethinking the whole concept with God at this moment.

Thank you Steve! You are missed.

It is very common to have to construct URLs in iOS apps. Unfortunately there is no such things as NSMutableURL, so we need to come up with our own solution. Most developers seem to take a very pragmatic approach to this. Basically, you take a base URL, append a path and/or parameters to it, and go about your business. Almost, if not all, code I have seen do this make assumptions about the base URL: for example, no query or fragment present in the URL. Sometimes even relying on the other parts of the app always providing text that is safe to use in an URL. It can be quite a safe assumption that this is safe within your app, but I wanted a solution that is safe to use no matter what the base URL looked like, or what text was provided for the parameters.

One of the perks of having a newborn in the house, besides dirty diapers and frequent feedings, is that you only get up-to-date on some news later than normal. During the last weeks I had been hearing about Windows 8 and the new Metro style apps Microsoft introduced, but it wasn’t until this morning that I found some time to look at one of the introduction videos.

Actually, I have to congratulate Microsoft on this one. Like mine (yes, not a subjective opinion, but who cares) theirs is a pretty baby too! A fresh and unique approach is something we don’t often see coming out of Redmond. The tiles, the side-by-side mode, sharing between apps are all great features to have. Also smaller things like being able to swipe between pages whilst dragging is a fun new gesture.

A fresh new website for Koolistov is finally here. As Koolistov recently incorporated in Singapore as a private limited company, an update to its website was more than overdue. The old started to show its age, and although I applied a somewhat fresher CSS style to it, it still didn’t feel quite right.

The legendary Matt Gemmell had been feeling the need to freshen up his personal blog recently too, and this is how I got to learn about Octopress. Octopress is framework based on Jekyll created by Brandon Mathis. It provides you with a great looking, HTML5 based blog. You run it locally on your own computer where it creates a static website which can be hosted anywhere. Despite being static, it actually offers quite a nice number of features by wisely letting established third parties take care of those, such as comments and searching. It’s quite configurable, and by creating static html you are not getting locked in to one hosting provider. Great stuff!