Indie Spark

Checklist for Publishing to the App Store

You’re about to submit an app to the Apple’s App Store, Android App Market, or Windows Phone Marketplace? STOP and read this article first before you do. A binary doesn’t make a product and here’s a checklist of the things that you need to have so that your product gets noticed.

Job Security by Levels of Abstractions or Indirections

Hate abstractions? Fed up with indirections? Tame your tempers, grasshopper. These idioms may well be the thing that provides you with a job and keeps you and your bosses employed.

How I Prematurely Killed My Second Game

I was in the middle of working on my first iPhone game and was so excited about iOS games, I began having ideas for more games. Then I realized that these won’t make it through the noise and tough competition in the App Store and decided to pivot from making games. Here is the back story how I came to that realization and on what conditions should I return to making games.

Living Costs in Redmond, Washington

Are you considering to move to Washington State, USA and trying to get a feel of how much you need to live over there? Perhaps you have a job offer to migrate to Seattle or Redmond and want to know how much salary you should ask? Read this post for answers to your questions.

Finance for Developers: A Concise Tutorial

You’re a smart developer but yet you’re having trouble planning your finances and keeping your credit card debt in control. Then it’s likely that you don’t really understand what money is and how to manage it properly. I can help you help yourself in keeping your finances under control by giving you an understanding of the invisible driving forces behind money.

Word Clouds for Twitter

Hi Everyone, We’re very close in releasing a more trimmed-down version of Resonate. Why? Resonate have been brewing for too long without any feedback from you guys, our users. This can lead us to the dangerous path of making apps that you won’t love. So instead of including every feature that should be in Resonate,…

Blood & Glory: Invictus!

I’ve just completed all tournaments in Blood and Glory — all the free ones, that is. Read this article to find out more about the game, how I completed it, and how you can use my experience to improve your own game play.

News Anchor for Mac OS X 2.4.6 Beta 3

Apparently enabling garbage collection in News Anchor 2.4.6 Beta 1 did more harm than good. Thus I’m releasing News Anchor 2.4.6 Beta 3 that fixes the issue.

Wrapping C-Style Callbacks with Blocks

Elegantly handle C-style callbacks with Objective-C blocks. Reduce clutter, improve readability, and a really cool way of wrapping those clunky callback style that’s more than 20 years old!

News Anchor 2.4.6 Beta 1 is available

News Anchor 2.4.6 Beta 1 is out and fixes a compatibility issue with a future version of Mac OS X.

How to Get Employees for Your Startup (and Compete with MegaCorps for People)

If you’re running a startup and wanting to hire star performers for your company, you should know how to compete with the hiring power of large established companies that many good talents are drawn to. Likewise if you’re a recruiting agent and have a startup as your client, don’t repeat the same mistakes that hundreds of headhunters do every day.

HackerSpace.sg: iOS Developer Meetup

Coverage on the iOS Dev Scout event on March 2012 with my commentaries. The primary topics were iOS in-app purchasing and test-driven development.

Multithreading with Core Data on iOS

The pervasive use of blocks and new nested context in iOS 5 and Mac OS X Lion paved the path to a whole new way of multithreading. Apple has lifted yet another barrier to use Core Data for applications that needs to run on multiple threads. This article teach you how to effectively write multi-threaded apps that uses Core Data as it’s backing store.

Caveats on Shared Web Hosting

Do you host your website in a managed web hosting environment? Be careful since they may not be as “professional” as you might think they are. Here are some tips on how to cope with less-than-professional web hosting companies.

Indie Spark (page 9) — Thriving in Apple’s Ecosystem