Google App Engine has this item – Discounted Instance Hour – which you can reserve a number of hours per week at a cheaper cost.

Recently, I was looking at the Charge Sent per week, and one of the item is this:

Unused Discounted Instance Hour – Used XXX hours

iOS 5 does NOT support Base Internationalization.

I learnt this the hard way (and partly Apple’s fault).

After upgrading my project to use Base Internationalization, I release a new version, and shortly, my users complained of startup crash.

I have been thinking which to use.

I am already using Google App Engine (Java) for a few years, running a couple of web apps on production. And paying them ever since they started charging.

I tried a few apps on Dotcloud, but never yet deployed any on production.

If you are an iOS developer, you are probably familiar with the 3 ways to install an app – Run/debug on device, Ad hoc distribution, and App Store distribution.

For each of the 3 ways, Apple provisioning portal has provided the provisioning certs you must use to sign the binary.

Adhoc distribution is the most complicated (the other 2 ways are very straight forward). Over the years, the process has also changed.

This post is for development with Xcode 4.5.

My experience with using ads in iOS goes as far back in 2008 when iOS is released. It was simple back then, but now, I have lost count of the number of ad networks.

See what I mean:

This post I am going rave a bit. So..

tldr;

• Use 2 mediation – Admob & MoPub – and split them 50-50
• Use Admob
• Use MillenialMedia/mMedia
• Use InMobi
• Use iAd

nosetests is Python favorite unit testing framework.

It helps to collect tests from functions that has the word test, or subclasses from unittest.TestCase, etc.. Learn the different ways that you can write test cases.

This post is about some custom stuff I did for localization.

It does not cover the basic of how you localized an app, nor how to use the Apple provided genstrings tool.

Lambda is

one line anonymous function constructed on the fly

Closure is

a function object that remembers values in enclosing scopes regardless of whether those scopes are still present in memory

There are some simple steps you can take to make your iOS app friendly to the visually impaired users. All you need is to provide more meaningful labels and iOS VoiceOver will take care of it.

I am guilty that I didn’t take these simple steps whenever I release a new app, even though I know about it since iOS 3.. Sometimes, I need a reminder.

Treat this post as another reminder. And as a guide.

I came across this great slideshow about projects, teams and developers.

Some of the ideas are similar to The Lean Startup.

Other key takeaways for me are: