MacIndie

So, you’re all hyped up to play with the newest iOS5 goodness, you fire up Xcode, create a new project, throw in some of you favorite 3rd party utilities from GitHub and hit build and…. boom! you see  a bunch of these: OACall.m:75:9: error: ‘retain’ is unavailable: not available in automatic reference counting mode  What [...]

Robert J. Samuelson of the once respectable Washington Post wrote a pretty sad piece today. It started out like this… Before reading this, you should know the following: I do not own an iPad, an iPhone, an iPod or a Mac. I abandoned my typewriter only recently. In short, I have not enlisted in the digital [...]

The day that everyone has expected for the last couple of year has come.  Today, Steve Jobs passed away at 56. I was lucky enough to have met him once at a computer show in New York City in 1979.  That same year my father loaned me over $2,500 with which I bought my first [...]

Here’s great new resource for iOS frameworks – named eponymously, iosframeworks.com  Lots of cool and very useful stuff!

Wired is reporting that Google has at last awakened and stepping into the Lodsys in-app purchase patent controversy by moving on a new front and actually moving to have the patents re-examined and possibly invalidated by the US Patent & Trademark office. This is a good move on Google’s part because forcing re-examination is the [...]

Mike Lee, the newly minted “mayor” of Appsterdam, made an important announcement yesterday:  The Appsterdam Movement is forming and funding a legal defense collation (“The Appsterdam Legal Defense Fund”) to help indie devs fight the Patent Troll Menace(1). Of course we applaud them and think the fact they have an actual IP pro onboard is a [...]

This article is a little different from our Patent Mess Scorecard, rather then detailing who’s getting sued, here we’re going to try to detail what these patent trolls are claiming to control with these patents… Note: we’re not lawyers, and of course nothing we say here should be construed as either legal advise or a [...]

It’s a little scarce on details but Jonathan Freeman of Widgetpress has announced “Widget Press has been dismissed without prejudice of MacroSolve’s claims against the 816 patent.”   Congrats to Jonathan, it’s great news for the moment, but as he mentions in the blog entry, they could add him back into their lawsuit plans at [...]

[Update 12-July] Lodsys has just upped the ante again, now claiming that beyond in-app purchases, even cross-selling and/or cross-promoting in an app is a volition of their patents.   This story first broke yesterday on TouchArcade’s Dev Forum, where iFighter 1945 developer EpicForce reported receiving an infringement letter from Lodsys, and when EpicForce asked for [...]

Ever wonder how some other app solves a problem you are trying to tackle?  For example,  what are different ways that apps ask users to “sign in” to their back end services?  Or, stepping back form login screens, whast are some nice looking sign-up pages that might be a good model for your app to [...]