Google has acquired the development team that produces the excellent Mac and iPhone email app Sparrow. Development of the app is being stopped so that the developers can “[join] the Gmail team to accomplish a bigger vision.”

Like many, I find this news disappointing. I bought both the iPhone and Mac versions of Sparrow. I use it daily on my iPhone, and intermittently on my Mac. It’s a great app on both platforms. I’ve been very happy with my purchase so far, but I have to admit I felt a little betrayed when I heard the news of the acquisition.

As…

In which a method is presented for reliably building static libraries with subprojects in Xcode, and it is suggested that this method, combined with Git submodules or other similar mechanisms, provides the best way to share libraries, frameworks, or other code between projects.

I’m sure I don’t need to tell you that it’s a useful thing to be able to share code between projects. On the small end of the scale, you might have created some nice views, or text processing classes, and want to be able to include them in multiple apps. On the larger end, perhaps you produce games…

Marco Arment has written a provoking article about Apple App store ratings. I haven’t really looked at the situation since my original (and, at the time, infamous) brush with the Apple law over the rating of Eucalyptus. As you may remember, it’s rated, at Apple’s request, 17+ for “Frequent/Intense Mature/Suggestive Themes”, because users can access Victorian textual translations of, for example, the Kama Sutra from it. How are other book reading apps rated? I took a sample of the popular ones:

• iBooks: 4+
• Kindle: 4+
• Blio: 4+
• Nook: 4+
• Stanza: 4+
• Wattpad: 9+
• Kobo: 12+

In case you’re in …

In October 2011 I gave a talk at the inaugural NSScotland conference in Edinburgh entitled “An iOS Developer’s OpenGL Primer”. It was an attempt to introduce iOS developers to the world of OpenGL by starting with what must be happening - pixels being displayed on screen - and working up through the layers of abstraction to UIKit. I wanted not to “teach OpenGL” (that could take up a lecture series…), but to make OpenGL seem understandable by explaining away the magic.

I promised then to put the slides online and, almost half a year - and one iOS release - later,…

I’d like to take a moment to talk about Apple’s new policy on paid ‘content’ in iOS applications. If you don’t live in the Apple bubble I live in, let me explain: Esentially, all apps that allow users to comsume pay-for content (magazines, music, books etc.) must allow the user to buy access to that content in-app, using their iTunes account. For this, Apple will take 30% of the retail price of the content. Content can also be sold outside of the app, via whatever means you can think of (books on your web site, an newspaper subscription bought via…