Ads or no ads

Should I put iAd to my iOS apps on iTunes App store? Should I put the google adsense back to my blog? The reason I am asking this question is: while personally I really don’t like the ads on Facebook, LinkedIn, or the iAds on some apps like Echofon, I understand this is a meaningful way for app developers to make some money. This applies to me as well. While I did not spend whole a lot time working on my apps (in aggregate), I cannot go on this app dev road without any meaningful downloads/income revenue forever. I can do it for a while. But not for too long. I believe Ray Wenderlich talked about the importance of Ad revenue at recent raywenderlich.com podcast. One of the episode of Paul Kemp’s the App Guy Podcast (onemob.com) , talked about something similar.

I guess, the trick is to balance the ads and app. We don’t want ads to totally destroy the good experience of an app, but at the same time, if the app revenue could help the developer keep going, go for it. We live in a commercial world, no money, no bread. No bread, how can app developers survive?

Btw, I found the Apple developer documentation for iAd is insufficient or not up-to-date. For example, it uses requiredContentSizeIdentifiers in the tutorial, which is already deprecated in iOS 6. I found it won’t compile with iOS 7 SDK. I have seen in the past Apple does not always updates its developer documentation. Maybe they have not given high priority to this. I am sure if they pay attention, they can fix it.

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• 2D Game Art: The raywenderlich.com Podcast Episode 6

Singleton pattern backfired on me

This is a continuation of my earlier post of Tree, recursive function and my dumb mistake. As I said in my last post, my solution was to create hash maps (singleton) to store those for the session. The main motivation was to help out the performance. But I found out it backfired on me, a few days ago and today. In both cases, it has to do with the hash map I created, it was something like (object , a list of objects). In both cases the list of objects was actually dynamic, and I made an assumption it was static. In other words, I thought I only need to put the mapping to the map once, then I can use it happily ever after. I think there might be ways to get around it, i.e., I should update the map when that list does change. I will investigate and work on it more. (Update 05-30-14) So I found a solution to one scenario, I was able to update the map as needed. And I use put method (java hashmap) to do that update.

Related articles

• Singleton Design Pattern- Java Tech Guy must read!
• Singleton Design Pattern – An Introspection w/ Best Practices

What types of developer are you?

Or am I? 🙂 I think I’m a pragmatic programmer. Note this is also a book title I read, by pragmatic (note not agile), I think it’s about balance between software quality, effort and delivery date. It’s also about releasing software with known risks (including bugs) 😦

I thought about this as I started practicing some new (new to me) programming techniques, e.g., pair programming, test driven development (TDD), and also seen developers of different personalities/experience adjusting to this, at the same time trying to deliver the project on schedule. I felt and considered myself to be lucky in this aspect, as I thought my career at UGS/Siemens PLM Software laid the foundation for me as developer, in other words, I was very lucky to work with some excellent developers (definitely top 20% according to Jeff Atwood, co-founder of stack overflow), and received their guidance and mentoring in my programming formative years. Note I was not doing Agile, TDD, pair programming at that time, at least not formally. But at the latter part of my stay there, I did quite a bit automated unit/regression tests there. Also, although there is no pair programming, whenever I feel stuck, I could go to a senior member of the team, and talk. Not to mention the long debug session. I wrote about them in my blog long time ago (in Chinese, such as this one and this one).