Side Project Spotlight Podcast

The trio continue to suffer the Beta Blues, but Steve did do his pod homework this round and made a very janky visionOS prototype that lets you apply a pixelation filter to a photo! This leads into some good discussion of photo app features that would be appropriate on visionOS interspersed with some “bad app ideas,” a digression about Share Play, and Kotaro & Aaron decide they want to build Cerebro! [More Info]

The trio are trying to run the visionOS sample apps, but broken Xcode betas are getting in the way! Undeterred, Kotaro leads a discussion on what you can learn via the four visionOS demo apps (if you get them running). Then, the trio speculates about the forthcoming dev kits, Steve brings up the movie Hackers (because it’s awesome!), and we end the show with some truly “bad app ideas. [More Info]

The trio have had some initial hands-on time with the visionOS SDK and are ready to dive into a new development adventure. That’s right, it’s time to pivot! We think visionOS is a rare opportunity that should not be missed by Apple developers. Maybe it’s a big nothing burger, maybe it’ll be a new App Store gold rush, maybe somewhere in between, but the time to start exploring this new platform is now! [More Info]

The trio are joined by developer and educator, Mohammad Azam to discuss some of the big announcements from WWDC23. Topics include Swift Macros, SwiftData, app architecture patterns, server-side swift, and more! There are ton of great links in the show notes this episode, so be sure to check them out! When you are done, follow some of the links to Azam’s courses and content. We have found his work to be very helpful in our own developer journeys and maybe you will, too! [More Info]

Twas the pod before WWDC and the trio decided to enjoy themselves with a little speculation about what gifts Apple will bestow on June 5, 2023. Most of the discussion centers on speculation about the “mythical goggles” rumored to be released along with a brief tangent on widgets, some thoughts on whether Apple will even utter the acronym, “AI,” during the conference, and we end with a nerdy grab bag wishlist of features we hope to see added to Apple’s platforms this year. [More Info]

This week, the trio is joined by our good friend and Philly CocoaHeads alum, Joe Cieplinski. Joe is an accomplished designer who transitioned into iOS development and has built multiple apps for iPhone and iPad. With the recent announcement of Final Cut and Logic on iPad, it feels like a new era of pro iPad apps may be on the horizon and there is no one better to talk to about iPad apps than Joe. [More Info]

This week, the trio celebrates their podcast mid-life crisis by discussing a concept coined by Daniel Steinberg in a 2022 talk, “Packaged Oriented Programming.” How do you organize your app using Swift Package Manager packages? What are the benefits and costs? There is also some discussion on dealing with JSON API changes, using Codable vs DTOs, and strategies for caching external package dependencies for the longterm. Be sure to stay until the end where Kotaro engages in some live “prompt engineering” with Chat GPT that generates some impressively bad jokes. [More Info]

This week, Steve engages in a little “proompt engineering” with Bing, we bring back our Not a Sponsor segment to share how impressed we are with Clip Dish, and then we discuss the topic that all Apple dev podcasts must tackle at least once, “going indie.” We focus on some of the logistics like whether you should use a company App Store account, how important it is to get an accountant, and ideas on revenue models, the special challenges of being an indie game dev, and end with some advice on getting started consulting. [More Info]

The trio is back from The State of the Mobile Union event where fun was had by all and minds were expanded about the possibilities of mobile development! Plus, the Comcast Technology Center is cool! We continue to slowly build PickleJarTodo with Kotaro putting into practice the ideas he espoused at his talk for our UI. In our newly restored Not a Sponsor segment, we check-in with the current state of Arpit’s GroceryTimer app, which might just be what Steve needs to avoid rotten strawberries. [More Info]

This week, the trio wonder about the nature of a “sprint” and Steve takes his first tentative steps into whatever circle of Hell is reserved for Jira. The three amigos then revisit the topic of “AI” tools since this space is moving at warp speed. Kotaro and Steve talk about their experiences with ChatGPT and Bing before discussing some of the machine learning tools already available from Apple. Kotaro talks about diffusion model image workflows and the concerns of visual artists. [More Info]