Newsstand and Subscriptions

Oct 29th, 2011 | Comments

Two different concepts

In my previous article on the subject I explained how to create an app that supports the Newsstand feature introduced by Apple with iOS 5. The concepts explained in that post provide the technical references needed to build an app that is able to retrieve and download any new content, even in the background, and update the cover-like icon in the Newsstand app. Unfortunately while technically an app build in this way is completely functional, it wouldn’t be approved by Apple if sent for review. The reason for this is that Apple requires that each app compatible with Newsstand must offer its contens using an iTunes managed subscription.

iOS Newsstand Tutorial

Oct 17th, 2011 | Comments

A new way to distribute magazines

Since the beginning of the iPad era, one of the most appreciated features in the tablet has been the possibility to read magazines and newspapers. Practically all major publishers (and a lot of minor) have created their own magazine and newspaper apps and the first in-house experiments have grown with increasingly better applications. Besides a lot of software companies followed this path, the major ones by providing their own publishing system and a lot of other start-ups simply exist to offer their services to create custom apps for their customers.

Video Composition With iOS

Oct 15th, 2011 | Comments

Why video composition

You may think that video composition should be limited to applications like iMovie or Vimeo so you can consider this subject, at least from the point of view of the developer, to be limited to a niche of video experts. Instead it can be extended to a broader range of applications, not essentially limited to practical video editing. In this blog I will provide an overview of the AV Foundation framework applied on a practical example.

Setting Up a Blog With Octopress

Sep 28th, 2011 | Comments

Why Octopress

My web site is powered by Django so I would like explain before why I’m not providing the blog using the built-in framework. The main reason is that I want to keep separate the blog instance from the corporate (standard home page) one: this means different content, different formatting, essentially different entities. The website is dedicated to customers, of would-be ones, while the blog is more for hackers, colleagues like me.