The Online Magazine Focused on App Design, Branding & Marketing

There has been a lot of discussion lately on the subject of remote workers versus on site workers, spurred on by this Stack Overflow blog post supporting their remote workers. As an employee of Rocksauce Studios, some people wonder why I work remotely instead of packing my bags and moving to Austin, Texas. The answer is simple, really: while Austin is truly one of my favorite cities in the world, sometimes you just can’t leave your “home.” Before starting at Rocksauce, I worked in a corporate office, so there were lots of questions regarding my sudden change in daily scenery and a big adjustment for me as a worker. So far, I’ve found working remotely to be quite wonderful as long as you have a good team and the right tools at your disposal.

Here are some of the most effective tools for any remote employee:

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We recently released a small app called BeerTab. This app will take your beer photos, tag them with beer info and send them to Instagram. At first, I thought we would simply utilize the Instagram API to post the photos directly to the Instagram service. Unfortunately, the API doesn’t allow you to post pictures. Luckily, there is another way: “Document Interaction”!

Since all of the apps on your iOS device are “sandboxed” and cannot see each other, the previous method of saving a file to a shared directory doesn’t really work. What document interaction provides is a method to tell iOS that your app can handle a particular document type. That is exactly what Instagram has done. Within your app, create an image file with the extension “.igo” to send it to Instagram.

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Hey there! The last time we spoke, I shared with you how the AFNetworking client can simplify the process of having your iOS apps talk to internet. Now, let’s talk about how to get this and other third party libraries integrated into your iOS apps. This is done pretty easily with something called Cocoapods!

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Hi! Are you looking for a better way to talk to the internets in your iPhone, iPad and Mac applications? Before you answer: hi. (If you don’t get this, please listen to Back to Work, you really should be anyway.)

Anyway, my name is Adam Weeks and I’m the lead mobile developer at Rocksauce Studios. Welcome to my new column “Dev Notes.” I’d like to use these articles to share with you some of the neat things I’ve come across in the development side of things. Being a developer at Rocksauce allows me to work on a multitude of platforms and technologies, but iOS development is what is nearest and dearest to my heart! So that’s where we’ll start!

More after the JUMP…