illumineX

This weekend we had a call with a prospective client eager to pay us to help them build out a new social media feature in their (very cool) software system. We turned them down. They had an urgent deadline, but that doesn't scare us. They'd also already done some exploratory prototyping before they realized they needed some help, so they had a pretty good idea of what they needed help with. After listening to them describe their current status, I asked a few questions and then realized they had run into a little snag with a non-obvious feature of the API used to talk to a particular cloud service. They didn’t really need our help building and delivering the short term solution, they just needed an email briefly describing the shortest path from where they stood, to the goal. I sent them the email they needed, right after the call.  They're running with the ball, now, and they're gonna make the goal. We didn’t lose business, we made a friend. A fascinating thing about th

Pulling iBlogger off the #iPhone #AppStore a few years ago wasn't an easy decision.  One of the first apps on the App Store in 2008, iBlogger had grown a loyal following of thousands of bloggers who had created over a million blog posts in the first couple years. Countless more after that. To save the product, we had to kill it. But iBlogger was always a labor of love for my team, not really a profit center. We didn't have the bandwidth to maintain the old Objective C source code and migrate the app to Swift at the same time. Too many things were changing at once, new blog platforms being created, old ones being retired, new protocols, social media, and a strong demand for iPad support when the core of the app made unfortunate assumptions about iPhone screen sizes.  To save the product, we had to kill it. So we did. Today, that painful decision bears fruit.  iBlogger is back on the iPhone and #iPad #AppStore!  iBlogger 3 is a great new foundation for the future of mobile bloggi

Lately I've been working on various projects with several new #freelance #iOS#Swift #mobileapp developers, including David Cui (Zuizin). David is helping us update the illumineX, inc. cartoon-eyes toy, EyeSpy (for macOS), which we've been ignoring for a few years. David is enthusiastic, professional, and effective. He's the type of developer who likes to leave a campsite cleaner than he found it. While doing routine maintenance on the product (updating it for Swift 5 and Xcode 11.5) he noticed there was a tiny bit of test code accidentally left in the product for years, and causing a little glitch. He brought it to our immediate attention, and fixed it. David also cleaned up and modernized our In-App Purchase system, which hadn't had any attention for a few years. It turns out that even though our IAP store had been working in sandbox testing in the lab, it had been failing silently about 1/3 of the time in production. Doh! The IAP system in EyeSpy is a wel

If you're a blogger, you might find this essay, recently shared to YCombinator's Hacker News  from a blog, to be of interest. It's perhaps a little pessimistic, but has some fair observations about the state of affairs in the #blogosphere.  If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs It's almost impossible now to find a blog that's not on a focused theme because that's what search engines focus on and how websites profit. But you want the opposite, a blog that never tried to focus or even thought about it.  The observations about the role of the only search engine that presently matters, Google, in the state of the blogosphere are worthy of consideration. In the discussion at Hacker News, the author was criticized a bit for saying that Google Blogger was "dead" —which itself seems a pretty fair criticism if not strictly accurate in a pedantic sense. Google basically abandoned Blogger in place years ago. Sure, our own ill

hey Bloggers! iBlogger 3 is ready for its first TestFlight on the iOS App Store. This all-new iBlogger written from scratch in Swift for iOS 13 gives us a great foundation for the future. Long live iBlogger 3! To join the iBlogger 3 Test Flight public beta, download the TestFlight App .  Send us an email so we know you're using the beta release. If you like, you can include the URL to your blog, and feature requests. email: support@illumineX.com subject: join iBlogger TestFlight New in iBlogger 3 This first release is compatible only with WordPress, but feel free to join the TestFlight group anyway, and tell us your blog type. iBlogger 3 has been completely rebuilt from the ground up in Swift for iOS 13. The all-new product provides better performance, robustness, and security. iBlogger 3 includes a dramatically improved editor. iBlogger works fluidly on iPhone and iPad for all device screen sizes (iOS 13 and higher). supports modern OAuth for secure and c

Looking for a fun sticker pack with Valentine Hearts? Look no further! The new Valentine Hearts Emoji PaX by illumineX is now available on the App Store for iOS Messages. This pack features over 30 fun, silly, flirty, sexy, artistic Valentine hearts. Spice up your text message game or sprinkle some more fun hearts as "likes" in your next chat. Valentine Hearts Emoji PaX - the best Valentine's sticker pack for iOS Messages.