Stephen has a new tutorial published over on Mobile Orchard, in which he introduces a means of migrating the data from a so-called “Lite” application to the paid version. A lot of apps don’t provide this facility, and others use (or suggest using) a server component, which can add considerable development overhead. Our solution, which we use for Strip and Strip Lite, is really easy to implement and the migration happens on the device itself. Check it out and let us know what you think!

Now this strikes me as a very good idea:

…there isn’t an acceptable way for iPhone developers to constructively provide feedback with gravity.

Sure, Apple takes bug reports. However, the system is effectively opaque. Is the submitter alone with his/her issue, or does it effect a silent majority of developers? Furthermore, while bugs are objectively resolvable, they’re a subset of the much larger category of subjective feedback, e.g., policy/behavior changes.

There is evidence that Apple responds to constructive feedback: They dropped the NDA, they’ve reversed app rejections (e.g., Eucalyptus), and there are reports that they actively try to avoid bad blood.

So, to provide the iPhone developer community with a mechanism to collectively submit constructive feedback with gravity to Apple, I’m pleased to announce: The Unofficial iPhone SDK Feedback Project

I’ve already created a nugget of feedback, go vote it up and help out your fellow devs!

I’m very excited, our man Bret Morgan from Bands On a Budget just sent us a pic modeling our new t-shirt:

I know it’s not as design-intense as those South-East-Asian Zetetic threads (I never did figure out how to order from them), but I’m stoked. We just ordered these to have for friends and fam, but if you’ve got to have one, hit us up.

I spend quite a bit of time in front of a screen all day hacking away, so I love to put on WNYC in the mornings, sip my pot of coffee and get to work.

Lately, however, I’ve taken to following more and more podcasts. This morning, on the walk from Greenpoint to Williamsburg Coworking I found myself listening to Stack Overflow, which is getting more and more entertaining as the weeks go by. The guest on the current episode is Damien Katz of Couch DB fame, who we saw give an incredibly inspiring talk at Ruby Fringe last year. The conversation ranges from fascinating computer science to some lively anecdotes about IBM (“full of douchebags”), Erlang, and Lotus, which keeps re-appearing in tech conversations lately. I’m only 40 minutes in, and it’s been fascinating.

Yes, I know I’m a nerd. But if you’re in the business, this is pretty interesting stuff. And we are totally in the business.

Another ‘cast that I look forward to every week is Dan Grigsby’s Mobile Orchard Podcast, focusing on iPhone development and the iTunes App Store. Dan keeps the topics very technology focused, but some of my favorite moments are when the guests (who are always iPhone developers) and Dan (a great developer himself) go into the business aspect of things. Few people have such a magnetic focus on market trends and data, and it also frequently turns up in Dan’s writings. Full disclosure – we were interviewed recently for this one.

And then there’s Savage Love, which is not even a little bit tech-related; it’s Dan Savage’s relationship advice column gone wild. Not safe for children, no, but very, very entertaining. This one can get a bit distracting, I’ll admit, but I absolutely cannot help but listen every week, it’s great.

This post is a tad off-topic, but I know some of us share this sphere of interest. I recently got a great write-up for a show my band played in Brooklyn:

There are no airy disco beats, no acoustic jams, and certainly no taking of prisoners as Ben Franklin is a live act that goes for the jugular with every song. Even the borderline kitschy, “Timmeh,” dedicated to our Treasury Secretary Tim Gieger [sic], is a sludge rock tune that sounds like Dinosaur Jr.’s J. Macis if he ever got the rocks removed from his mouth and asked, better yet demanded, “Where are my taxes?!”

Not bad. I didn’t know that we could be described as “neopunk,” and I never would have thought “sludge rock,” but this is not a review to complain about.