Here Comes the New iPhone (Please Let There Be Surprises)
The day has finally come: it’s September 12th and tech reporters and Apple cognoscenti will soon pile into the brand new Steve Jobs Theater on the Apple Park campus to hear all about those new iPhones. But as any iPhone app developer who has not been in a coma over the past few months will […]
Dogtown Media Champions Bipartisan CONNECT for Health Act
After seven years of promises to their constituents, House Republicans passed their repeal of Obamacare earlier today by a narrow vote of 217 to 213. To say that the bill is controversial is putting it lightly — for many Americans, it’s literally a life-or-death matter. But in this period of turmoil for the American healthcare […]
Tech Giants Stand Up for Clean Energy in the Trump Era
Silicon Valley’s attitude toward Donald Trump on the campaign trail was decidedly less than enthusiastic. Sure, contrarian Peter Thiel stood with the loose cannon Republican candidate, but his politics have always leaned further right than most of his colleagues. The vast majority of the tech world viewed Trump with skepticism, uncertain of what his approach […]
App Developer Challenges: Writing Helpful Bot Dialogue
The chatbot trend has been burning for a while now, and one of the biggest challenges facing app developers who jump into the fray isn’t entirely a question or programming. Instead, it’s a question of writing. Dialogue isn’t simple, and the trope of the anti-social hoodie-and-flip-flops San Francisco app developer doesn’t exactly lend itself to […]
How to Perform a Competitive Analysis for Your App Idea
Would you go spelunking without a headlamp? What about mountaineering without a map? Well, pursuing your great app idea without performing a competitive analysis would be just as foolish. Finding and analyzing your competitors will shine a light on the “roadmap” for your business. Without it, you miss out on the chance to fill actual […]
Mobile App Developers Gamify Biology, Discover New Species
There are over 8 million animal species in the world — finding, identifying, and cataloguing them all is one of biology’s biggest challenges. What if professional scientists could access the experience of casual ecologists and curious kids all over the world? That’s the vision of iNaturalist, a brilliant project from San Francisco iPhone app developer […]
How to Guess Startup Success Without Knowing What They Do
Yahoo’s $4.8 billion sale to Verizon in recent months has drawn the eyes of the tech community. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is bearing the brunt of that attention, but you’d never know it from a recent Bloomberg Businessweek interview. In conversation, Mayer seemed confident and relaxed about the huge changes to the company, and the […]
How to Pitch Your Startup and Get Investment Capital
In a recent episode of This American Life, first-time startup founder Alex Blumberg found himself in a situation most iPhone app developers would kill for: meeting one-on-one with investor Chris Sacca (of Twitter, Instagram, etc.) to pitch his app idea. Unfortunately, the meeting didn’t go as planned — to put it lightly, Blumberg crashed and […]
Why Would Apple Drop the Headphone Jack from New iPhone?
Apple has a history of making their own rules rather than following consumer expectations. In most industries — especially high-overhead ones like hardware — this approach would be disastrous. In spite of this, Apple has clearly gone on to become an iconic brand, dominating the mobile marketplace and supporting the premier platform for mobile app […]
Google SDKs Enable iOS & Android Mobile Apps to Work Offline
On May 29, 2015, Google launched its new Mobile Offline software development kit, giving app developers a new way to support offline functionality. According to Google, the new SDK will give developers the tools they need to create apps that will continue to function smoothly in the absence of an Internet connection. The Mobile Offline […]