iOS-Blog and how I won a great book
A while ago I was reading a tutorial on iOS-Blog called How to make a magazine app in iOS and I was fascinated how well it was written when an ad caught my eye. It was a so-called internal ad, leading to another page on the site. It offered me a chance to win a book about iOS development by tweeting about the site. It was a no-brainer. I then finished the tutorial – which proved quite interesting – and just a few weeks later I was holding the book in my hands: iOS Recipes – Tip and Tricks for Awesome iPhone and iPad Apps by Matt Drance and Paul Warren. The book was great...
read moreMonetizing iOS apps — lessons learned
When we started our first iPhone app we wanted to test first hand if we could develop a product that was ready for the market. We didn’t know how to code Objective-C, not all of us had iPhones, no-one had a Mac – those were strange times. We didn’t plan for profit – we were just poking around to see if we liked it. Well, we did like it. And the app turned out good. The users liked it, we liked it, it was featured on the App Store and reached the #1 spot in Bulgaria. After the dust settled down, we found ourselves with a free app, which was taking us several hours a...
read moreOur App Store debut was a major success
On Sept 2nd we released our first app on the App Store. Its name is ‘По кината’ (po kinata) and is about movies and where to watch them. It lists the movie listings in 11 Bulgarian cities, including Sofia, Plovdiv, Varna and Burgas, and gives the user useful information about the movies and the movie theaters. Users have the option to vote for the movies they watch, thus helping their peers in their decision. The app quickly reached #1 on the App Store and is still in top 10. The reviews are great and our team is very happy with the success. We launched a website for...
read moreMySQL ERROR 1005 Can’t create table (errno: 121)
ERROR 1005 (HY000): Can’t create table ‘my_db.my_table’ (errno: 121) When you get an error like this one, you have only one choice – start cursing the genius who thought that error description is good enough while searching for the real meaning of the dreaded message. I can offer you one more option – that if you are using InnoDB, of course – login to mysql and type Source code mysql> SHOW INNODB STATUS\G This will give you a lot of output, including a more clear description of the error you encountered. Good...
read moreA thing you should know when deleting posts using the Tumblr API
Like every curious developer out there, I like playing with APIs: Google Maps’, Facebook’s, Twitter’s and, currently, Tumblr’s. I’m trying to write a decent importer from WordPress to Tumblr so I spend a lot of time with the Tumblr API and its docs. I stumbled upon a peculiar problem with the delete method from the API, which I want to share with you. You can read how to delete posts by going here – http://www.tumblr.com/docs/en/api#deleting_posts. It says (to save you from clicking and reading): Deleting posts To edit a post, create the...
read moreFree themes for Yii Framework
I stumbled upon a site offering free themes for Yii Framework and – as we at JI Apps are huge fans of Yii – rushed over there to download a few for testing. Those of you who expect WordPress-like themes are bound to be disappointed. The author is just showing you how you can make a theme for your projects, he is not a designer (so he claims), so don’t expect some graphics-heavy themes. That said, I found the site very useful. Using some of his sample themes I can create a couple of versions for a client and easily switch them to show her what it would look like, for...
read moreError: DBus error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply
For those of you who use Ubuntu on a daily basis this error message may sound familiar: Error: DBus error org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NoReply: Message did not receive a reply (timeout by message bus) Please select another viewer and try again. I get it from time to time when trying to connect to a SSH or FTP server from nautilus. I found a solution through google, though I can’t recall where, so no “source” link. Here it is: Source code sudo dpkg-reconfigure nautilus Wait a couple of seconds before you try connecting again. Hope that works for...
read moreJI Apps v1
While discussing, planning, and gathering ideas about what company we wanted to be we arrived at the observation that the company was already up and running, the clients were happy and everybody liked us. Well, at least the 3 people we asked did say that. So here we are, working our butts off for you. And we are happy to do it, as long as you are happy with the result. Most of our current projects are web related and in the mean time our co-founder Martin is doing some research on office cloud computing as we are planning to offer such a service in the near future. For those of you who...
read moreHow to rename the Home link on your breadcrumbs in Yii Framework
Prerequisites: In order to understand this post you should know what Yii Framework is. You don’t have to know much about it, though – we’ll discuss basic stuff here. It would certainly help if you have a copy installed on your server, so you can test freely as you read. For this tutorial we assume you have downloaded and set up Yii Framework with the default settings and you have used the yiic script to create your application (something like ./yiic webapp ../myapp where myapp is the name of your application). This is the way described in the Yii Framework documentation. In...
read moreHere we are!
Our website is up and running and we can tweak it on the go – it’s so much easier than the old-fashioned way of waiting until it’s 100% ready. Thanks, Jason Fried. Who are we? We like to code, we like to create, we like to help people out and we like things simple and easy. There’s me – Dimitar Chakarov, sometimes credited as gimly, and Georgi Ganchev, mostly credited as johny – a pair of developers who believe that developers could and should create beautiful things. And we wanna give an example. You can learn more about us on our About us page. Our first product is bound to...
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