Tales from the app development team at Steamclock.

This year, Steamclock collaborated with &yet to build an iOS version of their video chat service, Talky. We released the first version in June, and a 1.1 update a few weeks ago. Along with the release of 1.1, &yet released important portions of the app as open source, under the Otalk project. Otalk is a collection of open source components to simplify setting up real time messaging systems based on modern, open standards: WebRTC, XMPP and WebSockets.

For four years, Steamclock has humbly used @steamclocksw on Twitter to keep in touch with our customers and fans. We would be @steamclock, but the year before we founded the company, somebody else registered it. Now, we’re running an unusual experiment find out who.

Last week, iOS 7 updates of our music apps went live on the App Store. I’d like to show some of the design decisions we made in bringing these apps to the new look, and share some of what we’ve learned working with iOS 7 so far.

We get a lot of inquiries each week about app development or consulting. Most of our clients are existing businesses who need an mobile app or site for strategic reasons. Sometimes though, we get folks who are simply excited about an idea and are looking to have a Vancouver shop build it out. We love to have passionate startups as our clients, but here are a few common surprises that are worth heading off before we get started.

A few month back, Apple quietly slipped a very nice Objective-C to Javascript bridge into WebKit. Since the first commit while we were busy celebrating New Year’s Eve, it has been fairly actively developed and improved. This new API supports straightforward embedding of the JavaScriptCore interpreter into native Objective-C projects, including reading and writing variables and object members with appropriate type coercion, calling methods on JavaScript objects, and directly binding Objective-C objects into JavaScript.

This week Gillian Shaw featured us in an article in the Vancouver Sun about unpaid overtime.

A lot of clients ask us about training.

At Steamclock, we’ve built a lot of apps. Until now though, we’ve never built one with a scope like this: