App development, bug reporting, and more in this GeekSpeak podcast with Bugsee

Back in early September, Lyle Troxell from GeekSpeak invited Dmitry and myself to his ad-hoc studio at Netflix in Los Gatos to record an episode for his podcast.

Interestingly enough, we didn’t realize we were actually going to do the recording then. We thought we were just meeting Lyle to discuss a future interview. Imagine our surprise, when we walked into a regular Netflix conference room and saw Lyle setting up his recording equipment.

We had a fantastic time chatting with Lyle. We covered a wide variety of topics. We started with the importance of titles in a startup, then went to talk about our early days working in embedded space with cameras, DVDs and phones. Then talked through our previous adventure and how it eventually, with a bit of help from Goldman Sachs, led us to the birth of Bugsee.

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Managing iOS build configurations

Applications today are rarely being built without 3rd party libraries and SDKs. There are libraries for integrating remote backends into your app. Libraries for effective image caching and loading. Libraries for gathering analytics and libraries for pushing messages. Libraries that help your users report issues, help you debug and analyze crashes. (Yes, that last one is Bugsee)

It is also a common practice for developers to maintain more than flavor of the application during active development. A debug version of the application may require a new version of the backend server which also might be under development still, it might send analytics data to a different service or it may need to include a helper library that is not necessary in the release version.

This following tutorial describes several options for maintaining different build configurations.

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iOS Ad-hoc distribution using Amazon S3

Every iOS developer at some point in their life is challenged with a task to distribute their awesome app to a group of loyal beta testers. Apple does not make it easy. The reasons for this are clear. We all care about security and greatly appreciate the fact that iOS platform is much more secure than its main competitor, but it is still a problem that needs to be solved. There are services out there that try to automate the ad-hoc distribution process, but sometimes it is not desirable or even possible to use them. Thus, there is a need to bake an in-house distribution system.

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Introducing Bugsee Blog

Hello world!

Today, we are introducing Bugsee corporate blog, ran by our engineering team under the helm of our CTO, Dmitry Fink.

We plan to cover a wide variety of technical topics about iOS, Android, browser plugins, web front-end and back-end development and deployment.

We will also write here about Bugsee news and updates, as well as, feature our customers’ and friends’ guest posts.

If you wish us to write about a certain topic, please let us know at support@bugsee.com.

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