Archive for February 24, 2011

Thursday, February 24, 2011

App Store Revenue Stream

John Gruber:

The iTunes Store was and remains a business in its own right. Its mission isn’t selling music, or movies, or TV shows, or apps, but building an end-to-end system, a platform that allows people to easily buy anything digital. If you think the App Store shouldn’t be “a huge revenue stream” then you’re not seeing things the way Apple does.

And yet, CFO Peter Oppenheimer responded to criticism of the iOS subscription policy by saying that Apple runs the store “just a little over breakeven.”

Blocks + GCD Design Patterns

Colin Wheeler (via Brent Simmons):

Out of all the API calls I saw in grand central dispatch the one that initially impressed me least was dispatch_once. However after reading its documentation and using it a bunch I realized how useful this one API call is. Not only it is a dead simple way to ensure that code only gets executed once, but it is also thread safe.