We have just launched our new blog: Lemon Overflow. Check it out.

MerryCode is a registered company now, so from now on, MerryCode blog will only be used for company announcements and staff updates. All news reporting, tips and tricks and all other updates that you use to see here will be posted on Lemon Overflow.

Letterpress’s simple and elegant UI gives me a thought about Windows Phone’s Metro UI. Letterpress has a tile based Metro like UI minus the WP Segue font and totally cornered edges. It has really an amazing UI. The transitions are sweet and simple.

Isn’t this how metro apps on Windows Phone should feel like? Why there aren’t such apps on Windows Phone?

Metro UI is a cool concept but I am not really impressed by it in practice. I don’t like the idea of making all apps look alike. The metro app design trend on Windows Phone gives all apps almost same look and feel. Apps are useless unless they are able to differentiate their user experience from other apps. Tweetbot for iOS is a fine example of success based on unique User Experience.

Application development has gone multiple platform: If one wants to build an app to reach maximum users, multiple mobile platform versions are build to make sure it reaches all the audience. Rapid Application Development in this new era is like having an IDE where you can write code for a single app that can be complied to multiple platforms.

ZendStudio is one of the moden IDEs that is used to create rapid and quality applications that are hearted in cloud as web services and their clients are complied to run on multiple mobile platforms (The usual scenario).  Here is Zend’s senior director of product management Kent Mitchell  creating a cloud-enabled native mobile application in 10 minutes. This video shows the power of ZendStudio’s Rapid Application Development in action.

XML parsing is a frequently used thing in applications fetching data from the web. Fetching RSS feeds, XML-RPC, SOAP or REST data might not be usable unless you parse it. In Objective C (specifically in iOS development), NSXMLParser is used for parsing XML. The following tutorial explains how you can use NSXMLParser to parse RSS feeds.

Create a new Objective C application in XCode. I am creating an iOS application in this tutorial.

This little printer is lovely. In my perspective, if I have a choice to read something from hard copy instead of a soft copy, I prefer the hard copy because for some reason it gives me a unique feeling of attachment with the read. In this digital era, printers in homes mostly just serve the purpose of printing letters, some photos or maybe some stickers or greeting cards.  This $259 (plus $30 shipping to US) device is a small cute printer that prints different stuff you read on the internet in its own way. This small handy device looks little but can it looks to provide so much fun for your world of offline reading.

The description says:

Little Printer lives in your home, bringing you news, puzzles and gossip from friends. Use your smartphone to set up subscriptions and Little Printer will gather them together to create a timely, beautiful miniature newspaper.

One of the favorite activity of people in Ramadan is eating out. After fasting for whole day, people love to break their fast (Iftar) with the food they fantasize about. Food fantasies in Ramadan are not limited to favorite cusines. People love to try new type of food and want their dinner table filled with the mouth watering and juicy food specially trended for Ramadan. Most of the times even eating habits and food favorites change and during the holy month of Ramadan. People love to go out, arrange iftar or Sehri (Suhoor) parties with friends and want food that can make them happy.

The restaurants all over the Muslim world start offering meal deals. Eating out generally becomes cheaper, and all restaurants get  in competition to offer the best dine-in or takeaway deals. Ramadan is the month when you can get the best deals in restaurants. These deals are so good that they make Foodies fall in love.

If you have not used MetroTwit for Windows. You know nothing about Long Zheng‘s efforts for creating an awesome Twitter client that uses Windows Presentation Foundation and follows the Metro design paradigm.

I get annoyed by huge fonts, sliding pivots and too much space between text that occupies a lot of useful space  in Windows 8 and Windows Phone 7 Metro apps. I call these Metro apps ‘Conventional Metro apps’ because they follow the design norms of Windows 8 and Windows Phone 7 design templates. Although Metro is much vast than this. Metro is a design language that has a certain fell of modernism and simplicity. Metro does not necessarily restrict the specifications of UI elements to sliding pivots, panoramas and other stuff we normally find in most of the Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8 apps . This is why most apps on Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8 look same and it sucks.

MetroTwit for Windows 8 is first good looking app that goes beyond the ‘Conventional Metro’ and it is pretty. There are no pivot controls that waste screen space or other ‘Conventional Metro’ stuff that makes it look like just another Windows 8 app.

This caught my attention on Reddit. Entitled “My Mom helping me through a hard level in Super Mario Land on the day Nintendo Gameboy was released”, this picture is awesome at many levels.  Shows love, connection and awesomeness of gaming era and tech-savvy parenthood between late 80s and early 90s.

With iOS 5 SDK, JSON parsing has become very easy with NSJSONSerialization class.  Whenever I search for a programming tutorial on internet, I have a hard time. The problem with programming tutorials on internet is that they waste half of your time by walkthroughs of creating User Interface that you might not need or making code extra long by hooking up methods with UI elements or creating separate classes and a lot of variables.  Here is a very very simple tutorial that explains how JSON parsing in Objective C works using NSJSONSerialization.

iPhone Dream Team has just released Absinthe 2.0 that jailbreaks iOS 5.1.1 on all devices except  Apple TV 3. The jailbreak is untethered and it does not require you to cook a firmware. It works directly on the iOS installed on your device.