Recently we have released iPhone app of our mobile social network **ollaa. **However there have been arguments about why don’t we support iOS 4.x and forced minimum iOS 5.0. In fact it is mostly about trade-offs we made before starting development. iOS 5.0 SDK has several features that made our development phase much easier such as automatic reference counting (makes the code readable and maintainable) and storyboards (made having feedbacks on UI flows and designs possible and removed the need to have separate mockups for flows and UIs) Read More →

Digitimes: Intel and Microsoft have been keeping close cooperation […] developing new tablet PCs based on Windows 8, with a goal of decreasing the global market share for iPad from 70% currently to below 50% by the middle of 2013 […] So here’s the Microsoft’s master plan. I am not sure if people are going to pay $300-$1000 for a Windows-based and probably not so well-designed and thicker device while there is iPad out there. Read More →

I see many people around me who can’t do anything productive in most days. That’s a common problem that we all sometimes feel drowned by having lots of things to but actually doing nothing. Recently I have read this free book named GTD for Hackers and compiled a list of practices of mine and author’s on getting things done. Organize your inbox. I use Gmail and for the emails I won’t read or reply immediately, I star them. Read More →

I am clearly obsessed with minimalistic blog themes and I finally decided to clone Dustin Curtis’ blog. Thankfully, Rıza created the main layout and styles and I adapted it for myself. His code and my usage are both available. In addition, I disabled commenting for a while, let’s see how it goes. I don’t want to change this for a long time. Read More →

While we’re waiting for our mobile social network app ollaa to get approved for iOS App Store in next two days, here’s the mobile OS percentage of 1000+ users signed up for beta invitation. Pretty much shows market shares in Turkey. (Follow @ollaaApp for news.) Read More →

_(Prelude: At ollaa.com we are 3 undergrad CS students, developing a mobile social network.) _

We have faced several difficulties in our startup adventure until now. Here’s a few of them:

**Things are slow: ** When everybody is supposed to pay attention to college courses, development is not so agile and you cannot expect all team members to push feature implementations everyday. GPA-hobbies balance is pretty dangerous. Therefore, you keep postponing release dates. Read More →

At ollaa.com we are 4 undergraduate CS students, developing a mobile social lifestreaming network. We are not working on this startup full time and we don’t have a budget to spend on fancy project management tools. One of the solutions that we proudly use to get things done is HipChat.

Basically it is a chat software that team members can communicate in chat rooms or in person. The different thing is, conversations are persistent and you don’t have to be online to keep up with previous chats. It also allows file sharing, video chat and has iOS, OS X, Android apps, which is pretty cool.  Read More →

Yesterday there has been a popular post on Hacker News about Designing Secure REST API ** without OAuth**. I don’t agree that OAuth is unsuitable and I’ll introduce my way shortly. This post is intented to be a reply on this topic. In our new startup (ollaa.com), we (3 undergrad co-founders) are basically developing a mobile social network that has iOS/Android clients communicating the server via a REST API. We also looked at how we can provide a secure authentication to our API.

Earlier in our development days, we developed our own proprietary authentication method. It basically should not make us store passwords on the clients and should be extendible for 3rd party apps (who should not know user passwords).

Naively, we were just passing

/api/someEndpoint?username=xxx&passsword=xxx as URL parameters. But later on we realized that will cause serious issues:

Read More →