PearComp

Are you still actively supporting mygas? It seems to have been reported by many to be broken for months with crashes after rendering your location. It would be a shame to see such a good idea for an app to be lost.

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 14:20:32 +0000

We are still supporting MyGas, even though we’re being kept pretty busy with other stuff. I’ve been working on a new version for a while now, hopefully we’ll get it out in the not too distant future.

We laughed about this. A lot, actually ;-)

Wed, 13 Jul 2011 10:01:03 +0100

We laughed about this. A lot, actually ;-)

Soon coming to an iPhone or iPad near you…

Mon, 09 May 2011 10:56:56 +0100

Soon coming to an iPhone or iPad near you…

Someone is coming (back)…

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 13:14:00 +0000

Someone is coming (back)…

thanks for the handy MyGas app. If you added mpg and tank size to the options, you could display savings of going each garage, and even figure out which would be the best station to head to for the biggest saving. Also, an iPad version would be very nice too :)

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 09:49:00 +0000

Thanks a lot for the suggestion, that’s a really good idea! We’ve been very busy recently with a top-secret project, but we still have a lot of improvements and new features in mind for MyGas, so stay tuned ;-)

KashFlow - QuickSnap

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 10:57:00 +0100

As we’ve written about before, we teamed up with KashFlow to create a full-fledged accounting app for the iPhone.

Many users of the KashFlow iPhone app have commented that one feature they use regularly is taking a picture of a receipt and attach it to a receipt in KashFlow. In order to make this as quick as possible, we created a stand-alone app we call KashFlow QuickSnap.

The idea is simple: Set your name, customer and expense category in the preferences only once, and then just take pictures of your receipts with a tap. You can enter a description, but you don’t have to. Inserting receipts is now faster than ever.

As usual this goodness comes to you for free, courtesy of KashFlow. Give it a try today!

KashFlow - easy accounting on the iPhone

Tue, 25 May 2010 11:15:00 +0100

Accounting is the part of business life that almost everyone tries to avoid like the plague. The prospect of spending hours filing receipts is daunting even to the best of us. This is especially true if you’re not a multi-national corporation, but a small company with limited time and manpower (like us for example).

Hence, it is no surprise that there are plenty of software packages to help SME (small and medium enterprises) with their accounting needs. The biggest and most widely known online service for SME accounting in the UK is KashFlow. They offer an amazingly comprehensive service at a very affordable rate. Try it yourself, there’s a 2 months free trial - no strings attached.

We are very proud to announce that we’ve teamed up with KashFlow to create (what we believe to be) the most full-featured accounting application available on the iPhone. This app is not just a gadget. It is your entire accounting system in your pocket. Features include

Bank account overview
Invoice creating, listing and editing (in multiple currencies)
Create & edit receipts, attach snapshots with the iPhone camera
List all your customers, contact them directly via email, phone or text message
View report charts

… and that’s just the beginning. In the near future, we’ll continue to bring even more features of KashFlow to the iPhone.

If you like KashFlow for iPhone, we’d love to hear about it. Likewise, if you’ve got some feedback, just drop us a line at info@pearcomp.com.

Do you also need custom software developed, be it a website or an iPhone app? Get in touch with us today!

NSArray+UniqueObjects

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 23:17:00 +0000

I decided to do the good deed of the day and migrate the first of the Objective-C blog posts from the old godawful site to our new one, as some people seemed to find these tutorials quite handy. This one’s called NSArray+UniqueObjects, and I hope you find it useful.

How does one get rid of duplicate values in an NSArray whilst maintaining a specified sort order? After researching the Cocoa documentation I couldn’t find a way to doing this with a oneliner. So here’s a category on NSArray that does it! The following code should help you out.

Here’s the header and implementation:

You can also grab the source code for this snippet from github:

git clone git://gist.github.com/339644.git gist-339644

We laughed about this. A lot…

Wed, 03 Mar 2010 18:32:46 +0000

We laughed about this. A lot…

MyGas in UK App Store Navigation Top 10!

Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:42:00 +0000

We’ve been following the rising App Store rankings of the free petrol station finder app MyGas in excitement. MyGas, our second last release which we made together with whatgas.com, has been out since Christmas and has gained in popularity especially in the UK App Store very steadily and is receiving a lot of positive feedback. The app is currently out in a handful of European countries (UK, Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Portugal) and we’re hoping to expand this in the future.

We’ve released two updates to the app based on the user feedback with bug fixes and added functionality such as Google Maps route finding searching. More free updates are coming your way soon, so stay tuned andkeep the feedback coming so we know what you want!

App Development Diary in TheAppleBlog

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 05:00:00 +0100

In addition to our on-going client projects, at PearComp we have also, for a while now, been working on an iPhone game of our own, to be released sometime in the not-too-distant future, hopefully in a couple of months.

While there will certainly be posts about our game development experiences in this blog, some of our first steps (and missteps) have also already been documented, with enthused journalistic vigour, atTheAppleBlog’s App Developer Diary.

This is due to us agreeing, after the game project’s initial launch, to become guinea pigs in a real-life app design & development experiment, to be observed by one of TheAppleBlog’s regular writers, Olly Farshi. The diary reports on any (interesting enough) obstacles we stumble upon, lessons we learn and little victories we hopefully achieve, when creating a fully functional mobile game for the iPhone platform.

Of course, it’s also not only about us. Instead, our undertakings often serve as triggers for the series to provide a broader perspective on the issue at hand, with, for example, interviews with bigger players in the industry, and Mr. Farshi’s own insight and previous experience in mobile game design.

So far, the following four installments have been published in the App Developer Diary:

Part 4: The Hidden Cost of iPhone Apps - How should one balance development effort with estimated returns? What other returns can you expect than direct sales of an application?
Part 3: All In The Timing - How do you pace a project for the ultimate goal, the release of the application? (Also appeared on The New York Times and CNN)
Part 2: Pitching My Concept - Designer meets Borg-brained programmer. How do you convince a development team of the viability of a game concept?
Part 1: Game On - How can you breathe life into a game concept? Hasn’t it all already been done? (Also picked up by The New York Times, CNN and Salon)

Each post so far has been a good read, and therefore heartily recommended!

App ranks for all categories and all app stores

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 05:00:00 +0100

Every iPhone developer wants to know how his apps are doing. While Apple tells you about sales and traffic, you can’t really compare your app to the competition. Although this information is available in iTunes in the form of a “ranking” of the top 100 applications in each category, there is no way of getting to it other than clicking through all the pages in iTunes by hand. What makes things worse is that there are many stores, and the rankings will be different in each store and category.

Not too long ago, Ben Chatelain wrote a perl script, based on Erica Sadun’s previous work, to exctract the rankings for an app identified by its ID from any iTunes Application Store in the world. Unfortunately, it seems that Apple keeps changing the XML format that these web services return. The original Perl script by Ben was subsequently modified by the guys at touchcentric to make it faster and easier to use.

Last week I downloaded the perl script from their website and tried to get statistics for our new app, Point Don’t Shout. As it turned out, the script didn’t work for me. I traced it down to the regular expression that digests the XML returned by Apple and extracts an app’s rank, id and name. It seems that Apple was kind enough to change their format, once again.

I set out to fixing this issue and modified the Perl script again. However, as the format has become more complicated, I decided to properly parse the XML using XML::TreeBuilder, a nice and simple XML DOM style parser for Perl. I also cleaned up the code and removed some unused functions as well as modifying the way caching was handled previously.

The new script can be downloaded here. Please let me know if you run into problems, or if you are overjoyed to use this little piece of code.

Releasing your first application

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 05:00:00 +0100

These weeks have been both manic and exciting for us. Manic because we had to rush to fix issues with the 3.0 beta compatibility, get additional translations of the user interface done, and deal with Apple’s not always entirely intuitive submission process. Exciting on the other hand, because we finally managed to get our first application out of the door and onto the app store. In case you hadn’t seen it on our Apps page, Point Don’t Shoutis a picture dictionary which helps you make yourself understood, even if you don’t know how to pronounce a word in a foreign language. Currently it features more than 700 terms, and can translate between 8 different languages.
Once your app is eventually out there on the Store, you feel like a parent whose kids moved out to go to college. There’s not much more you can do. They’re on their own now! You can try and support them by helping with the move but in the end they have to find their own way. So while we are very excited about the release, one also feels a bit anxious, because it’s now beyond us how the app will be taken up by users. I’m sure that many developers, and probably a lot of artists and writers will feel the same, and we’d love to hear about it. A worry shared is a worry halved.

About Us

Sun, 01 Feb 2009 16:00:00 +0000

PearComp got started by two computational biologists armed with experience in web and desktop software development and scientific computing in Cambridge, UK. Matias and Ben underwent a transformation from serious scientists to serious iPhone developers. They begun working on their first iPhone app and since then there has been no coming back.

The people

Matias Piipari (founding member),born and raised in Finland, has been working for his PhD in Cambridge at theWellcome Trust Sanger Institute. Matias’ interest in software development has been sparked by his work experience innew media and scientific computing.

Alongside his computational biology research, Matias built up a strong interest in all things usability, and has developed easy to use yet powerful computational biology research software for the Mac as well as taken part in research into tools that help making web applications usable. As if a biology PhD and running a software company weren’t enough, Matias also busies himself with composing some weird and wonderful music and organising conferences. You can find out more about Matias on Twitter.

Benjamin Schuster-Böckler (founding member) came to Cambridge from Germany. He had left his home town of Munich to study Bioinformatics in Berlin before starting his PhD in Cambridge in 2004. He now lives and works in Barcelona as a post-doctoral researcher. Before turning to science, Benjamin worked as a freelance web-designer and developer, mainly focusing on PHP solutions for online shops. Benjamin’s other passion besides iPhone applications is Capoeira, which he plays whenever time permits. Ben is on twitter, too.

Markus Piipari (affiliate) started programming just for fun in the tender age of 8. He later took it seriously as a developer, consultant and software architect for about 10 years in variousonline media companies and their tech partners in Finland, before stepping up, or sideways, to a project manager & team lead capacity for the last couple of years. The coding chops (that started with drawing circles on paper with a turtle robot) are still there, only the languages have evolved from Logo and Basic through Assembler, C and C++ to Java, Python and Objective C.

Aside from geeking out with computers, Markus also reads, writes, eats, runs, bikes and has recurring artistic differences in musical composition with Matias.

email: info@pearcomp.com
Post: 86 Cavendish Road
CB1 3AF Cambridge
Cambridgeshire