CIM Apps

Stephen T.    real quick, though… can you take a look at http://url-to-api/… and let me ask a specific question?
Brad S.    sure hold on
Brad S.    I need to set my accept header and what not
Brad S.    er authorization too
Stephen T.    An orange peanut? For me? Well i accept you.
Brad S.    ok i set the orange peanut and now I am looking at the response
Stephen T.    go past the Chunks, those are fine…

While Apple’s UIAccessibility Protocol Reference has been updated to note that there is a new accessibilityTrait in iOS6 called UIAccessibilityTraitHeader, none of the supporting documentation on accessibility mentions it—and while a few blog posts from around the web will tell you to use it, none tell you how.

To save you some of the hair pulling I experienced, I will share this lesson learned: If, like me, you are trying to get VoiceOver to read the label on a custom UITableViewCell as a header, set UIAccessibilityTraitHeader on the *cell*, not the label.

Stephen T.   brad/jose, is it safe to assume that it’s not safe to assume that the completedRecordings block will fire on main thread?
Brad S.    it’s safe to assume you can’t assume that
José I.    we could do that though
Stephen T.    it’s not that i was hoping that you wouldn’t not say that
Brad S.    well
Stephen T.    no no, let me. it’s cool.

We all want our apps to be accessible, but it’s pretty easy to forget that in any media playback application the app cannot just be accessible. The content that you are exposing the user to must also offer options that allow for consumption in different fashions.

Apple has recently announced the support for WebVTT subtitling information to be included with an HTTP Live Streaming playlist. The only downside is that they didn’t really announce HOW to do this. The tutorial below will help explain how to produce an HTTP Live Streaming playlist that includes subtitling information from a WebVTT source file.

Read More →

I need to get me a plaid shirt!

iOS Developer Wanted!

We are a group of people inside of Comcast working to change the world of entertainment. We do that by creating beautiful applications that improve our customers’ lives and help them experience our content in fantastic new ways.

We’re looking for people who are passionate about mobile development. We need teammates with “can do” attitudes, who don’t shy away from problems they don’t know how to solve just yet. Our world moves quickly, and we expect the same out of whoever we bring on.

You will be in a highly collaborative, fast paced environment that will require you to think on your feet and to make decisions that affect millions of users. If you do not think that is something you could handle, please stop reading right now, as this is at the very core of how we develop.

It’s not necessary for you to be an Objective-C wizard with years of mobile experience to join our team—a strong engineering background and C or C++ experience, as well as deep knowledge of http, would be just as useful—but experience shipping and maintaining customer-facing software is a huge plus.

Our team may have originally been formed to build a proof of concept web application, but over the past two years we have built an industry leading suite of native applications that have garnered critical acclaim, and we continue to improve our existing apps and expand our offerings. There have been lots of arguments, many changes, and even more laughs along the way, and there will continue to be as we grow.

Come join us for the adventure, and hopefully add to the laughs! Email steven_schumacher@comcast.com to apply.

Name: Eric Schrag

Occupation: Android engineer, snowboarder, sorta-retired-hockey-player, hockey/sports fan

Tweets at: @Kusand

About this guy: In a former life, he was a hockey-playing grad student whose advisor left the East Coast. He then moved on to Comcast, learned to snowboard, got a cool Java back-end job that involved ingesting television and sports data (and who doesn’t love sports data?! Totally serious.) and eventually turned that into a demo mashup app of Comcast TV Listings and Comcast Scoreboards. Suddenly, he was an Android dev. For reals. And now life is great - playing with mobile toys, working in a great place, doing things he loves to do, and traveling to mountains in his free time. The end - OR IS IT?

Well the 2012 WWDC is officially over, my body is still adjusting to time differences, so I wanted to take some time to kind of give my perspective about what we saw, and what we learned.

Read More →