Black Pixel, a Mac and iOS software studio, writes about Cocoa development, Objective-C, Apple bug reporting and its own apps.
HN commenters cite it for the 'Radar or GTFO' post on Apple bug reports and the Cocoa interview questions, which one finds a trivia quiz.
I'm afraid this isn't going to produce much beyond anxiety in your candidates. This leads to the sort of interaction where I'd end the interview early, thank the interviewer for their time, and high-tail it out of there never to return.
It's a trivia quiz. And frankly, who cares if you know what iBeacons are? What's the likelihood a project requires knowledge of both iBeacons and HealthKit?
HealthKit AND HomeKit?
HomeKit AND Apple Pay?
Why ask about something as deeply specialized as Metal, a brand new 3D graphics API, when so few projects are likely even to need it—except in game dev shops?
And in what conceivable universe does someone need to know the screen resolutions of any given piece of hardware? I've been building iOS apps for six years now, and I barely remember at any given moment.
Anyone looking for great interview questions for iOS devs should instead consult Black Pixel's excellent post here:
http://blackpixel.com/blog/2013/04/interview-questions-for-ios-and-mac-developers-1.html
It talks through concepts as much as technologies, hitting the most common cases for what a developer will actually use.
Note: I listen to Talk Show only occasionally, I'm more of Hypercritical guy.
So, Dan wanted an iOS app for some time now (year? more?) - and he was working with Black Pixel (http://blackpixel.com) on that.
We don't know exactly why, but that app was never released - Dan stopped talking about it (I'm not actually sure about this, somebody please correct me if I'm wrong.). Recently, he (again, not sure) wrote new app - that's what's on App Store as 5by5 app.
Parts of "old" app were apparently reused by Black Pixel while working on Mule Radio app (also by Black Pixel.).
I don't think they even need a QA department for software, given how many people are donating their free time to file radars.
https://blackpixel.com/writing/2012/02/radar-or-gtfo.html
Considering that some people will continuously adjust their iPad clocks into the future to be able to play Candy Crush without waiting (sic!!!), this bug must have affected people, and was certainly somewhere on Apple's radar.
It's just that management then shrugs and sticks to yearly releases instead of working down this mountain of debt.
Someone posted this to Hacker News a while ago about how submit bugs and interact with Apple. When I compare them to other software providers I have interacted with (development tools/platforms/libraries/etc), the only team looking worse than Apple is google. It's a coping guide for an abusive relationship.
http://blackpixel.com/blog/2012/02/radar-or-gtfo.html
You can also listen to TAL in the TAL app - although it’s not a very good app and pretty buggy at times. Built by Black Pixel (https://blackpixel.com).
http://blackpixel.com/blog/1558/radar-or-gtfo/
seriously... report it.