Horace Dediu of Asymco has been publishing some fantastic insights and analysis of the mobile market in the past few weeks. I linked to some of Dediu's analysis of the Economics of Android in an earlier post, and since then he's updated his work with the latest data and is studying RIM and Microsoft's efforts in the space as well.

In iOS 4.0 Apple introduced the AV Foundation APIs that made working with audio and video media much easier than it had been in previous versions of iOS. Apple then brought these APIs to Mac OS X in OS X 10.7 "Lion". In this post I'll show how to use some of the APIs to create a simple four track mixer.

Apple made their session videos from WWDC 2012 available earlier this week in record time. It's nice to see since tickets for this years event sold out in under two hours. Apple has an iOS 6 Preview page touting some of the new features such as Siri's new abilities, tighter integration with Facebook, Photo Stream sharing, and things like iCloud tabs for Safari all of which look great.

Drew McCormack is writing a great series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) of posts about using iCloud for syncing Core Data managed data. It's harder than Apple lets on and Drew has done a great job of uncovering how this actually works.

If you haven't already do yourself a favor and head over to asymco.com to catch Horace Deidu's multi-post series on "The Economics of Android". Horace and Dan Benjamin discuss the series during this week's Critical Path podcast as well. Horace is a former analyst for Nokia and has been writing Asymco for a few years now. His analysis of the mobile industry and Apple's place within it in particular has been featured in publications such as Bloomberg and Forbes.

RubyMotion is a new development toolchain that allows you to build iOS apps using Ruby created by Laurent Sansonetti, a former Apple engineer and contributor to the MacRuby project. It has garnered a lot of attention the past few weeks and some detailed reviews have already been written:

The makers of Simplenote recently introduced their Backend as a Service (BaaS) offering called Simperium that looks to compete in an increasingly crowded space with services like CloudMine, Kinvey, and Parse and to some extent with iCloud for iOS and OS X only apps. So just how crowded is this space? Back in February, Kinvey published their own map of the BaaS ecosystem that highlights different tiers of the ecosystem and various relationships between them.

I've been following the developments in the "Internet of Things" and Big Data / Open Data markets as new apps and tools are released and they look to be two exciting technologies on a collision course. With the advent of internet connected home appliances like Wattvision and Nest that provide real utility to the average home owner at reasonable prices along with crowd funded projects like Air Quality Egg or Twine we should see an explosion in the kinds and amount of useful and real-time or near real-time data that is available to anyone with a smartphone. Health metric or "quantitative self" tracking devices such as Fitbit, Jawbone Up, and the Pebble watch will fuel this data explosion as well.