Alexander Blach Developer of Textastic

Who are you and what do you do?

My name is Alexander Blach. I’m an indie iOS developer living in Germany. I’ve created Textastic, a code and markup editor for iPad. I’m also the developer of apps like The Photo Cookbook and History of Rock.

You can find me on Twitter as @Lextar and @Textastic.

How did you get started in iOS development?

I started playing around with the iPhone SDK on an iPod touch in my spare time as soon as Apple released it in 2008. I loved the beautiful and consistent user interface. At the time, I was still working for a company that created business software for Windows.

Things started to get serious when I quit my day job and started my own business in February 2009. My first app was Rezepte - a German recipes app. To this day, it’s a huge hit in Germany, Switzerland and Austria with over 230.000 downloads.

While developing the Food Guide app as contract work for Cologne-based ditter.projektagentur GmbH, I got to know Michael Ditter. Together we created The Photo Cookbook, which was featured in several of Apple’s TV ads (notably iPad is delicious) and is installed on demo iPads in Apple Stores around the world. Last December we released History of Rock. It was iPad App of the Week at the day of its release. Just two weeks ago, our new app The Photo Cookbook – Cocktails was published. It's filled with stunning photos that make full use of the new iPad’s Retina display.

My own international app success came with Textastic. It’s a code editor for iPad with features like TextMate-compatible syntax highlighting, (S)FTP and Dropbox support, code completion for HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP, a built-in WebDAV server, interactive regex find and replace and much more. Who said the iPad was only for consumption?

What does your computer and workspace setup look like while developing?

For five months now, I’m one of those standing-desk-with-a-treadmill guys. I try to walk as much as possible while coding. It’s kinda hard to do so when you try to draw a straight line in Photoshop, but it works rather well when you’re typing in Xcode.

On top of the desk, there’s a 27" iMac that I upgraded with an SSD. I use the standard wireless keyboard and a Magic Trackpad. There’s also a Wacom Intuos 3 that I’d like to use more often than I actually do. I’m listening to some music through Harman/Kardon SoundSticks III.

Most of the time, there’s an iPad or two on the desk so I can test my apps.

What are your favourite Apple iOS API's to use within apps you develop?

I love to use Core Animation as long as it does what I want it to. I also have a love/hate relationship with Core Text.

What is some software that you use outside of Xcode for development?

I used to use TextMate, but I started to switch to Sublime Text 2 for everything related to text that’s not Objective-C. For version control, I recently switched from Versions/Subversion to SourceTree/Git. I like to use shell scripts and the Terminal to automate tasks.

On the iPad, I use Textastic with a bluetooth keyboard - I’m writing these words on it right now.

The other tools I use most often are Photoshop and other apps from Adobe’s Creative Suite. I use it for everything graphic-related.

I also use AppViz to check App Store sales every day.

If you had two minutes to tell another developer your favourite iOS development tip, what would it be?

Require iOS 5 in your apps and use new features of the Objective-C runtime and compiler like automatic instance variable synthesis and ARC.

From a developers perspective, what are your hopes for the next major iOS update?

I’m actually quite happy with iOS itself. The ability to create shortcuts for external keyboards would be nice, though. I would also welcome a system that would allow several apps to work on the same set of files. The current “Open In…” mechanism is not good enough and iCloud doesn’t solve this problem at all.

The App Store badly needs a way for developers to comment on or respond to user reviews.

Oh, and Apple needs to announce the WWDC date many months earlier than they do now, so international developers can book their flights for reasonable prices.

Finally, what is your favourite app?

That’s a tough one. On iOS, the apps that I use most often are Tweetbot and Reeder. On the Mac, ForkLift is great for file management, and I also use Twitter and Reeder.