Author: Mandar Apte

Choosing your correct online Music distribution and streaming service provider

Mandar Apte Apple, Apple iOS, Apple iPadOS, Apple iTunes, Apple macOS, Apple Music, Apps, Reviews Leave a comment

In the old golden day, music came on cassettes and compact disks (CDs).

With the evolution of better, faster, stable internet with Gigahertz processing power for computers, better/stable computer applications came along. With the invention of gesture-based high-tech mobile devices like the iPhone, modern, always accessible pocket-friendly apps emerged.

With faster 4G and 5G internet mobile data, internet-ready cloud-enabled apps came with better interactions. Moreover, even if mobile devices got more than 64/128/256/500 GB and 1 TB of internal storage, people will never have to come to desktop/laptop computers to back up and free up storage.

Apple first introduced Apple iTunes with a CD Ripping facility to convert already bought music cd collections to mp3 for easy listening on Mac computers and then a range of iPods. iPods didn’t have to have internet in the early days then. They were internet ready after a few years, the video on iPods and then an iPhone introduction.

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Males and Females in Human Resource (HR) Recruitment in the Era of Feminism / Illusion of Patriarchy or Illusion of Brahmanical Patriarchy in Brahman Hatread Society

Mandar Apte Company, India / Bharat / Hindusthan, Maharashtra, Mumbai, Personal Experience, Reviews Leave a comment

With the invention of Feminism. The female audience was introduced to the term called Patriarchy and, for Hindu haters Brahmanical Patriarchy. Feminism tells young female audiences to blame Male dominant society for their natural human body periods of pain. They somehow ask why boys should not suffer the same and why just girls or women.

Even with the disclosure of Twitter Files by Elon Musk. Vijaya Gadde from Twitter also got sued in court for her bias Twitter’s social media administration or moderation. (Vijaya Gadde is an American attorney who served as general counsel and the head of legal, policy, and trust at Twitter. – Wikipedia) I remember her saying, “Smash Brahmanical Patriarchy”, out of nowhere. Why are American companies’ social media heads blaming or shaming Brahmins from India / Bharat / Hindusthan for no harm they did?

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My side of the story of selling Apple iPhone apps on the Apple App Store while doing a day job…!!!

Mandar Apte Apple, Apple iOS, Apple iPadOS, Apple macOS, Apple Xcode, Personal Experience Leave a comment

I am selling apps on Apple App Store since 2012, Tried free apps with excellent sales but no revenue or no Apple iAd revenue or very little. I kept doing that for two to four years. Then I removed all of my apps from the sale and kept my account inactive with no apps on ready for sale for almost one or two years.

Then Swift language was introduced with support for Unicode while watching Apple’s Keynote presentation, I got the idea of Learning Devanagari Script apps with support for Marathi, Sanskrit and Hindi Languages.

It got almost 3 months of the year 2016 for me to record 500 audio samples and videos with proper code to get to the level of MVP i.e. Minimum Viable Product.

Next three years I finished recording audio and designing videos and vector illustrations. So it was a total of 700 Audio Recordings with statements and alphabets (Vowels, Consonants and Barakhadi), and 422 animated videos for stroke by stroke guide. Then almost 500 vector and raster illustrations.

With Covid and Corona Epidemic and forced leave from March to November I finished and upscaled all of my apps with visual and performance quality for my Mudrakshar, Swarakshar and Chitrakshar apps.

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Accion Labs Employee Churn, Their Hiring Process & Corporate Culture. My Professional Experience with Accion Labs.

Mandar Apte Company, Personal Experience, Reviews Leave a comment

I worked in AccionLabs for a year. I worked on a single long project for my whole tenure.

At that time, they used to have offices in Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Bengaluru. And they were supposed to open an office in Pune when I left the company.

I joined AccionLabs as a Senior User Experience Designer. When I started interacting with my senior staff, who were UX Architects or Project Managers, all were over-stuffed with projects out of their capacity. I was working in the Mumbai office, so I don’t know about office culture in other offices. There was a sense of uneasiness everywhere. Employees were allowed to play cricket outside during office hours. One employee never showed up to work but received a salary for the last four months. My project manager and CTO were rude in every meeting. They will discuss some random employees’ performance and why they should warn them to install PIP (Performance Improvement Program) or why they should have been fired. They were a few billable employees who sat ideal doing nothing.

It was such a situation that three or four employees resigned and left the company every two or three days. The company ask them to resign but hosts a send-off party somehow out of no shame. Even two colleagues told in the send-off party’s last speech that they had no work since joining or for the previous four months, and the company asked them to resign, so they did. The churn rate was high.

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My experience in converting my paid educational apps to a subscription business revenue model.

Mandar Apte Apple, Apple iOS, Apple iPadOS, Apple macOS, Apple Xcode, Apps, Reviews Leave a comment

After experimenting with various apps, I ventured into an educational language-earning app in 2013/14. I developed three apps Mudrakshar for tracing Alphabets, Swarakshar for Pronouncing Alphabets and Chitrakshar for Alphabet Charts with Illustrations and audio pronunciation. All three apps were dedicated to Devanagari Script—mainly Marathi, Sanskrit and Hindi Language. For Chitrakshar, I added the English Language with Latin script.

I am developing my apps for Apple iOS, iPadOS and macOS platforms. Here is my Apple Developer Profile if you want to check it out.

I think the In-App purchase / StoreKit framework was not introduced back then. That’s what I remember. So I used paid app business model to support my app development and time invested.

Maybe because I started sailing my apps with an upfront paid pricing model, I was forcing my users to purchase them without allowing them to try them before they bought. As a result, I had significantly fewer downloads or sales. But over the years, I sold almost 1,000 units of apps or more. I also utilised App Store Connects’s App Bundles feature at that time. App Bundles undoubtedly helped me to sell more apps with discounts.

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My Solution to my year-long back pain and health issues

Mandar Apte Inspiration Leave a comment

Since I started my health and fitness journey, I have been facing issues with tremendous back pain and mobility.

As you may have guessed already, I started walking, but the pain was not going anywhere whatever I did.

I took physiotherapist assistance, machine exercises, long distance and long time walking but with no relief.

But one day, I just turned off the air conditioner for the whole night in my room for one or two weeks, and somehow, my back muscle was relieved, and I had no pain or muscle stiffness issues. But after that week, I turned on the air conditioner for the next three-four days, and the back pain was back again.

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With the release of macOS Big Sur & macOS Monterey, the user cannot format External Hard Disk to ‘Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted)’ format as there is no option to do the same.

Mandar Apte Apple, Apple macOS, Apps, Company, Hardware, Reviews, Tutorials 1 Comment

With the release of the macOS Big Sur Mac Operating System, Apple has removed the option under Disk Utility to allow users to format External Hard Drive to Mac OS Extended (Journaled, Encrypted) format.

There is only one option for Mac OS Extended (Journaled) but no choice with encryption. It only allows users to format Hard Disk with Apple File System APFS without encryption, with encryption & with case sensitivity.

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In-depth Review of Matrimony Website by Anuroop Wiwaha (anuroopwiwaha.com)

Mandar Apte Apps, Art & Design, Company, India / Bharat / Hindusthan, Maharashtra, Mumbai, Personal Experience, Reviews, User Experience Design, Web Design 1 Comment

I have used the Anuroop Wiwaha Matrimony Website for the last four to five years. In addition, I have extensively used their mobile Apple iPhone app and website for my bride search. As a result, I discovered a few points that Anuroop Wiwaha Portal / Company improved upon to help the community get the right matrimony match for their search.

Observations:

Few Points that they can improve on.

Mobile App & Website Portal:

  1. At every event, they talk about having 20,000 Profiles / Accounts of the bride and groom registered on their portal. An average Anuroop Wiwaha account cost is INR 5,000/-.
  2. The user (Bride or Groom) can’t register with a free account as they don’t support free accounts. The user must pay an account fee upfront before registering to the portal. So it gives assurance that the user is at least serious about their search, and even the user has to submit identity proof within seven days of registration. So in a way, it eliminates the possibility of fake accounts or fraud.
  3. Even with this money of 20,000 Accounts * 5,000 Fee, the Bride or Groom Search is cumbersome and hectic. The mobile app is not full fledge as compared to a web portal. They use non-native software technologies for the Apple iPhone app, which takes minutes or sometimes fails to load content and data.
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Here is how to apply UIVisualEffectView & UIBlurEffect to UITableView, UITableViewCell, UICollectionView, UICollectionViewCell, UIView / View in your Apple iOS / iPadOS or macOS Catalyst App.

Mandar Apte Apple, Apple iOS, Apple iPadOS, Apple macOS, Tutorials Leave a comment

As Apple describes UIVisualEffectView & UIBlurView in its support document as follows:

Depending on the desired effect, the effect may affect content layered behind the view or content added to the visual effect view’s contentView. Apply a visual effect view to an existing view and then apply a UIBlurEffect or UIVibrancyEffect object to apply a blur or vibrancy effect to the existing view. After you add the visual effect view to the view hierarchy, add any subviews to the contentView property of the visual effect view. Do not add subviews directly to the visual effect view itself.

So in simple words, you don’t have to use Adobe Photoshop to get a blur effect and fake superimpose on your UIView instead, you can get the same effect programmatically for every situation without any hassle.

Note: If you are using UIVisualEffectsView in your app I would strongly suggest you use a system setting called ‘Reduced Transparency’ to condition code it. If the user doesn’t want transparency or Blur or Vibrancy effect for all of the apps in his iPhone or iPad or Mac he can just do it with a single switch in the settings app. Another note view that you are applying effect should preferably be the Popover View Controller. Another thing is to remember to replace the below blue color with the UIColor of your choice with alpha channel transparency.

For UITableView and UITableViewCell, use the following code in your UITableViewController’s viewWillAppear function:

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