December 2011
2 posts
“Newsy is like the best informational app for news and stuff or whatever the...”
– James Mills, App Store reviewer
Why programmers work at night →
September 2011
1 post
SecondConf Slides
I’m throwing this up, mainly for my own future reference: a list of speakers at SecondConf, and their related slides/links:
Speakers
Andy Ihnatko
Rob Rhyne
Chris Clark
Audrey Eschright Slides, Blog Post
Bob Kressin
Justin Miller
Eloy Durán
Brad Larson Blog Post
Guy English
Steve Glinberg Rate
Jens Alfke
Mike Rohde Slides
Mark Gunderson
Blitz Talks
Anne Halsall Slides
Ray...
April 2011
1 post
The Portal 2 Flu
Holy shit, the Internet is terrifying. Late Monday night/Tuesday morning, sleep-deprived me decided to post a joke intended only to tick off a close friend of mine. When I woke up, my story was the #1 story on Reddit. As of today, it’s been seen by probably tens of thousands of people.
Some backstory:
Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that on Monday, Valve...
February 2011
1 post
"Minimize All" with NSBorderlessWindowMask
First, a rather long backstory: I’m working on creating a custom window design based on an NSBorderlessWindowMask-style NSWindow subclass, but I’m running into trouble recreating some of the basic window commands. I mainly followed this post on creating custom window shapes, and used the advice from Craig Hockenberry in the comments in order to get the “Close” and...
January 2011
12 posts
App Store Receipt Validation Oddness
I’m trying to fill Google with some helpful tips, since I took forever trying to figure this out.
If you’re trying to validate receipts with a test account for the Mac App Store, and it’s silently failing without installing the receipt, check Console.app. If you see something like this:
1/30/11 1:16:07 AM storeagent[62006] promptResponse: <CKSignInPromptResponse:0x103c88c60...
Todolicious →
Ever since I found the “Minimally Awesome Todos” I linked to back in December, I’ve been wanting a more Mac-like version of the same idea: a quick-entry, hyper-simple to do list. Todolicious answers that call.
I’d seen Todolicious when it first came out, but I wasn’t exactly sold on it at first (not so much on the price as the commitment to a new system). But today,...
Mac App Store →
Like you haven’t heard about this yet.
Apps I Haven't Been Able to Live Without
I had a dead hard drive in my MacBook Pro, and it’s being replaced by the manufacturer (Samsung), but until I get my replacement, I’m having to use my parents’ iMac. These are the non-system apps I’ve been compelled to install thus far just to maintain my sanity.
Xcode Tools
TextWrangler
Coda
Quicksilver
Acorn
CloudApp
Hibari
I’ll update this list if any more...
Neven Mrgan's tumbl: Redundant data in the Weather... →
mrgan:
If you’re a serious weather junkie, you might use a special weather app to get your daily klimate kick. And if you’re Edward Tufte, you might think the iPhone weather app is “a bit thin”. Me, I don’t mind it - it’s a nice, big dashboard view of the weather features I care most about.
But here’s…
New Personal Page →
If you’re following this blog, you probably already saw this one way or another (after all, the URL is now http://blog.pado.name, but I launched a personal site to help centralize everything about me onto one page with way too many words on it.
960 Grid System →
I’d seen the 960 Grid System before (originally in Aaron Vegh’s book), but until today had never actually used it.
Wow.
If you suck at web design, like I do, you owe it to yourself to check it out. It lets you create neat column-based websites really fast.
Command-Line Project Management →
Proper Ordering of Obj-C #import Statements →
EDIT: Later discussion decided that the class header file should actually go last, after “other classes”.
New Years Resolutions
Save money.
Make Cocoatype a sustainable business.
Move out of my parents’ house.
Just saving this for later.
December 2010
4 posts
If anything worth doing is worth doing well, isn’t it also true that anything not worth doing well, is just not worth doing?
@zadr: SQL is a language?
Me: What do you think the L stands for?
Me: I didn't say three *programming* languages. :P
@zadr: then four, english :P
Me: No, I don't work in English.
@zadr: do you just grunt?
Me: While coding?
Me: Yes.
@zadr: hah
Keynote Wireframe Toolkit →
This looks like a neat set of interface pieces to use in Keynote for quick prototyping. I can’t overstate how great Keynote is for that kind of thing; it’s possible to do an extremely full-featured storyboard of an iPhone app completely in Keynote.
Minimally Awesome Todos →
Now that Tumblr’s back up, I can (more permanently) share this link that people have been asking me about.
November 2010
1 post
Sometimes I find important documents like IRS forms lying around my room, and am briefly stunned when I remember that I’m running a real business. Who decided this was a good idea?
June 2010
1 post
“New friends, old friends, and totally inspired to do awesome things. Yup, it’s...”
– Me, dismissing the idea that WWDC would be forever changed by the lack of Mac focus.
May 2010
1 post
Announcing WWDCParties.com
I’m pleased to announce WWDCParties.com, the “parties list”, Web-2.0 style. It’s a bit barebones right now, but I’ll be trying to fill it up. Let me answer a few questions about it:
Why’d you do this?
Because @Quazie couldn’t. He did a great job with his list last year, but wasn’t able to get a ticket to WWDC this year, and didn’t feel like...
April 2010
1 post
March 2010
1 post
@Arclite: You only have 25 followers? Wow.
@MikeRoof: don't rub it in
@MikeRoof: i only follow 63
@Arclite: I remember when I had 25 followers.
@Arclite: Bush was still President.
@Arclite: I was still in high school.
@MikeRoof: hey
*beat*
@MikeRoof: i dont have a comeback
February 2010
1 post
Faster release times, and please — this wasn’t brought up anywhere else in the survey — *PLEASE* allow developers closer contact with their customers. We have no way of talking to people that comment on our apps. I’d like to be able to talk with my customers, but I don’t have access to contact them, and I can’t post my own comments.
At the very least, let us post...
January 2010
2 posts
Also, I released Blitz 1.1.1. It’s the first Blitz release in 14 months. Sorry about that.
iPad Reactions
So, Apple released a shiny new toy today: The iPad SDK. Oh, and they announced the hardware. But it doesn’t come out for 60 days. Yawn.
But in all seriousness, Apple’s new tablet is pretty neat. Is it cool enough to justify the sheer amounts of hype that it garnered before being announced? No. But I’m pretty sure Steve would have had to invite Jesus Christ himself on stage to...
November 2009
4 posts
I Suck at Email
No really, I’m terrible at responding to email. I blame my iPhone. I was bad at email before the iPhone, but now I’m absolutely horrible at it. Here’s the issue:
I get an email on my iPhone. iPhone pings to let me know.
I read the email. Email is now marked as read.
If I need to respond to the email, I don’t, because I’m on my iPhone and thus am probably too busy...
Invisible Localization
Or, How to Make Your App Friendly to Kids and Foreigners.
I’ve begun to notice a surprising trend among sales of my most popular iPhone app, Kineo: A large portion of the people buying it don’t live in the U.S. In my previous life as a Mac developer, barely 10% of the sales I made were outside the U.S, even on apps that were translated into other languages (Blitz, for example, is...
I changed the theme here because I got sick of the light-on-dark look of the last one. If images on posts before my “Smoking Bans” article are misaligned, that’s why.
Smoking Bans
I think I made some people hate me today with my disdain for the passage of a public smoking ban in St. Louis Country, MO. I didn’t feel like Twitter was an appropriate place to discuss why I opposed the ban, so I’m going to dump a lot of my thoughts on the matter here.
I don’t disagree that smoking is harmful to your health. I don’t disagree that secondhand smoke is...
October 2009
1 post
Proximity Release Announcement
So, nearly five months to the day after my development postmortem on Proximity, it’s finally been submitted to the App Store for Apple’s approval. If you haven’t already read that postmortem, do so now — much of what I’m going to say in this post is going to be comments on what I’ve said there.
First off, I’d like to apologize for the much-longer-than-expected...
September 2009
1 post
Let me preface this by saying that I’m usually one of the first rushing to defend Barack Obama, and one of the last to defend celebrities like Kanye West. However, if this story about Obama calling Kanye a “jackass” is true, there need to be some apologies all around.
1) The obvious one: Obama apologizing to Kanye for his remarks. This is just the human thing to do.
2) Obama apologizing to the...
August 2009
1 post
District 9 Spoiler-Free Mini Review!
The first half of District 9 is pretty good — a sci-fi mockumentary about aliens living in South African slums, and what happens to one person who gets a little too involved. Exactly what I expected.
The second half of District 9 sucks. It becomes an action movie — one man vs. a multinational military to save a random alien and his young offspring. Seriously.
These two halves combine to equal a...
July 2009
7 posts
Making a Prettier Adhoc Bundle
Creating an .ipa file is a quick way to make your Adhoc releases easier to install and nicer to look at, but how to make them (or even that it’s possible) isn’t common knowledge. Here’s a quick tutorial:
The underlying problem that is solved by creating an .ipa file to distribute Adhoc iPhone applications is the “generic application” icon left in iTunes.
While...
Why 8lbs Could Sink the App Store
It’s no secret that the App Store pricing is a mess for independent developers. Take a look at the top 100 paid apps — the only apps with prices over $2.99 are by large studios: Gameloft, Major League Baseball, PopCap, Dataviz, and the biggest contributor: Electronic Arts, with a whopping 6 apps above $2.99 in the top 100 apps. That Electronic Arts is one of the few companies able to...
New Proximity Icon
Just a small update — revealing the new Proximity icon by designer Jeff Smykil:
Developer Friendliness
This post is mainly in response to this tweet by PC-happy blogger Jeff Atwood, who recently bought his first iPhone:
“It was a giant middle finger to iPhone developers.” because Apple is just not a developer-friendly company. http://www.marco.org/122990476 — @codinghorror
Jeff, it seems, has never written any Mac or iPhone software. Apple is a very developer-friendly software...
June 2009
1 post
The Road Goes On...
Engineer-designed.
Designer-designed.
It makes a difference.
May 2009
2 posts
The Road to Proximity
It’s finally over. The stealth program I’ve been killing myself over was finally finished and submitted to the Apple Design Awards early last night. Unfortunately for all of you, it’s an iPhone OS 3.0 application, and it won’t be available until it’s 3.0 is officially released by Apple. This could be next week, it could be months. I really don’t know. But I...
March 2009
5 posts
ClickToFlash
Just wanted to give a heads-up on this awesome Flash-blocker plugin for WebKit-based browsers (for most people, this means Apple’s Safari browser). Thanks to the work of Jonathan del Strother, who apparently is also the person behind CoverFlow, ClickToFlash is now usable enough to put in permanently.
Basically, this plugin puts a big square wherever Flash content would be, blocking it...
WatchIntroducing the Adverse Network, with iCoMo News and VOX Magazine as launch apps.
“I’d love to start a company / become a great programmer / write an awesome blog,...”
– There’s always time to launch your dream - (37signals) (via ctshryock)
I actually printed this out and put it on a bulletin board behind my desk. I would also pay good money to get this article as a well-done poster.