Design is in the code

Game Dev Tycoon - Best anti Piracy move ever!

In a move that has genious written all over Greenheart Games took some measures to try and reduce piracy of their new game, Game Dev Tycoon.

It’s a shame that most guys that got the “cracked” version don’t get the irony in it.

Unheap - a tidy repository of jQuery plugins

The place to go when you need a jQuery plugin. The beautifull great UI/UX makes it the best of it’s kind.

Sensus - App Enhancing Case

After the Leap Motion ‘s here’s another device that promises a whole other level of possibilities, this time to iOS applications.

Sensus is a smartphone case that introduces touch technology to the back and right side of a protective case.

I’m patiently waiting for the end of May to see if I can get my hands in one of those. Imagine all the things you can do with it…

Introducing A New Article Design - The New York Times

Looking good.

Twine - Listen to Your World. Talk to the Web

Want!

How I ended up with Mac

To me, the fragmentation of Linux as a platform, the multiple incompatible distros, and the incompatibilities across versions of the same distro were my Three Mile Island/Chernobyl.

Without noticing, I stopped turning on the screen for my Linux machine during 2012. By the time I moved to a new apartment in October of 2012, I did not even bother plugging the machine back and to this date, I have yet to turn it on.

I believe this pretty much sums it up.

Web/Mobile agencies done right

Two great examples of Digital Agencies. Both case studies sections are not only a joy to look at but they also convey meaning to otherwise boring information about the UX/UI/Development processes. Be sure to check them out.

Engage

SoftFaçade

Code.org | Anybody can learn

Every student in every school should have the opportunity to learn to code.

I have mixed feelings about the concept. Why not design, art, dance? I’m sure there are more important things that students should have access to before.

Campus Quad iPhone app

We developed a social app for a new startup called Campus Quad that lets students explore what’s happening on campus – in real time.

SoftFaçade managed not only the create a great looking application¹ but also to create the best Case Study I’ve ever put my eyes on. Nice pretty animation that result in a timeline of the entire process.

1 – According to the screenshot on the site. The fact that it’s only for US schools stop you at the first screen.

Apps Are Creating New Jobs

A good read about the services revolving around specific applications in the different mobile stores, markets or whatever it is yours is called.

Google Glasses

If you needed further proof that this is the future, check out Google Glass.

3Doodler

It’s a pen that can draw in the air! 3Doodler is the 3D printing pen you can hold in your hand. Lift your imagination off the page!

We’re definitely living in the future!

CSS PhotoEditor for new features of iOS6

Awesome!

Why You Should Pick Your Own Boss

The simple reasons why your boss matters more than you realize are:
- A good boss in a mediocre company will protect you and support you on a daily basis.
- A bad boss in a good company will frustrate and demoralize you on a daily basis.

Great advice for those looking for a job change.

Technical Debt Will Kill You (If You Let It)

A good piece of opinion about the choices made on early stages of any given project.

NSBackbone

Yet another great small library. Built after Backbone.js it eases the pain of updating the UI each time a model’s data changes.
Have a look and be sure to read the blog post about it.

Underscore.m

A great library to every iOS Developer toolbox.

Underscore.m is a small utility library to facilitate working with common data structures in Objective-C. It tries to encourage chaining by eschewing the square bracket]]]]]].
It is inspired by the awesome underscore.js.
Underscore.m was written by Robert Böhnke, it is MIT licensed.

Why We’ll Never Stop Talking About Steve Jobs

Even when we don’t discuss Jobs directly, he is still in our conversations. If you talk about mobile anything, you’re talking about Steve Jobs. Ditto Chinese manufacturing, digital animation, user interfaces, apps, hardware design — even the stock market itself, which is now firmly dominated by Apple, the metric against which all other companies are measured. There’s not an important mainstream technology product or service out there right now that isn’t a result of or response to Steve Jobs. It’s not so much that we want to keep talking about him; it’s that there’s no avoiding it.

iOS: A visual history

A great timeline of the iOS evolution throughout the years. Beautifully done.

Shell Apps and Silver Bullets

This pretty much sums up my thoughts on the subject. Personally I like to think of it as the Lowest common denominator.

WWDC 2012

Last year it only took 8 hours. How many hours will it be before all the tickets go away this year?

I’m guessing less than 1 hour. Let’s wait and see.

Postgres.app - the easiest way to run PostgreSQL on the Mac

The title says it all. It works nicely and saves the trouble of the “files everywhere” with the normal install method.

PHP - a fractal of bad design

Long but worth the read.

Propellerhead Figure

A really nice app for everyone, a music lover or not. Love the controls.

Get it from the App Store or check out the app’s page

My iPad 3/iPad HD predictions/wishlist

It will be bigger, better, brighter and faster.

And my wishlist:

- User Accounts
- Settings as a Notification Panel entry
- Siri API (pretty please?)

Sphero

Got my attention a long time ago and it’s out. Unfortunately only in the US for the moment, but soon, real soon, all over the world. Rolling!

Little Printer

Little Printer lives in your home, bringing you news, puzzles and gossip from friends. Use your smartphone to set up subscriptions and Little Printer will gather them together to create a timely, beautiful mini-newspaper.

It looks pretty cool and my turn out to be useful lots of times. I’m waiting for the price to know if one of these will be part of the furniture.

Thank You

Here’s to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes.
The ones who see things differently. They’re not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them.
About the only thing you can’t do is ignore them. Because they change things. They invent. They imagine. They heal. They explore. They create. They inspire. They push the human race forward.
Maybe they have to be crazy.
How else can you stare at an empty canvas and see a work of art? Or sit in silence and hear a song that’s never been written? Or gaze at a red planet and see a laboratory on wheels?
We make tools for these kinds of people.
While some see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.

Automatic Reference Counting explained

I’ve vaguelly referenced it before (pun intended) and last week Mike Ash finally talks about it and, as usual, explains it all. If you’re interested in learning all about Automatic Reference Counting and how things work behind the curtains, give it a read.

KIF - Square's iOS Integration Testing

KIF – Square’s iOS Integration Testing

If you have unit tests¹ in your iOS apps, which you should, and want to simulate user interaction you’re surely using Instruments’ UI Automation² which consists of one, or more, Javascript file(s) containing those tests. Yes, it seems odd to use Javascript to perform UI tests inside an iOS application.
So you have to, at least, know two different programming languages and take the time to know how to traverse your UI hierarchy, with Javascript, in order to get the correct element for each of those interactions.

All that testing should now be easier as the guys at Square released KIF, the “Keep It Functional” framework. The short description:

(…) We developed KIF to meet a few goals:
- KIF requires minimal setup to run a test suite
- KIF lets you develop your tests in the same language as the rest of your code to minimize learning and adaptation layers
- KIF can be easily extended to fit your needs
- KIF works in continuous integration (CI) setups

Read the post in their blog and get it at https://github.com/square/KIF.

@joshaber is porting KIF to run with MacOS applications. Check it out.

¹ Unit Testing Applications

² UI Automation

Steve Jobs resigns as Apple's CEO

It’s all over the intertubes: Steve Jobs resigned from being Apple’s CEO. Tim Cook was nominated as the new CEO may mean that things will continue to run smoothly (I hope).
I believe he will keep involved in the decision making at Cupertino, ate least for now. Just until the transition is complete.

Will there be any more surprise announcements soon?

HTML5 & CSS3 - Expressive Web by Adobe

Adobe’s showcase of the possibilities that HTML5 and CSS3 offer us. It provides information on twelve new HTML5 and CSS3 features and makes extensive use of new features such as CSS3 transitions, CSS3 transforms web storage and more to provide a visually compelling resource for learning more about HTML5 and CSS3.

Automatic Reference Counting

One of the many things iOS 5 introduces is Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) that takes away most of the memory management pains and let’s the compiler deal with them.

In Apple’s iOS 5 for Developers it goes like:

Automatic Reference Counting
Automatic Reference Counting (ARC) for Objective-C makes memory management the job of the compiler. By enabling ARC with the new Apple LLVM compiler, you will never need to type retain or release again, dramatically simplifying the development process, while reducing crashes and memory leaks. The compiler has a complete understanding of your objects, and releases each object the instant it is no longer used, so apps run as fast as ever, with predictable, smooth performance.

If you want to get to know this new approach to Objective-C’s memory management one good starting point would be, if you have a Developer account, the Apple Developer docs and the WWDC Session Videos.

You can find a complete technical specification of Automatic Reference Counting in clang llvm’s docs at Automatic Reference Counting. The videos might be more to the point but this stands a must-read in order to underpin this new approach.

Paper.js

Paper.js is an open source vector graphics scripting framework that runs on top of the HTML5 Canvas. It offers a clean Scene Graph / Document Object Model and a lot of powerful functionality to create and work with vector graphics and bezier curves, all neatly wrapped up in a well designed, consistent and clean programming interface.

Google+

Google’s new attempt at social networks.

We’ll have to wait to see if it goes the same path as the previous ones

Polymaps

Polymaps provides speedy display of multi-zoom datasets over maps, and supports a variety of visual presentations for tiled vector data, in addition to the usual cartography from OpenStreetMap, CloudMade, Bing, and other providers of image-based web maps.

Because Polymaps can load data at a full range of scales, it’s ideal for showing information from country level on down to states, cities, neighborhoods, and individual streets. Because Polymaps uses SVG to display information, you can use familiar, comfortable CSS rules to define the design of your data. And because Polymaps uses the well known spherical mercator tile format for its imagery and its data, publishing information is a snap.

jVectorMap

jVectorMap is a jQuery plugin employed to show vector maps and visualize data on HTML pages. It uses SVG in all modern browsers like Firefox 3 or 4, Safari, Chrome, Opera, IE9, while legacy support for older versions of IE from 6 to 8 is provided with VML. Using jVectorMap is pretty simple as for any other jQuery plugin. All you need is to connect JavaScript and CSS files of the plugin

Evernote Peek

Evernote Peek is a free app designed to help you study, learn and strengthen your memory. Interacting with Peek is pretty intuitive. Once you’ve connected Peek to your Evernote account and selected your study materials, you simply close the Smart Cover and peek under it to see a clue. Raise the cover further to reveal the answer. To advance to the next clue, just close the cover and repeat.

It’s totally new, and yet feels as familiar as lifting a page.

WWDC 2011 thoughts

This week starts with a busy day for all geeks as Apple WWDC 2011 and E3 go on at the same time! Due to time constraints I’ve only managed to watch/follow the WWDC keynote.

My list of preferences as a user/developer are described bellow. Further opinion about each of the listed features will be added soon in a separate post.

The 1500+ APIs iOS introduces mean there will be a lot to get up to speed to. From the quick reading through the documentation there are not only good additions but also long waited enhancements to existing APIs.

Lion

Multitouch gestures
Document versioning
AirDrop
Mail – not sure about this one. Will it replace Sparrow as my mail client? Not sure.
Full-Screen Apps

iOS 5

Notification Center – Android anyone?
Mac/PC free activation
Wireless Sync
iMessage
iCloud
Twitter integration

I’m still making my mind about iCloud.

I have yet to test the Xcode Developer Preview but there seems, again, from the documentation, to be considerable changes in the app development process. Most of them meant to facilitate the tasks at hand. I’d be happy of the only improvement was code completion and coloring. But hey, that’s me.

The fact that most of the features are under NDA doesn’t allow for further details on Xcode.

Welcome!

The title says it all! Welcome to this blog. Here you’ll find my thoughts about stuff that matters to me.

Please bear with me as I finish all the site’s remaining sections, there aren’t that many, so it won’t be long now.

Join me for the ride!