June 2011
1 post
3 tags
on Windows 8 and the Ghetto
Yesterday Microsoft released a video showing off the new interface for Windows 8. My first impression was that Microsoft was making a bold move and hoping they could pull it off. But the brief demo of Excel gave me fear that underneath all of the nice UI nothing had changed. Would Windows have a split personality? Old style apps seem to relegated to a ghetto.
Today, that fear grows. Ars...
August 2010
1 post
2 tags
Game Dev →
Game Dev is a newish question and answer site about game creation and development. It was launched just over a month ago and is a public beta. It is likely to launch in a couple of months with a new name and design. If you have any interest in game design and development, it is a great resource.
The site is powered by Stack Exchange, the engine behind Stack Overflow.
March 2010
2 posts
3 tags
iPad Application Design →
Matt Gemmell gives a very good overview of design ideas that should be used for iPad applications. I love how these come together to create interfaces that seem natural to use and not overwhelming. These to me are what makes the iPad itself compelling. When it is released, I hope it will live up to my expectations in this area.
2 tags
The Dev Show →
I have started listening to a new podcast called ‘The Dev Show’. So far it seems promising, though I am a sucker for programming podcasts of any decent quality.
November 2009
1 post
The Meaning of Information Technology →
October 2009
3 posts
3 tags
Introducing Google Building Maker →
I have always loved the idea of modelling real buildings, but this is really exciting. The easier it is to model individual buildings, the more scalable it is to model all of the more populated areas in the world.
The two App Stores →
Marco hits on one thing that I’ve noticed by looking at many apps: the primary screenshot can easily sway an impulse purchase.
2 tags
September 2009
8 posts
Turning the tide: a hands-on look at Google's Wave →
Whenever my knowledge of a topic or technology is incomplete, an Ars Technica goes a long way toward understanding it. This article on Google Wave is no different.
Post-Medium Publishing →
Paul Graham with another insightful article. His insight that most publishers are selling the medium not the content is well presented. It is not a new thought, but presented in such a clear way it feels like one.
NetNewsWire 2.0 for iPhone now on App Store →
2 tags
The Failure of the GPL →
I find discussion on the pros and cons of different open source licenses fascinating. I tend to think of BSD licenses more favourably than the GPL, and increased cooperation is one of those reasons.
2 tags
Do you need an umbrella today? →
Clever little website. Does one thing simple and well.
4 tags
Mantia - App Store Ratings and Reviews →
Mantia’s comparison of the App Store to MacBooks highlights how people’s perception can flavor their attitude.
4 tags
Cocoia - Snow Leopard UI roundup →
Sebastiaan has summarized a bunch of the UI changes in Snow Leopard. The roundup has some nice observations of little things I had not noticed yet.
1 tag
Tumblr, it is Your Turn
I do not like Wordpress. After months of using it half-heartedly, I have decided that it is not right for me. Instead, I am going to try out Tumblr for a while. So far it seems to be a big improvement. Wordpress was just too ‘heavy’ for my needs.
June 2009
1 post
4 tags
Update on App Store Rankings
Every few days someone finds my site by searching for how to scrape app store rankings. I no longer use that script, since I found it awkward to use. I’ve switched over to using MajicRank by Majic Jungle software.
MajicRank is a Mac application that polls the top 100 lists in iTunes to find your apps. It keeps a history so you can graph and also see the change in rank since the last run. I...
March 2009
3 posts
3 tags
Egg Painter
Yesterday, we submitted another iPhone application to Apple. This one is called Egg Painter. As you may guess, it’s an Easter Egg painting app aimed at kids. You can check out the website for it at http://www.fanfoot.ca/eggpainter.
4 tags
Scraping App Store Rankings Around the World
Having become frustrated trying to check iTunes for app rankings, I decided to look for a better way to do it. That search led me to a post on Ben’s Dev Blog. The perl script given is priceless and saved me from having to write something up myself. It would be preferable to have a Mac app that does it, but this works for now.
Edit: I have switched to using a Mac app called MajicRank. See...
2 tags
Ars on UISwitch labels
Ars Technica has an article about changing text in a UISwitch robustly. It looks like a fairly interesting approach, but the issue with localization is probably a deal-breaker for me.
February 2009
6 posts
2 tags
Spatial Thinking
Here’s a great article on spatial thinking as it applies to software usability. Now I wonder about where I can use this to improve things in my own software, which is a sign of a good article.
3 tags
WordMind Lite now available
Yesterday, Apple approved the lite version of WordMind. You can check it out on the App Store. There is only one available mode and the potential number of words to guess has been reduced to about 100.
3 tags
WordMind Released!
I’m happy to announce that WordMind appeared on the App Store some time last night. You can check out the website or check it out in iTunes.
2 tags
iPhone Dev - Bootstrap
Craig Hockenberry has written a great article about how to get started developing for the iPhone. He mentions some very helpful links and resources.
3 tags
My iPhone App has been Submitted
As of yesterday, my first iPhone game has been submitted to Apple. The game is called WordMind and is a word guessing game. The process has been fun, though making the self imposed deadline made things a bit tougher. I learned from experience some of the things I had read about releasing software. e.g. You can’t put everything into your first release. There are so many more features I could...
2 tags
Stupid iPhone Dev Mistakes #1
When doing an Ad Hoc build, do NOT release a build created with the device set to the simulator. It will not work. The resulting app will be empty for all intents and purposes because the simulator does not use normal builds.
Lesson learned: Try every build before releasing it, even if you think nothing has changed.
January 2009
1 post
2 tags
iPhone Development
Over the last few months I’ve been digging into devloping an iPhone/iPod Touch game. While I am not ready to announce it, I thought I’d give a few thoughts.
First, I love Objective-C and Cocoa. Right now these are my preferred tools for development. I’ve been toying with Mac development for a couple years, but diving into it for the iPhone has been fun. I am of the opinion that...
June 2008
2 posts
3 tags
on Games With Bundled Hardware
Looking through console sales figures for May I was struck by the fact that 4 of 5 Wii games listed for top sales were bundled with hardware. Mario Kart Wii, Wii Fit, Wii Play and Guitar Hero III all come bundled with various pieces of hardware. Three of those are hardware specific to that game or a subset of games.
This is a departure from previous systems, where games requiring non-standard...
3 tags
SWT in Cocoa
SWT is the best widget toolkit for Java development. It uses native widgets for each platform in an attempt to match the platform aesthetically. Ars Techinca has news that Adobe is leading a project to port the SWT from carbon to cocoa on the Mac platform.
I find this interesting mostly because I wonder how this will improve Java’s abilities to blend in with other Mac apps.
May 2008
1 post
1 tag
New Comments System
After disabling all comments because of spam, I was a little frustrated. I wanted commenting enabled, but didn’t want to fight spam and didn’t have time to research anti-spam measures. So I’ve decided to use a commenting service called Disqus. At very least it’s a smaller target than Wordpress, but it also has lots of cool features.
[EDIT: I have since moved the blog to...
April 2008
1 post
2 tags
Apple Listens Again
Apple has improved their Software Update dialog on Windows. This addresses people’s issues with ‘forcing’ Safari on people who didn’t want it.
March 2008
6 posts
3 tags
Apple's Windows Behaviour
Jesper at Waffle posted about Apple and their Windows apps. I’d been meaning to give this some thought and list my annoyances with how Apple software behaves differently on Windows. I think this sums it up:
Apple knows how to behave on their own platform. When I talk to Windows-using friends, Apple is legendary for being bad Windows citizens. I do not think that’s the case myself....
3 tags
Martian Headsets
Joel on Software posted an insightful article about web standards. The article makes clear the issues surrounding web standards, or any standards.
I’ve backed the idealist decision by Microsoft to default to IE8’s standards mode . The reason is that it discourages web developers from moving forward. But I don’t have a solution any more than Joel does.
3 tags
App Store Questions
Craig Hockenberry has a nice write up of what have been some of my biggest questions regarding the iPhone App Store.
The one question that I’d add is concerning the differences between the iPod Touch and iPhone. There are capability differences in the hardware. I assume that part of the review process is to determine compatibility, and that iPod Touch users will have fewer apps available...
2 tags
Wii Control Video
Here’s a video demoing exactly what I was hoping for in the Wii TV Guide channel:
2 tags
One Small Step for IE
So it turns out that IE8 will be IE8. This is a clever trick for Microsoft. First tell everybody you are doing something bad, then everyone will celebrate when you do exactly what you should be doing.
Opt-in standards are not the way of the future. Microsoft gets a gold star for listening skills today.
Via Ars Technica
2 tags
Wii Control
The Wii TV Guide channel has debuted in Japan. It’s an interesting addition to the Wii, though my personal interest has been minimal because it is Japan only and I don’t watch TV. However, one feature caught my attention.
There is apparently an experimental option to use the Wiimote as a universal TV control. The [Google...
February 2008
5 posts
2 tags
Browser History Sniffing
Browser history sniffing is such a neat idea. I have to admit, at first I didn’t catch on to this idea. But when I did understand, the practical situations outlined in that blog post were very eye opening. I especially liked the OpenID example. And immediately, the Prototype way of getting all the links and processing them seemed simple to me.
HTML
<div id="testLinks" style="display:...
2 tags
Spore Interviews
Newsweek’s Level Up blog has a couple of interviews about Spore. Both interviews are informative, and give me hope for the game.
Will Wright is interviewed in two parts: Part 1
and Part 2
Lucy Bradshaw is interviewed specifically about the Mac, Nintendo DS and mobile phone versions of the game.
3 tags
Apple Responds
As noted by Macworld, the 10.5.2 update to Leopard is an amazing response to customers. It addresses most of the issues people had with the UI of Leopard. The most visible being Stacks and the Translucent menu bar. The one remaining UI gripe was the 3D dock appearance, which is not a usability issue.
I’ve been expecting this update since before Leopard was released. Small changes made...
3 tags
Planet Cocoa
Planet Cocoa is a great resource for following blogs about Cocoa and Mac development.
2 tags
Headline of the Day
Ars Technica gets a gold star for this headline: Microsoft adds Yahoo! to shopping cart
As for the bidding news, I’m on the fence. Folding Yahoo! into Microsoft will most likely end in tears. In the odd chance that Microsoft manages it properly it could turn out favorably. I’d like to see Microsoft take this chance to look at their web offerings with an objective eye. Since Microsoft...
January 2008
10 posts
3 tags
Physics Unleashed
Joystiq (among others) reported on a video of the physics of Star Wars: Force Unleashed. Here’s a video demonstrating the three physics engines:
My first thoughts were of the ‘Wow’ variety. On a technical level, this is simply amazing. Especially the way objects are deformed appropriately. As the comments on the Joystiq article state, some of the effects are just not...
2 tags
Co-Optimus
Of all the games I have enjoyed playing over the years, games with a co-operative mode have been the most memorable. Even when the co-op mode was buggy, or limited, I still milked them for all they were worth. A good example of this is the Delta Force series of games. In one of the versions, the scripted events could only be triggered by the first player. While it didn’t prevent you from...
2 tags
Layer Tennis: Season Finale
So yesterday afternoon was the season finale of Layer Tennis which is a design contest put on by Coudal Partners. The concept is that two artists take turns editing an image, volleying it back and forth. Meanwhile, a commentator writes some thoughts about each volley. The results are usually interesting.
Yesterday was no exception, in part because there were two matches happening simultaneously....
3 tags
MacHeist Bundle
Among my favorite podcasts in MacBreak Weekly. It is usually the first podcast I’ll pick out of a list of fresh podcast episodes.
I have to agree with Merlin Mann that the latest episode is my favorite episode ever. The soon-to-expire MacHeist Bundle was discussed at length, with depth. There is plenty of commentary on Merlin’s post, but I’d like to approach that topic from my...
1 tag
Globalization
That stock markets around the world can drop like this because of fears that one country might enter a recession surprises me. Admittedly, I don’t have experience on the financial side of things. However, there are hundreds of countries in this world. One would think that the world economy has some sort of redundancy built into it. Everything I see seems way too oversimplified, probably...
3 tags
de Blob
Somehow, despite watching Wii news carefully, I’d totally missed it. Completely off my radar. But today I discovered de Blob. The game has succeeded in being one of few unknown, third party Wii games that I immediately wanted to buy. Too bad it’s not out yet. Sounds like it’ll be out this year sometime.
Conceptually, the game is brilliant. The world has been drained of color....
2 tags
Today's Keynote
There seem to be mixed reactions to today’s Macworld keynote. On one hand, most of Apple’s audience seems pleased with the announcements overall. However, Apple’s stock price is down and comments at reddit were decidedly against the MacBook Air.
Taking time to think about the keynote, I can see why. There was an excitement from many people expecting a Wow product. The iPhone...
2 tags
Narnia
I’ve always enjoyed the Chronicles of Narnia series of books. The first movie exceeded my expectations, and now the second looks just as good.
Though the trailer isn’t new, it was only added to the Apple trailers site a few days ago. The battle scenes and some of the various being of Narnia look amazing. Also, the scene where they arrive in Narnia again seems well handled.