I’ve been working on Deadline iPhone, and I got stuck trying to figure out how to create grouped form–like UI elements. Apple’s applications use them a lot, so I thought I’d be able to create them in Interface Builder.
Here’s what I wanted:
I went to the Rewired State event yesterday to contribute to contribute code based on hacking government data sources and APIs. My project was called StateAware, and it aimed to collect, combine and enrich data through APIs and screen scraping.
I wanted StateAware to achieve two things:
I just published Getting Started with iPhone Development over at Quite Useful. It covers the basics and should help you decide if you really want to take the plunge:
Around Christmas I was watching TV with the family and messing around with my netbook. It’s got Linux and Ruby on it, so I can actually work on that tiny thing. I came up with a script called lovehate.rb: it downloads matches of love and hate on search.twitter.com, then calculates the frequency for each term and presents a "winner".
For some reason this script fascinated me: love almost always won, and I really wanted to find out what trends affected this. I made the script more generic and used it to compare other terms; eventually TweetFu.com was born.
I get a lot of hits to my blog from people looking for Vim resources, probably due to Vim for TextMate fans. I think Vim might be getting a resurgence from developers using Linux on netbooks and the refreshing speed and efficiency of Vim.
Alan Bradburne, a fellow Rails and iPhone developer who I’ve worked with, has released his first iPhone app: MoloPix. It takes multiple photos and combines them into one image, and has an integrated website so you can share them straight from the iPhone.
I wrote a review for it on Quite Useful.
There was a time when journalists finally realised what cookies were, and Google got heavily covered in the press for using them to track what you were searching for. Google said they use the data anonymously, and so the argument moved on to the lifespan of the cookies.
Recently Google stated inviting users to enter profile data. You can see this if you’re logged in, google.com/ig users will have no doubt seen it by now. This can be as detailed as you want: full contact details, date of birth, place you were born, employment details and a photo.
I like Tumblr — they’re very generous with what they let you edit, so you can run a pretty serious blog with only a domain name and some spare time to make a template. I use it both as a lifestreamer and blogging system. WordPress.com is also pretty good, although a bit slow at times. No matter which hosted blogging software I try, though, none of them really deliver 100%.
It’s hard to please everyone, but existing services have some pretty serious omissions. They also do things most people don’t need. Trying to bend WordPress.com into behaving how I want is sometimes so much work just getting cheap hosting and running my own copy would be easier: and that’s the kind of time wasting I’m trying to avoid.
This is a followup to my previous post, What cross–browser testing could look like. After talking to a few friends about the idea, we realised one way of running remote Windows instances would be through Amazon EC2.
The weaknesses of this approach are:
I build web applications aimed at Windows, Mac OS and Linux. This means I have to test my designs in Firefox, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer (some clients still need 6 support) and Chrome.
The biggest problem with this is Windows: I can’t run versions of IE side–by–side: I’ve used Multiple IE before, but it’s stopped working on my XP machine. So I have Internet Explorer 7 on my Windows PC, VMware and IE6 on my Mac, and another VMware instance for IE8. That’s 3 Windows licenses. I don’t even use Windows, I do all my development in Mac OS and Linux.