September 2010
1 post
“I’m really glad to hear that ABC and NBC will be paying us 99 cents to...”
– WillAffleckUW on Slashdot
Sep 1st
1 note
August 2010
10 posts
4 tags
Aug 31st
12 notes
2 tags
An addendum to the last post: It occurs to me that Apple taking the lion’s share of the profits from the mobile phone industry means something else to investors: It means they know what to do to take that profit. They “skate where the puck will be”, and have proved that their guess was accurate. Betting on high quality phones, touchscreens for fully costumizable user...
Aug 25th
3 tags
“In only one year Android’s smartphone market share catapulted from 1.8% to 17.2%...”
– Apple: Short Term Winner, Long Term Loser (hat tip to John Gruber) Interesting that they use units shipped and market share to determine that Apple isn’t a good investment. How about revenue? Last I checked, Apple was making a ridiculous percentage of the gross profits earned in the...
Aug 25th
1 note
Anonymous asked: Hi Alan,

My name is Wim Haanstra and I have a question about the AQGridView you created. The grid is awesome, but I think I am doing something wrong somewhere.

This is what I do to get the grid filled:

- I have a NSMutableArray where I put in objects (for example UIImage objects).
- When the grid executes "numberOfItemsInGridView", I...
Aug 22nd
Anonymous asked: My question pertains more to object-oriented design in a way. I wanted to know your thoughts on replicating something the Photos app interface on the iPad. You have a grid of albums (AlbumsViewController) that can expand into a new grid of photos (PhotosViewController). The transition seems to be seamless. How would you do something like that (using something like AQGridView for the grids) while...
Aug 16th
Anonymous asked: I just updated to Snow Leopard and the new xcode and iPhone iOS. Now almost all my sample code I was playing with says "Base SDK Missing" Can I get the previous SDK's back?
Aug 12th
2 notes
Aug 6th
24 notes
3 tags
Aug 5th
mayafish: jaydensmommie: Shut up. Look around you. Appreciate where you are. No, everything’s not great, but does that mean nothing is? Enjoy what you have. Not because others don’t have it, screw that. They aren’t your problem. I’m not telling you to eat your dinner because there are starving children in Africa. I’m telling you to eat it because it’s good. Amen.
Aug 3rd
50 notes
zahadum asked: what happened to your BackRow sdk?

it seems very dormant :(

cf: http://wiki.awkwardtv.org/wiki/BackRow_Developers%27_Kit (2007)
Aug 2nd
July 2010
12 posts
4 tags
Jul 31st
54 notes
“It’s telling that the criticism surrounding this issue has shifted, quickly,...”
– Daring Fireball: Antennagate Bottom Line To this cynical observer, the situation sounds to me like this: There was a flaw discovered in a highly desirable product from a company which makes many such desirable products, and people hoped to get something free because of it. Now they’re...
Jul 21st
1 note
Anonymous asked: I really like your AQGridView. I had a quick question about relating to it. When I tap on a cell, I want a full-screen view controller to show. But instead of just adding it, I want it to animate from the cell (kind of like in iWork, where when you tap on a document, it 'animates out' of the thumbnail in the document chooser). How would I do this?
Jul 16th
1 tag
Pixelmator 1.6 →
nikf: … a tonne of other features and improvements … A metric tonne rather than an Imperial ton is it? And you call yourself an Englishman…
Jul 13th
10 notes
5 tags
ShareKit →
nikf: This looks super-handy: a[sic] drop-in web service sharing for iOS apps (think posting items to Twitter, Facebook, Delicious etc). It’s open source on GitHub, and entirely customisable. Whilst it’s intended to be used in its entirety, if you’re wanting to (say) implement Twitter sharing in your own iPhone app with xAuth login you can still use ShareKit to implement the service on its...
Jul 13th
15 notes
Anonymous asked: I am wondering whether to buy your book "Pro Objective-C", now available in alpha. Is there a table of contents available, not just the sales-speak available on the a-press page? I trust you and Mike Ash, two legendary Objective-C gurus, but I'd like to see if it's not much above my level.
Jul 12th
“When we were first acquired, we were not taking long lunches and coffee breaks....”
– Mini-Microsoft: The KIN-fusing KIN-clusion to KIN. A member of the team which produced the KIN, a former Danger employee, responding to accusations that his team’s conduct was the cause of the device’s failure.
Jul 8th
Jul 7th
2 notes
3 tags
http://github.com/AlanQuatermain/NestedPlistEditor →
Ever wished you could do something like this: defaults read com.apple.loginitems read \ SessionItems.CustomListItems.Name …to get a list of the ‘Name’ attributes of all your configured login items? How about to print out their paths? defaults read com.apple.loginitems read \ ...
Jul 7th
1 note
6 tags
“I imagine some mesh of C Blocks, messages and Go’s channels to play an...”
– Jesper makes some guesses about what a new programming language from Apple might look like.
Jul 6th
2 tags
Jul 6th
2 notes
2 tags
“Apple isn’t anti-developer, they’re pro-customer. Linux is pro-developer and...”
– A comment on “Open always wins, unless it’s Symbian or LiMo or Openmoko or Qt”. For context: this is a reply to someone complaining that Apple doesn’t use “standards like C++, instead of strange niche technologies list Obj-c and Interface Builder.”
Jul 4th
3 notes
June 2010
3 posts
Getting Sassy with CSS →
9-bits: My newest post on the Sencha blog covering the wonders of SASS and Compass. Includes a full getting started guide and covers some of the techniques we used in developing the themes for Sencha Touch.
Jun 30th
22 notes
2 tags
Jun 25th
2 notes
Jun 18th
52 notes
May 2010
13 posts
3 tags
AQGridView 1.1 Update →
All the juicy details: Fixed an issue where left & right paddings weren’t preserved through data set changes. Fixed layout issues for grid bounds changes while looking at bottom of grid view. Fixed issue where old cells might be left in pre-animation positions instead of being removed from the grid view. Fixed an issue where Insert could cause the last item to briefly jump to its...
May 26th
1 tag
May 25th
9 notes
3 tags
“Microsoft—in a nutshell—is a company that had one successful product that we are...”
– Mike Lee (via marco) 90% Agree. I tend to give Google a little more leeway than Microsoft, because they do frequently make things which really are tremendously useful, and are still coming out with new stuff. This is usually done because it’s something they want to do, or feel they have...
May 23rd
178 notes
“To a homeless person, a cigarette does not represent a dangerous habit, but a...”
– Mike Lee advocates keeping a pack of cigarettes about you while in San Francisco, to give to the homeless. I have to say I agree with everything he says here; my experience has been much the same.
May 23rd
1 note
3 tags
“You’re trading one walled garden for another, except Google doesn’t...”
– Steven Troughton-Smith adds his weight to the Google ‘openness’ debate, pointing out that not everything in Android is freely available, and jailbreaking is still required for many more interesting tasks.
May 21st
2 notes
4 tags
“If anyone had any doubts about Google offering competition for Apple, this...”
– Simplify Media, a Mac favorite, bought by Google (via TUAW) Competition is good. Purchasing a third-party which produces stuff for a competitor’s platform and then axing that support is a Microsoft kind of move, and one which will only cause Apple to want to keep much more development...
May 20th
2 notes
4 tags
Steve Streza posted a six-point rundown on Twitter of the facts revealed in the newly-unsealed warrant for the search of Gizmodo editor Jason Chen’s home(PDF). 1. Warrant was issued in a felony investigation. 2. Apple confirmed the device was theirs. 3. Gizmodo ruined the prototype. 4. The finder used his roommate’s computer to sync without permission, and she contacted Apple...
May 14th
4 notes
“Apple’s iPad is a rather different case … it’s an appliance, and...”
– This witch-hunt will hurt Adobe more than Apple This sums up exactly what I feel when I read a lot of the hyperbole about how the iPhone/iPad means the Mac will be ‘locked down’ in a similar manner. They seem to believe that they and they alone are able to learn from the past, that the...
May 14th
1 note
Update: Rogers $20 Shared Data Plan Removed →
In answer to questions about the $20 plan: Many of you have asked about the shared data plan listed on the Apple website. This reference was an error and is being removed. Fair enough. This puts us roughly at par with AT&T in the US (where the ‘unlimited’ data plan has the usual nGB ‘fair use’ cap). In other words, while the $20/mo idea would have sucked ass, and a...
May 10th
5 tags
“Hmm. “Add to existing plan”. So if you already have, say, an iPhone, you can...”
– aaron.vegh.ca  » Seeing Red Aaron Vegh weighs in on Rogers’ cash-grab upon those who already pay for a data plan for another device. His main point is that the costs charged are in no way indicative of the amount of effort undertaken by the provider. The main insult however is the...
May 10th
10 Days In a Carry-On →
theoriginaljoefisher: Heather Poole, a flight attendant from Los Angeles, demonstrates how to pack enough for a 10-day trip into a single standard carry-on. Invaluable tips for those of us who’ve already shelled out thousands of bucks to visit WWDC this year. This means we can fit everything into carry-ons instead of paying to check bags & having to lug them through the city to our...
May 10th
1,689 notes
“This is the first strip drawn entirely in Adobe Photoshop CS 5! It crashed five...”
– Questionable Content: 1657: Chiyo, Then Osaka
May 4th
1 note
May 4th
5 notes
April 2010
30 posts
5 tags
Apr 29th
3 notes
6 tags
“[W]e cannot accept an outcome where developers are blocked from using our...”
– Thoughts on Flash Sometimes I wonder why this is so hard to grasp. Having played the underdog role for so long, Apple has learned this lesson the hard way. Perhaps the most high-profile case is that of Microsoft Word. Word version 5.1a on the Macintosh is considered by many to be the best...
Apr 29th
2 notes
iPhone Development: iPad Max Touches →
heroicautobot: So, can the iPhone SDK track 10 fingers at once? Yep. It sure can. I wrote a simple program to just record the count of the touches set provided to the four UIResponder touch-related methods, and it had no problem identifying and tracking 10 separate fingers at the same time. For as long as I’ve known that the trackpads on the unibody MacBooks can track 11 touches, I’ve...
Apr 28th
5 notes
2 tags
iPhone Development: WWDC First Time Guide, 2010... →
Essential reading. Also, note that Jeff’s advice regarding the Apple engineers you meet at the parties also applies to other people. Jeff’s a Real Ale sort of guy. I like vodka. Wil Shipley had sweet things last time I saw him (something involving orange liqueur IIRC), and the Delicious Librarians will accept G&Ts, Rye & Dry (callously made with Bourbon rather than the more...
Apr 28th
1 note
3 tags
Apr 27th
9 notes
6 tags
Lost iPhone prototype spurs police probe →
nsurl: Looks like the cops are going after Gizmodo. Let that be a lesson. Confidential Information and Property are quite different in the eyes of the law. Dissemination of another party’s information isn’t always a crime. Doing the same with their property usually is.
Apr 23rd
3 notes
1 tag
“HuffPost Books is launching a new weekly feature: a list of eBook bestsellers...”
– eBook Bestsellers From Kobo @ Huffington Post Kobo and HuffPost, sittin’ in a tree…
Apr 23rd
2 notes
3 tags
Apr 19th
3 notes
Anonymous asked: hi alan
any way of easily connecting an apple tv to sdtv - ie one with no component or hdmi??

cheers

daniel
Apr 18th
3 tags
“The Great: The Kobo iPad application. This is the future of books. Brilliant. It...”
– The National Post tests the Kobo eReader. They list the Good, then the Bad. Then they list the Great: which is just our iPad app. Excellent work team— /me feels like a proud father today :o)
Apr 18th
2 notes
6 tags
Apr 17th
3 notes