Handy way to save space and keep it sharp without having to @2x everything.
#6
by f1fanatic
I’m not usually one to go overboard about stuff, but this was a huge moment for me. I’m a massive fan of RBR and everything they’ve done, but also have tremendous respect for McLaren and my first season as a serious fan, cheered for Jenson Button on his championship run in 2009.
I got laid off in April, and by June I was down at the Big Nerd Ranch taking an iOS Bootcamp class that was setting me on a new path to a better life. We would review something with the prof, then work on our own for a bit, about a half an hour or so each. I had live timing up on my iPad and the VPN engaged on my laptop, streaming the BBC coverage. I had the volume muted, but as I saw Jenson closing the gap as the lap counter counted down, I turned it up a little. When Seb’s back end broke loose and Jenson took the lead, I jumped out of my chair and shouted out loud. Everyone in the room turned to look, I gave them a sheepish grin, “Its F1,” I explained to blank looks, “car racing.” “Oh.”
I went on to learn more than I have in the last several years put together, finish the class, come him and write Mediary, Magic Map, Busvetica, and I’m working on a rewrite of Telestrator.
(Source: , via f1-show)
Putting together the basic functionality for a new project, feeling good about today’s progress.
It loads an RSS feed, parses the entries and filters out ones that aren’t strips (news, blog posts, etc), then extracts the image url, downloads and displays it. It recognizes swiping left and right to view the previous or next strip in addition to the arrow buttons.
On the todo list:
- Interface improvements (tall strips are centered, cut off, and don’t scroll)
- Local image storage for offline viewing
You teach the player how to play the game in one minute. Within that one minute, you give them in-game money. You make them spend all of that money to buy an investment that will begin to earn them profit. They build a thing. It says: this thing will be finished in five minutes. Spend one premium currency unit to have it now. You happen to have one free premium currency unit. The game makes you use it now. Now you have a thing. Now it says to wait three minutes to collect from that thing. So they have a reason to stick around for three minutes. When those three minutes are up, you tell them to come back in a half an hour. You say, ‘You’re done for now. Come back in a half an hour.’ The phone sends them a push notification in a half an hour. Right here, you’re telling them to wait. You’re expressing to them the importance of patience. They’re never going to forget the way it feels to wait a half an hour after playing a game for one minute. They’re going to forget the second time they wait for a half an hour, and the third time, and they’ll then not forget the first time they have to wait for four hours, then twenty-four hours. This is why they’ll start to pay to Have Things Right Now.
…
Like Nintendo with the DS, Zynga is inviting a new audience. They are “teaching” a game-ignorant demographic how to play games, by starting with flat-as-a-board exercises (Farmville) in possibly-endless repetition of the most minute game actions (collecting things, numbers going up). Their games grow increasingly labyrinthine (Frontierville, Cityville), introducing game-genre tropes which are “monetized” effectively. Eventually, they have a game that plays something like a real game — Adventure World — and the micro-transactions are waning. Zynga may yet prove to be a not-evil enterprise. However, if we can calculate a man’s height from his footprint in the sand, we can predict that Zynga has already done evil by perpetuating flimsy game models which are mere sugar-coating for a bitter pill of “Show Us The Money”. The modern videogame development is a mathematician’s paradise, where getting the customers addicted is as easy now as downloading pirated music in 1997.
— who killed videogames? (a ghost story) - a long and excellent article about math, psychology, and business of social gaming.
Telestrator’s been in progress for over a year, and there’s still a lot to do, but we’re going to pack up a stable version and call it 1.0 here soon.
To get ready for the submission and launch, I’ve started working on (yet another) new website for the app. Here’s a little preview.
Busvetica has a front and a back!
I still have to implement some of the back end stuff, but went ahead and started working on this today. Just need to clean up how the predictions are displayed, then I’ll get it to pull in the stop data.
Working my way from the back to the front of busvetica, so far this is the only interface it has: a list of services to choose from in the Settings app.
On launch, it loads all the routes for the selected agency, either from a locally cached file, or by downloading them from NextBus. Then it goes through and loads all the stops.
Now I just need to build out the useful parts of the app, like the UI and location awareness.
I updated frijole.info this morning, added the latest apps and some extra shine you’ll see if you visit it in a recent webkit or mozilla browser.
I had this idea for an app, a simple bus stop info thingy.
There’s already a bunch of bus apps out there, but it’d be a way for me to learn how to poll a web API for info. Since the Chapel Hill busses use NextBus, I’d build on top of that, so it would work in lots of different systems (including MUNI, MBTA, LA Metro, Toronto Transit Commission, and a load more).
It’s about to be conference season coming up for me. There are more than a few I’m either planning on attending or speaking at. The first of these being the Minnesota Blogger Conference in <gulp> ten days. Therefore, I’m sure I’ll get some use out of Instacard.
In this new era of having supercomputers in our pockets, it still takes too many taps to do something as simple as sending your contact information to someone you meet. This app is designed to solve that. Send your contact information to anyone with as few taps as needed. Launch the app. Tap. Enter email address of recipient. Send.
It’s only $.99 but here are a few promo codes on a first come basis:
Looks like a nifty utility that does one thing well
