Disqus - Latest Comments for ChristopherRicca

Re: Swift Programming Blog - The Design of Types

ChrisRicca — Tue, 17 Feb 2015 12:11:24 -0000

typealias UserInput = String

struct SanitizedString {
let value : String

init(input : UserInput) {
val = sanitize(input)
}
}

Should that be value = sanitize(input) ?

Re: Understanding Self Sizing Cells and Dynamic Type in iOS 8

ChrisRicca — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 21:24:41 -0000

I've added a comment above, but I just used tableView:reloadSections within viewWillAppear and it works without the flicker

Re: Understanding Self Sizing Cells and Dynamic Type in iOS 8

ChrisRicca — Wed, 19 Nov 2014 21:23:19 -0000

Instead of using viewDidAppear (which allowed a flicker when the cells re-rendered), I used tableView reloadSections: within viewWillAppear and it worked without that flicker

Re: Back of Mind - Fixing Our Most Broken Industry

ChrisRicca — Fri, 25 Oct 2013 12:48:17 -0000

Be sure to check out http://defyventures.org/ (founder spoke at Brooklyn Beta 2013) - trying to tackle recidivism through business training / mentorship. It is a kindred spirit of this idea.

Re: Appa-Mater

ChrisRicca — Wed, 23 Oct 2013 14:54:29 -0000

Apparently so does my high school and I never knew! Thanks for the tip. I knew some teams must be out there trying to tackle these problems.

Re: Back of Mind - The Ultimate Guide to Making Money Without a Job

ChrisRicca — Tue, 22 Oct 2013 21:18:03 -0000

This definitely needs to exist! A friend of mine is awaiting deployment in the Peace Corps, and we talked about needing exactly this kind of research to find what would be the best Task Rabbit to work for in the mean time.

Re: Back of Mind - Lighting the Introduction Economy

ChrisRicca — Mon, 21 Oct 2013 17:37:49 -0000

How does this compare to what hashable was trying to accomplish? (Not as a dismissal, but as a prompt to clarify your take on the problem).

http://techcrunch.com/2012/...

Re: Back of Mind - A Better You

ChrisRicca — Thu, 17 Oct 2013 11:59:28 -0000

A friend of mine joined up with some Yale professors to start http://www.stickk.com - They have become profitable ( http://daily-download.com/c... ) but not grown significantly in mind share: ( http://www.google.com/trend... ), They are surviving based on white label adoption from the enterprise space, but I would love to see they come back as a consumer product. The best thing they could do (if they wanted to come back to consumer) is experiment with a fresh product on a new platform (mobile especially) and focus on a clean focused user experience.

Re: blog.ChrisRicca.com • Bryan and I are each posting 20 startup ideas in...

ChrisRicca — Wed, 16 Oct 2013 11:05:30 -0000

You got the pitch just right (this one was kinda vague). The issues I'm especially focused on is linking flow (so Maps, Images, opening in iOS Chrome). The hard part is figuring out a solution that a) would deliver a good experience and b) you could get onto people's handsets effectively.

Re: blog.ChrisRicca.com — Know Thy Time: 2nd of 20 Startup Ideas

ChrisRicca — Thu, 03 Oct 2013 12:29:51 -0000

Hey Peter, Pomodoro (fixed link - http://en.wikipedia.org/wik... was definitely a part of the inspiration for the original idea, either originally or when I was playing with it - thanks for bringing it up. I had forgotten about it but should have mentioned it in the post. There are a LOT of tools (http://en.wikipedia.org/wik... built to help with Pomodoro, so why would another one be useful? I was really intrigued by the idea of getting to a number that could represent how on-track you were in the day's work, and using that as a way to understand when you were in trouble.

iDoneThis.com is terrific! I don't use it personally, but my wife uses it every day and I love the workflow. I would definitely want this to either hook into iDoneThis or offer a similar daily email workflow.

Re: http://local.gamechanger.io/game-4f3e8ad21545556a7b000004

ChrisRicca — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 18:18:14 -0000

something else

Re: http://local.gamechanger.io/game-4f3e8ad21545556a7b000004

ChrisRicca — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 18:18:03 -0000

testing

Re: http://blog.groupme.com/post/9226372737

ChrisRicca — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 20:53:08 -0000

Congrats, guys! Way to represent NYC!

Re: Mobile Devices and Rails: Maintaining your Sanity

ChrisRicca — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 14:13:02 -0000

I found one gotcha that I'd like to share (with a solution). I was finding that when the app was rendering an action for which I had not yet created a mobile view (like /widgets/show.html.haml) it was still prepending the mobile view path, and this would cause the view to use my mobile layout and mobile partials. I wanted the behavior to be: "If I've gotten around to the mobile view, use it. Otherwise, fall back to the full site version". Here's the solution I'm working with now and it's working great:
def prepend_view_path_if_mobile prepend_view_path Rails.root + 'app' + 'views' + 'mobile' if show_mobile? end def show_mobile? mobile_request? && template_exists?('mobile/' + controller_name + '/' + action_name) end
I'm really liking this technique for scrappy mobile support. Thanks for the tip.

Re: Priority Email Optimization

ChrisRicca — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 14:49:21 -0000

One key factor in prioritization I've noticed is time-relevancy.

Roughly 80% of the messages that have been marked priority for me have some significant time component. That makes sense to me - were I designing this system, I would be concerned about a 'smarter' inbox causing people to miss time-sensitive emails because they didn't hit the priority box.

Re: HTML5: SEO Incompatibility

ChrisRicca — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 13:41:33 -0000

...Why wouldn't you use h2s for the article titles in the HTML5 example? Even if you are using h1s for the article titles, there's still an implied hierarchy, though in a new style. The second h1s are nested down in a child document of the first. That seems to be an appropriate signal to a search engine that they aren't on the same level in terms of importance.

Re: Console for Sinatra

ChrisRicca — Thu, 06 May 2010 15:34:40 -0000

Wow, So simple and useful. I couldn't figured out what was going on for a second, and then I realized it's using require! To generalize the option, if you wanted to open up irb with access to someawesomegem, you can do irb -r rubygems -r someawesomegem. Should save a second or three. ;)

Re: http://blog.chrisricca.com/post/428370632

ChrisRicca — Sat, 01 May 2010 18:19:00 -0000

Interesting comments on the Hacker News thread:
http://news.ycombinator.com...

Re: http://blog.chrisricca.com/post/428370632

ChrisRicca — Sat, 01 May 2010 16:10:30 -0000

You're definitely right on your first observation, though I wouldn't call it stupid behavior (not because I'm afraid of calling out the many stupid people on the web - but I think in this case we're the super techie-geeks) . In the middle of the adopter bell curve, the 'normals', you anecdotally see a whole lot more navigational search activity, which would explain the higher representation of facebook in searches. ( If you haven't read the comment thread on this ReadWriteWeb article that momentarily beat out the facebook login page for the top spot on Google search results for 'facebook login', it's an enlightening example of just how important navigational search is to the mainstream experience of the web: http://www.readwriteweb.com... )

Also, to get a better sense of who the normals are, check out this post: http://cdixon.org/2010/01/2...

But this popularity of Facebook with the average user is exactly what I'm pointing out. You are right, each tick in the graph *doesn't* necessarily represent one additional user (might be more, might be fewer), but it does suggest a fundamentally different stage of adoption.

I don't disagree with your other points when it comes to the behavior of techies. I would probably search on summize.com ;) for realtime tweets, but on the other hand I also find google to be the best way to search for older tweets (http://www.google.com/searc.... I don't think this kind of techie behavior is enough to move the needle, though.

What do you think?

Re: On foursquare, cheating, and claiming mayorships from your couch…

ChrisRicca — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 16:20:33 -0000

How does this fit in with checkins via the API? (where lat/long can be sent as an optional, but unverified, parameter). Do you then use your aforementioned tricks?

Re: Check.in Aims to Support Universal Location Checkins [INVITES]

ChrisRicca — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 15:18:25 -0000

How do they support Gowalla? Last time I checked, that API was read-only.

Re: The Google Buzz API is a Book Not an API

ChrisRicca — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 12:50:28 -0000

PubSubhubbub does mean realtime updates to apps, which is a crucial piece of the location API stack. Progress!

Re: http://blog.chrisricca.com/post/390859652

ChrisRicca — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 11:06:23 -0000

Ha. There are certainly some important lessons for drop.io here -- but even after rich media there are a lot of opportunities for API interfaces that still need building. The trick is to use our perspective as developers to not only think about products we would like to build, but keep building the Internet that we wish we had at our disposal.

Re: The Google Buzz API is a Book Not an API

ChrisRicca — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 10:41:46 -0000

It's all about the API! But I do agree with some of the folks here. Gowalla is shooting themselves in the foot (or perhaps a more important body part) every week that passes without WRITE access. Buzz, on the other hand, will not live or die because their WRITE API is a month or two late. (not that it wouldn't have been a good idea in terms of using launch to gain developer momentum, just not mission critical like it is for a startup trying to define/own an API for a specific interface). Nice to have vs. Need to have?

Re: New York Makes First Award: A BIG LASER!

ChrisRicca — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 11:05:22 -0000

Awesome! Congrats, Ben!