Disqus - Latest Comments for schwa

Re: Is There Hope For Amtrak?

schwa — Fri, 01 Mar 2013 11:49:10 -0000

So basically scrap all routes except for NY,DC and Amtrak will be profitable.

Re: toxicsoftware.com

schwa — Sun, 02 Dec 2012 00:55:37 -0000

I bet comments don't work.

Re: http://tomloverro.com/post/20843166119

schwa — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 13:11:19 -0000

Hey Tom,

I work for Synthetic but in replying here I'm merely speaking for myself. My views do not represent the views of my employers, etc, etc.

So I think the way you're staging the story is as us vs them. It's not - Instagram's outstanding success isn't at Hipstamatics's loss. It's not a zero sum game, there's room for more than one camera app on an iPhone.

Hipstamatic and Instagram do different things for different sets of users. Some users are in both sets and end up choosing one app over the other, that's fine. But either way, there are plenty of existing and future Hipstamatic users out there.

Re: Shape Of: Buzz Andersen: A Plea for Better iOS Text Facilities

schwa — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:02:55 -0000

Buzz & Gus are talking about APIs.

There is no simple API for rich text editing (or display) provided to 3rd party developers.

There are complex APIs though…

Re: Shape Of: Buzz Andersen: A Plea for Better iOS Text Facilities

schwa — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 18:18:19 -0000

Holy shit, a dev blog I can comment on???

I think Buzz is just talking about presenting rich text - let alone editing. In which case my https://github.com/schwa/Co... project is one -good- (imho) option.

I've got a work in progress Rich Text Editor (based on my CoreTextToy) that I'm working on. Also there are a few open source and commercial rich text editors out there - google for UITextInput and you should get some hits.

I think Apple has decided to give us all the pieces we need rather than give us a single "one size fits all" view.

Re: UIStoryboard Issues

schwa — Wed, 14 Dec 2011 14:06:04 -0000

Madness! Madness I say.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with UIStoryboard. I think _if_ Apple improves upon it , it could be really useful. I just don't think the current version of it is ready.

Re: UIStoryboard Issues

schwa — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 23:29:04 -0000

In a NIB based app I tend to pass the data needed by a VC as the VC is created (see my "initWithFoo:" example in the post.) This sprinkles the set up code amongst the VCs that need the data.

In a storyboard based app the code for instantiation tends to get centralised in the source view controller.

On top of that because the destination view controller often is _not_ the view controller that needs the data (often there is a UINavigationController in the way) you need to get from the source view controller to the actual view controller that needs the data.

Look at the code example I posted in the body. And that just shows a prepareForSegue: for a single (destination) view controller - imagine if the source view controller had more segues. 3 segues in a source view controller isn't uncommon.

And yes, thank you for pointing out how to file a bug with Apple. I was expecting Tim Cook to read my blog and make sure these features were implemented.

Re: UIStoryboard Issues

schwa — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 19:37:14 -0000

There's that. I haven't encountered it myself (for most of this project I was the sole developer). Was hoping it would merge cleanly though.

Re: UIStoryboard Issues

schwa — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 17:53:07 -0000

(Thanks for copying the comment from the gist - you raise a good point so am very glad you did)

The trouble with breaking up your UI into multiple storyboards is that it buys you very little over multiple NIBs. And you still have all those problems discussed above. You can't easily link between individual VCs spanning multiple storyboards so you're back to writing a lot of code (again).I do plan on using Storyboards still - like you mention it's the only way for the new UITableView features (I have to assume that's a bug on Apple's part). And I may keep storyboards for some simpler parts of the app (e.g. new user signup/login). But I definitely won't try to make the entire app use storyboards again.

I'll happily re-visit the technology again once improvements have been made. I have faith it can be made a lot better.

Re: [steve release];

schwa — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 13:10:58 -0000

[steve release]; ???

ARC man. ARC.

Lame joke aside. Nice post. Cool lego trick too. Got me checking that case out.

Re: Shape Of: SPJ

schwa — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 02:43:51 -0000

I love "and that was that".

I remember that moment too.

Be well Gus.

Re: http://quatermain.tumblr.com/post/7492106658

schwa — Mon, 11 Jul 2011 11:12:04 -0000

Thank god! No more Apple is teh Evil screeds.

Congrats.

Re: Calling a Turd a Turd

schwa — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 09:38:06 -0000

Who was trashing the people? The people behind it were unknown.

Yes it's unfair to immediately blame the devs when something sucks. But at the end of the day they wrote the app.

Re: 90% of Everything is Crap

schwa — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 11:27:38 -0000

Having worked on literally dozens of products as a contractor I can definitely agree with you. Often you're considered "just the contractor" and never get any control over the quality of the final product. As a sub-contractor (a position I've preferred to avoid) it is even worse.

But totally blaming the client on the other hand isn't fair either. Contractors often blame the "crazy client" for everything - that's a cop out that is pretty common amongst contractors. I've certainly used "my hands were tied" line as an excuse for bad work. Maybe I could have made that product better on my own.

I think the key to what I tried (and probably failed) to get over in this blog post is that lack of criticism is worse than too much. With out criticism everything is "awesome" and all developers are "rock stars". No product is mediocre. Everything is amazing.

That's all a lie. 50% of everything is below average and 90% of everything is shit. We all know that. Pretending otherwise encourages mediocrity.

I'd rather my peers were overly critical of me and heck snarky with it than let me wallow in crapness.

Re: http://quatermain.tumblr.com/post/3365005188

schwa — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 13:52:57 -0000

Thought exercise for you:

Purely from a user's perspective what are the pros/cons of Apple's in-app purchase compared to any other alternative in-app purchase scheme?

I'm pretty sure you'll find that Apple's in-app purchasing is obviously superior in pretty much every way to other options.

What you're really asking for is "we want the right to have a sucky in-app purchase experience and potentially make more money per purchase". Apple seems to be saying "no".

Re: http://quatermain.tumblr.com/post/3048506087

schwa — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 14:31:45 -0000

There's obviously rock solid reporting going on there. Let's just wait and see how it pans out.

Re: http://quatermain.tumblr.com/post/3048506087

schwa — Tue, 01 Feb 2011 14:16:18 -0000

Wake me up when there's an official policy change and/or clarification of enforcement of existing policies.

Re: Some Non-Busy iPhone Wallpapers

schwa — Wed, 23 Jun 2010 01:05:43 -0000

Could you post a screenshot showing what these look like with icons?

Re: The iPad, Gestures, and Community

schwa — Thu, 18 Feb 2010 15:23:36 -0000

Good luck!

Have you looked at the gesture recogniser classes in iPhone OS 3.2? They go a long way. Defining a common suite of gesture recogniser classes would be very useful I think. (And eq. classes on Android etc)

Re: Run Python Script

schwa — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 10:07:30 -0000

Have tried to update this for Snow Leopard and had mixed results.

http://bitbucket.org/schwa/...

Re: CocoaJSON

schwa — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 09:53:39 -0000

This code has been made redundant by:

http://code.google.com/p/to...

Re: Disqus: The Official Blog - Disqus Comments: Import Your Blogger Comments

schwa — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 22:20:06 -0000

Really want threads to be automagically-closed after a defined period of time. I have no interest in comments on old thread.

Re: SVN Update Automator Action

schwa — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 06:53:23 -0000

I've stopped using SVN so I probably wont ever be upgrading this to Snow Leopard. Sorry!

Re: Cocoatoa :: Snow Leopard, a bargain at twice the price!

schwa — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 13:28:39 -0000

If you have run clang static analyzer on your code, you have bugs...

For some reason Xcode's Build & Analyze option doesn't find issues that the command line static analysis tool DOES find. Rather annoying.

Re: inessential.com: Get back to work...

schwa — Fri, 17 Jul 2009 21:20:43 -0000

Ha.

One problem I find with Disqus (I use it at toxicsoftware) is that you can't automatically lock threads after N months. So I get a lot of dubious comments on my site on really really old threads. (And as I haven't blogged in, oooh, six months, most of my threads are old)