Disqus - Latest Comments for tobinharris

Re: Vitamins, pain killers and app store conversion rates

Tobin Harris — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 13:25:08 -0000

Feedback appreciated, feel free to drop me a note here.

Re: Using Fonts in SVG

Tobin Harris — Thu, 02 Jan 2020 15:38:05 -0000

Nano is awesome, thanks for sharing. I'm converting http://yuml.me to use SVG and I need to embed a font in a single SVG file with IE compatibility. Nano seems to only include the needed glyphs, which I assume is an optimisation. Can you recommend a way to embed the whole ttf font that works across browsers? If Nano had a "Embed entire font" option that would be great. Appreciate it wouldn't be as efficient, just better for my use case.

Re: Product Panda — Agile for agencies. How agencies can employ agile techniques and win.

Tobin Harris — Fri, 02 Mar 2018 16:47:38 -0000

Really enjoyed this article. Your suggestions are good. I run a 12 man team up in Leeds and we're facing many of these challenges. We've also found our way into many of your suggestions.

So, you wrote this in 2013. Would love to hear what you're doing now in 2018?

Re: 7 Things Adept Mobile App Developers Don’t Do ⋅ ElseIf

Tobin Harris — Wed, 08 Mar 2017 12:50:01 -0000

For those needing a TLDR;

The things that developers can overlook are:

* Creating simple user experiences that
* Understanding Device Sizes and working to those
* Planning the app around user personas/UX
* Considering offline/disconnected states
* Getting feedback from real users
* User testing to see where users experience problems

I don't quite understand the article though. Are you saying mobile presents these challenges and that's where non-mobile developers fall down?

Surely the job of the mobile app develop is to understand and address all these concerns? I know a few mobile teams that do all this and more, including our team at http://pocketworks.co.uk

Re: FreeBusy

Tobin Harris — Mon, 05 Dec 2016 14:58:53 -0000

Really well written article, thanks!

Unless I'm being blind, I didn't see Conversation and Session implemented as classes in your solution? I guess session management is simply the automatic inclusion of conversation state in each request/response?

Since writing this, has Amazon done anything to make conversational apps easier?

Re: Test runner in Rails 5 | BigBinary Blog

Tobin Harris — Tue, 29 Nov 2016 15:20:48 -0000

Thanks for the post.

How do you do your continuous testing? Is Guard the popular option these days?

Re: Here's the tool we built to reduce remote isolation in our team

Tobin Harris — Sat, 12 Nov 2016 02:37:02 -0000

Thanks Jon. We'll give it a try. Big fan of your work :)

Re: Speed up your IoT development with ready-to-go middlewares. Round two: Samsung ARTIK

Tobin Harris — Wed, 09 Nov 2016 04:14:52 -0000

Interesting stuff. Where are you guys at with this research now?

Re: Here's the tool we built to reduce remote isolation in our team

Tobin Harris — Mon, 24 Oct 2016 17:11:56 -0000

I've been toying with creating a Slack Niko Niko Calendar bot for Pocketworks (Leeds, UK), but this might just do the trick. Is it working for you after your first 5 months with it?

Re: How we built a truly Smart Office system based on Raspberry Pi

Tobin Harris — Sun, 23 Oct 2016 09:23:38 -0000

Awesome. Would be great to hear about the web software too in the appendix, and any other software. Or just a big software and parts list :)

Re: iOS 9 everything you need to know about iOS 9

Tobin Harris — Wed, 17 Jun 2015 13:43:49 -0000

Nice roundup, thanks.

Re: Boost Your Signal

Tobin Harris — Thu, 04 Dec 2014 16:58:14 -0000

Sounds like a great use case for BOOST, and fits perfectly with the enterprise/business angle Sonos are addressing with it.

Re: Boost Your Signal

Tobin Harris — Thu, 16 Oct 2014 12:52:04 -0000

No problems. My original post was trying to be playful but it sometimes comes across as arrogant on the web :)

Re: Boost Your Signal

Tobin Harris — Wed, 15 Oct 2014 19:02:35 -0000

BOOST is probably great for customers who want to extend the range of Sonos. But isn't the BOOST a WiFi extender? And can't customers pick up WiFi extenders anywhere? Sonos are usually great at making products that are niche, enabling and fun :) A WiFi extender doesn't makes sense to me as a Sonos product.

Re: Boost Your Signal

Tobin Harris — Wed, 15 Oct 2014 18:52:07 -0000

Fair enough. Despite my flippant comment I understand Sonos must have to conduct many R&D experiments, and also measure customer demand to be competitive. I also suspect the BOOST meets a real need amongst Sonos customers. It's just not very exciting to this particular customer.

Re: Boost Your Signal

Tobin Harris — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 17:54:28 -0000

Dear Sonos. Please avoid blah products like this. Simply invest all your R&D into an OUTDOOR PLAY unit that is weatherproof, is battery powered, has solar recharging, You'll sell 10,000,000 of them I know it :)

Re: How I Rewired My Brain to Become Fluent in Math - Issue 17: Big Bangs - Nautilus

Tobin Harris — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 15:13:54 -0000

Great article.

I wanted a quick step by step of this approach, and I think it's something like (feel free to correct):

- When you start learning something new, grab the first simple lesson or principle you're introduced to
- Then bury yourself in it. Spend hours on a single small thing. Play with it. See it from different contexts. Examine it. Become fluent in that small part. Devote 10 hours to something you might have normally devote 10 minutes so.
- You'll learn more by doing that than by trying to get "breadth"; it's better than trying to memorise a lot of stuff without truly internalising it.
- Rinse and repeat. Pick another part and do more of the above.

This feels like it would be a slow way to learn, but I suspect that you achieve a depth of learning focused on a small surface area, which ultimately gives a more permanent and well-founded platform for further learning.

Re: Mind Maps in Cognition

Tobin Harris — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 15:17:04 -0000

Nice post.

The first one looks like a causal loop diagram. I only learnt about them recently but they're great for finding vicious or virtuous cycles in a problem space.

Re: LeanNotes â€” Markdown and Kanban sitting in a tree, KISS...

Tobin Harris — Tue, 05 Nov 2013 11:40:07 -0000

Nice, what do you use now? Broken .com :(

Re: Are we doing MVC wrong? - Without the loop

Tobin Harris — Sun, 20 Oct 2013 16:29:56 -0000

This looks like a clean approach. It reminds me of the Command pattern. I quite like using that within MVC.

That said, it's also nice to push business logic into the model objects, or services ala Domain Driven Design.

Re: Overbooking of a Resource

Tobin Harris — Thu, 10 Oct 2013 05:33:44 -0000

Sweet. Do you have anything for tracking costs?

Re: A MongoDB Guy Learns CouchDB

Tobin Harris — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 09:03:32 -0000

"we're talking about CouchDB running on an cellphone, which loses connectivity to the net for hours, and is able to resync to a central server once the internet becomes available again."

This is the bit that got me most interested in CouchDB.

We did an iOS app using this and generally the offline/online replication works very well.

Querying CouchDB made me want to cry. It's a different paradigm and requires a new way of thinking, that I personally struggled with lot.

I'd love to see a MongCouch that blends the approaches, giving us the filtered master-master replication, HTTP interface, sensible CLI tools, awesome dynamic querying, plus a plethora of client libraries for every environment under the sun :)

Re: Sync - Realtime Rails Partials

Tobin Harris — Mon, 29 Apr 2013 02:49:51 -0000

Looks sweet. What editor are you using?

Re: Heroku | Heroku Postgres Databases Patched

Tobin Harris — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 15:37:59 -0000

Thanks folks. We didn't feel the downtime on any of our apps, so for us I'm really glad you did this rather than scheduling a future maintenance window. Good call. --Tobin

Re: iPhone Tip: Record Demos With ScreenFlow

Tobin Harris — Wed, 20 Jun 2012 03:43:29 -0000

Cheers for the comment.

Hmmm, not quite sure I understand the question!
The background is a desktop wallpaper.
The shadow is built into the wallpaper graphic.
I then float the simulator over the desktop, to get that affect.
In screenflow, I'm just recording the whole mac screen. I'd usually crop the video in ScreenFlow to exclude the OSX dock etc.

Make sense?

Cheers

Tobin