Tuesday, November 17th, 2009
Paging is separating out content to multiple pages, and it is a really common task for websites. The problem is that like oh so many things on the web, it is rarely done well. Come with me on this journey (rant?) on the correct way to implement paging.
Each page should have a “Next” and “Previous” button. If you are referring to chronological content, such as blog posts, use “Newer” and “Older” to be more specific. They should be the most prominent part of the paging area, since anyone interacting with that area of the page will most likely be going back and forth through the results.
There should also be a list of the pages in between the next/previous button.
Here is an example from Bubble Burster website:
An example of using Newer and Previous buttons
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Thursday, October 15th, 2009
I recently had the misfortune of having to make a video to showcase Bubble Burster. The results were not pretty. I was literally laughed at by friends when they saw it. The problem is that while you can take screenshots of the iPhone screen, there is no way to capture video. I could have used a screen capture program but those cost around $100 (yes I am very cheap). The best solution I could come up with was to use the built in iSight on my MacBook to show the app.
Looking around for a better alternative I ran across this post from Tweetie creator, atebits. Basically what he did was create an app that set some settings on the iPhone simulator to look more like the real thing and then overlaid a circle for the pointer and a glare for the screen. You still need a screen capture program, but it looks much better. This got me thinking of what I could do.
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Sunday, October 11th, 2009
I recently purchased the beginning embedded electronics kit from SparkFun Electronics. It is a kit that include everything to start programming AVR microcontrollers. A microcontroller lets you control the most simple, physical things, like an LED or a motor. Given my lust for control, you can see why this has quickly become my latest obsessive hobby.
The problem is that I want to be able to program the micro with my Mac, which presented a few problems. Here is how I got it working with Xcode on my Mac.
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Friday, October 9th, 2009
I have been using Lunarpages for over a year now and I really love it. I first started using it for work, and then for my personal sites like this one. I have really enjoyed it and will definitely be using it for a long time to come. It is what I recommend to anyone that dare ask my opinion.
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Monday, October 5th, 2009
It has been about a month now since Bubble Burster was released to the App Store and early sales are not promising. Before I launched Bubble Burster, I did a lot of research into marketing and sales of iPhone Apps and I found very little information. Most of what is available in terms of sales numbers is from big companies with apps in the top 100, and almost no data from your average app developer.
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Monday, September 14th, 2009
I finished up the Bubble Burster website today. You can find it at bubble.davidbeckblog.com. I built it with WordPress (same as this site) but I made the theme myself and wrote and edited several plugins to get it just right.
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Friday, September 11th, 2009
If your OCD like myself, and also suffer from the need to make websites, you may have run into this pesky problem when you lay out images and what not on a page. The problem comes when you try to mathematically determine the exact right padding so that all the objects are laid out evenly only to find that the last one falls off the end to the next line.
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Wednesday, September 9th, 2009
I titled this post as such because I am hoping to help others that are in the situation I was in. Go ahead and Google “CGInsetRect”. When I did, I got 0 results. Not a single page has anything on it. The reason? While on Mac OS X you would call NSInsetRect, on iPhone you use CGRects. They are almost identical including having the same function set. The catch? NSRects functions all use the naming convention NSFunctionRect. CGRects on the other hand, as I forgot, use CGRectFunction.
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Sunday, May 10th, 2009
Figured out a very nice solution to automatically edit new rows added by NSArrayControllers via bindings! I searched for a while and didn’t find any correct solutions, so I made my own.
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Saturday, April 4th, 2009
Wednesday I picked up a copy of “Robot Building for Beginners” from the library and am now almost done with it. I have read several other books on robots and electronics, but this is the first that isn’t a complete waste of paper.
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