whatever happened, happened

Code Bubbles: Rethinking the User Interface Paradigm of...

Thu, 11 Mar 2010 18:55:03 +0000

Code Bubbles: Rethinking the User Interface Paradigm of Integrated Development Environments (via AndrewBragdon)

The essential goal of this project is to make it easier for developers to see many fragments of code (or other information) at once without having to navigate back and forth. Each of these fragments is shown in a bubble.

anologue

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 21:32:47 +0000

anologue:

An open source project built with the forked, PHP 5.3+ version of CakePHP - Lithium. anologue is like comments, meets im, meets irc, meets your favorite paste app, meets instant coffee.

Learning a language vs. learning a culture

Wed, 10 Mar 2010 02:32:56 +0000

Learning a language vs. learning a culture:

In short: when you learn a programming language — a real, grown-up one rather than a novelty — you have to learn the culture that goes with it. You just do. And it’s time-consuming and frustrating and feels like a waste of time, and yields up very few of those satisfying Aha! moments. It’s only gradually, having waded through these fertile but sometime smelly swamps for a few weeks’ evenings, that its all starting to swim into focus and make some kind of sense.

about:linkroom

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 04:20:00 +0000

**tl;dr: linkroom is my latest creation and it’s in private beta. Read the second paragraph to learn what it does. DM me if you’re interested. **

Here’s something I’ve been working on for two weeks now: linkroom, yet another web app built on top of Twitter API. It was inspired by laterstars, and obviously involved with links.

So what the hell is linkroom? To put it simply, linkroom stores latest links from your Twitter stream. linkroom reads your timeline, finds all links and imports them into its database. You can then have a glance at those links, decide which ones to read and which ones to ignore. And that’s it. Nothing more, nothing less.

Why would you need linkroom? Frankly, I don’t know. I only know for myself. I need linkroom because my Twitter timeline is a gold mine. I read nearly all tweets, click on a large portion of links and enjoy repeating this process every day. Sometimes I was left behind by the sheer number of tweets and miss some breaking news, like those about Microsoft Courier. So I want an automated way to put all links in front of my eyes and help me catch up with things I care about.

linkroom was built to help me cope with information overload, not to make my situation worse. So linkroom doesn’t automatically import links. It only does so when I explicitly tell it to. I could Do this as frequently or rarely as I want. To linkroom, only the latest links are relevant. Those buried deep down in my timeline are ignored.

linkroom works like this: For each link in your Twitter timeline, it displays the title and the person who posted this. Hover the title and it shows the full URL. Hover the person’s screen name and you could read the tweet containing the current link. From these factors, you decide whether you want to read the article this link leads to or not. You know you don’t have time to read every link, so be selective. Mark it as interesting to add it to your reading list, ignore it to make the link go away, or if you can’t make up your mind, add it to the end of your reading list so that you could check it out after finish reading other stuff.

When you’re done with this task (it generally takes me less than five minutes to go over a screenful of links), your reading list is ready for consumption. If you like reading on the screen, click linkroom’s bookmarklet to access the first item in your list. Click one more time to read the next one. Rinse and repeat until you’re done. Or, if you prefer reading in Instapaper, subscribe to your account’s RSS feed.

Some fancy stuff I’ve implemented in linkroom:

Short URL expansion: Admit it, those convenient bit.ly or is.gd links are cryptic when it comes to guess what they are about.
Fluid.app integration: Growl and sound notifications.
Visited links detection: Guess which links you have read and mark them as such.
Customisable rules: Choose to whitelist or blacklist those you enjoy or don’t bother checkig out.

Still there’re some stuff I haven’t covered. But those 500 hundreds words are enough to make my hands hurt (I’m typing them in Writeroom for iPhone like usual). So, TTFN.

If you’re interested in becoming a beta tester, DM me or reply to this post.

From December 2006 to February 2007 we were in touch with the...

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 03:07:06 +0000

From December 2006 to February 2007 we were in touch with the product manager of facebook. The prospective: Redesigning facebook. Eventually. Since the contract was never signed, we kept our designs in the drawer. Until now… (via iA » iA’s 2006 Facebook Designs, Redesigned)

A Look at Some Wicked iPhone Jailbreak Apps and Extensions

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:56:22 +0000

A Look at Some Wicked iPhone Jailbreak Apps and Extensions:

Here’s a look at some of my most beloved and also some of the most popular applications and extensions on the jailbreak scene.

Penzu - Write in Private: Free Online Diary and Personal Journal

Tue, 09 Mar 2010 00:56:22 +0000

Penzu - Write in Private: Free Online Diary and Personal Journal:

Penzu is a free online diary and personal journal that combines privacy and ease of use to make writingonline as simple and intuitive as writing on a pad of paper.

Jelly - a compact, powerful ORM for Kohana 3

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 16:12:26 +0000

Jelly - a compact, powerful ORM for Kohana 3:

Small, clean, well-commented codebase. Top-to-bottom table column aliasing. Natural, model-oriented extension of Kohana’s Query Builder. Extensible field architecture.

Ambilight for video tag—prepare to cry.

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:33:50 +0000

Ambilight for video tag—prepare to cry.:

If Sublime Video resulted in a mess in your pants, make sure you take em off before you see for this one. Ambilight for video tag. At first it looks like an average video player, the kind that loads standard HTML5 video. As the video plays, you very quickly notice what’s happening at the edges. The plugin automatically grabs the average colour in each area, and spreads it across the bounds of the video. This is not a new concept, as there have been hardware ambilights as well as Flash® versions of the same. What makes this one special, is that it’s written entirely using HTML5.

Evolution of Evony Video Game Ads

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 23:10:35 +0000

Evolution of Evony Video Game Ads:

The Guardian:

On the surface, Evony is a pretty standard online strategy game – a simulation in which players take the role of a medieval noble who must build up an empire. But the way the game has been marketed has created a bit of a stir: the games marketer Bruce Everiss has charted the volume of spam being sent by its creators, while Jeff Atwood, a US programmer and blogger, has documented the ads’ increasingly racy nature – from a simple medieval warrior promising the game would be “free forever”, through a string of increasingly racy images … until, finally, it was simply advertising itself by showing a pair of breasts.

via i.imgur.com

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 14:25:00 +0000

via i.imgur.com

Xcode Shortcuts Updated for Xcode 3.2 on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 14:19:26 +0000

Xcode Shortcuts Updated for Xcode 3.2 on Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard:

A cheatsheet for Xcode

Cocoa Source Code » Matt Legend Gemmell

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 05:23:27 +0000

Cocoa Source Code » Matt Legend Gemmell:

This page contains some Cocoa/Objective-C source code for fellow Mac OS X developers.

1 Bit Audio Player : A JavaScript-inserted Flash MP3 player for WordPress blogs and other websites

Sat, 06 Mar 2010 05:23:27 +0000

1 Bit Audio Player : A JavaScript-inserted Flash MP3 player for WordPress blogs and other websites:

1 Bit Audio Player is a very simple and lightweight Adobe Flash MP3 player with automatic JavaScript insertion. It’s main purpose is to act as a quick in-page preview for audio files you link to…

Development Video Access List - Apple Developer

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 20:37:08 +0000

Development Video Access List - Apple Developer:

iPhone & Mac development videos

iPad Application Design

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 20:14:43 +0000

iPad Application Design:

I held a 6-hour workshop at NSConference in both the UK and USA recently, focusing on software design and user experience. Predictably, an extremely popular topic was the iPad, and how to approach the design of iPad applications. I gave a 90-minute presentation on the subject to start each workshop, and I want to share some of my observations here.

Scaling Web Applications with HMVC – techPortal

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:37:56 +0000

Scaling Web Applications with HMVC – techPortal:

HMVC is a collection of traditional MVC triads operating as one application. Each triad is completely independent and can execute without the presence of any other. All requests made to triads must…

Cloth Simulation

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 03:12:17 +0000

Cloth Simulation:

Click and drag to move points. Hold down any key to pin them (‘g’ toggles gravity).

via i.imgur.com

Fri, 05 Mar 2010 02:51:25 +0000

via i.imgur.com

6 Places to Find Superb, High Quality Mac Icons | Mac.AppStorm

Thu, 04 Mar 2010 19:21:54 +0000

6 Places to Find Superb, High Quality Mac Icons | Mac.AppStorm:

Today I’ll be showcasing 6 places where you can find the perfect icon. We’re focusing on the absolute highest quality, so you can rest assured you won’t find any second rate design here!