Progress in iOS
Posted on
In this year's RailsConf keynote, DHH talked about progress. In short, things are always changing—usually for the better. Progress is good. Embrace it.
I know a lot of people (especially in the Objective-C world) that fear progress. We have all of these great tools like Automatic Reference Counting, Core Data, and UIKit to make writing iOS applications easy. Apple has spent some considerable engineering time solving problems that we all have to solve. Quit wasting your time and embrace it.
People give lots of excuses for not using these fantastic technologies. Most of them boil down to resisting learning how to use them. Progress means learning. Learning is good. For these three in particular, the learning required to leverage all of the solutions to problems you're spending time solving is absolutely worth it. Spend your time building something useful instead of reinventing a solution to a solved problem.
RubyMotion Review
Posted on
RubyMotion was released today. RubyMotion lets you write iPhone and iPad apps in Ruby.
RubyMotion is a revolutionary toolchain for iOS. It lets you quickly develop and test native iOS applications for iPhone or iPad, all using the awesome Ruby language you know and love.
It's a very exciting new product from Laurent Sansonetti, the creator of MacRuby. He was at Apple working on MacRuby full-time, but decided to leave and do his own thing. This is what he made.
The Industry Podcast
Posted on
I had the privilege of being on The Industry Podcast. We talked about Adobe, HTML5Rocks, Dialoggs, and Cheddar.
It was a good time. Give it a listen.
Announcing Cheddar
Posted on
Cheddar is an app I started working on November of last year. From the start, it was a really exciting project, but I never had much time to devote to it. Now that I don't have a job, I've been focusing on it full time.
Cheddar will be the first Nothing Magical product that I launch. I'm massively excited to release it so you can see what I've been up to. It should come out in a couple of weeks. I have a lot of other ideas that I can't wait to work on, but more on that later.
Check out Cheddar. I made a little video to tell you about Cheddar. Head on over and watch it.
Don’t Forget the Little Things
Posted on
Tonight I spent an hour on a simple animation. Instead of the UI element simply appearing, it now fades in and fades out. To get this right takes time. You wouldn't believe how much nicer it feels with the simple animation. It feels polished and complete instead of jarring and hacked together.
It's funny how a 0.2 second animation can make something feel a million times nicer
The fade in takes 0.3 seconds, moves the element 100 pixels, and scales from 80% to 100%. The fade out takes 0.25 seconds, moves the 45 pixels, and scales from 100% to 90%. (All of these values are relative to the element's size.) The point being, getting all of this right took awhile. It's a lot of trail and error to get it right. When you get it, it will just feel right.