Unjarring The Responsive Web
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Responsive web design is what all the cool kids are up to these days. Basically a "responsive" site uses CSS media queries to change the page based on certain parameters. (This article a good place to start if you're new to the topic.) Usually this is width. The designer can change the appearance of the page based on the width of the browser. This allows the same design to be used on iPhone, iPad, and the desktop with minimal work instead of three different designs.
Most responsive sites are really jarring when they jump between media query sizes. Elements start jumping around and if you were reading something, your spot may or may not still be on the screen. I really wish people would take the time to improve this. It's not hard.
Here's a concrete example. Let's say you have a header on a website and want it to be smaller on mobile. This is easy with the following media query:
Hire Sam
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You can now hire me. During the next few months, I'll be mainly focused on some upcoming products, but I need to eat so here we are. You can now hire me for up to 10 hours a week for $200/hr. I know that's expensive, but I need to guard my time.
Bootstrapping is hard. I only have so much in the bank. It's really painful to watch it dwindle away. This whole process has put the pressure on. I love it! This is amazing motivation. The only reason I'm contracting is to keep my runway going longer so I have more time to get some products ready. Honestly, I could go without contracting, but the extra cushion will be nice.
I whipped up a little site and posted it at http://hire.soff.es. (The source is on Github by the way.) Head on over and hire me if you're interested. The first 4 weeks are already booked. The following weeks are already in talks so be quick.
Introducing Shares
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Really excited to finally be able to introduce Shares. I started working on this app in November. It's come a really long way since then.
Recently, I bought some Apple stock. (Which, by the way, has been a fantastic investment.) I found myself looking at the price in the stocks dashboard widget then using Alfred's calculator to do the math to see my change. This got cumbersome quick.
I just wanted an app to see my overall gain or loss at a glance, so I made one.
Image Optimization on iOS
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Recently in IncrediBooth, I greatly decreased the size of the IPA we send to Apple. We were around 70MB before everything and ended up at 31MB. It was honestly really easy to shave that much off the app.
IncrediBooth is a universal iPad/iPhone app. With the last update, we added support for the new iPad's retina display. This made our bundle huge. IncrediBooth has a ton of full screen textures to help illustrate the physical metaphor. These images as 2048 x 1536 PNGs are just massive. Converting some of these to JPEGs saved a ton of space. It's unfortunate they don't load as quickly, but some PNGs that were 10MB+ were ~200Kb. This was a good first step.
Even after converting as much of the big textures as I could to JPEGs, I was still over the 50MB limit. My goal was to be under 20MB so older devices could download it without WiFi. I turned to my Twitter friends and found ImageOptim.
Hello Internet: Selling My Stuff
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So, I'm selling all of my stuff.
I'm a big fan of minimalism. Every so often I get the urge to drastically simplify my life. This time around I have a good reason. It's exciting. I don't need really anything I have. It's definitely nice to have nice stuff, but I don't need it. I'm excited to simplify.
There's a list of stuff I'm selling on Yardsale. If you're in San Francisco and want to buy something, hit me up on Yardsale. If you're not in San Francisco and want to buy something, hit me up via email.