Nick Harris' shared items in Google Reader

Creating iPhone and Mac icons using Inkscape (Part 2 of 2)

2009-11-07T06:59:00Z

In this part, I expand on the simple techniques presented in the first part by adding different line, effect and texture styles. I'll also present some Mac application icons and simple texturing.

Introduction

This series covers the creation of the following different icon styles:

The first icon was created in the first part of the series. I'll go through the creation of the remaining variations on the checkbox/checkmark theme in this post.

I'll assume that you've read the first part or are familiar with the techniques involved.

Icon 2: A brighter, more colorful iPhone icon

Goals in this section

Use a radial gradient
Learn to adjust all of the common stroke properties
Learn to adjust a multi-effect filter

The icon developed in Part 1 is very simple — really just a couple white lines over a typical iPhone icon background — which is appropriate for a serious application but might not stand out as prominently against other icons.

In this variation, I'll have the background reach a bright point behind the checkbox element and change the effect on the lines so that the lines look embossed into this bright point — visually integrating the background and the overlayed element.

I'll also introduce a complimentary (opposite hues) color scheme with an azure blue and a red.

A radial background

Starting with a 57x57 document as created in Part 1, add a rectangle filling the document area.

Set the fill to a radial fill and edit the gradient. In the Gradient Editor, click "Add Stop" twice to make the gradient a four part gradient. Top to bottom, the four gradient colors should be:

RGBA=(192,255,250,255)
RGBA=(99,164,184,255), Offset 0.26
RGBA=(5,74,119,255), Offset 0.62
RGBA=(0,40,80,255)

We now have a bright spot in the center of the background.

Over the top of this, paste (or recreate) the starburst effect from Part — X,Y=(-15.7,-15.7) should center it perfectly.

In the Fill and Stroke palette, set the opacity of the starburst to 100%.

Now, to make the starburst smoother, open the Filter Editor (from the Filters menu) and find the starburst's blur effect (it should be selected in the filter column when the starburst itself is selected). Select the Gaussian Blur effect and set the standard deviation to 0.75.

Different stroke properties for the checkbox and checkmark

Create the checkbox and checkmark in the same way that they were created in the first part or copy them in. If you copy them in, select both the checkbox and the checkmark and choose Filters→Remove Filters to remove the shadow and bevel effect applied in the first part.

Remove the corner radius from the checkbox (select it using the rectangle tool and set the Rx and Ry to zero). In the Fill and Stroke Editor, select the Stroke Style Tab and set the Line Width to 4.0 "px" and the Join Style to rounded. The result of these steps is to create a slightly thicker line that is curved on the corners within its width.

Select the checkmark and set the stroke color to RGBA=(255,42,42,255) and the stroke width to 4.0 "px".

A customized "Cutout glow"

With both checkbox and checkmark selected, choose Filters→Shadows and Glows→Cutout Glow. Go to the Filter Editor and find this Cutout Glow filter. This filter will have 5 effect rows. Select the Offset row and set the X,Y offset to (0.8,0.8). Select the Gaussian Blur row and set the Standard Deviation to 1.0.

Now follow the instructions from the "Apply the gloss effect and round corners" subsection of the previous post to complete the icon.

Icon 3: A cartoonish style

Goals in this section

Directly edit paths for greater control
See a Path Effect (Spiro Spline) in action

This variation will forego the starburst effect and instead go for a smoother, more "cartoonish" approach. The checkbox and checkmark will then need to be more distinctive as they will be the only significant graphical elements

Creating a path

Start with the background rectangle from the "brighter, more colorful iPhone icon" created above (if you created a cloned version for the round corners, don't copy the cloned version as it will behave strangely).

Select the Bezier Path tool (11th icon down in the Tool Area). We'll draw the rough loop first.

You can use the Bezier Path tool in one of two ways: simple click-and-release to create corner points and straight line segments or click and drag to create curve points (the dragging then affects the curvature of each point).

For simplicity here, I'll show you how to create the path using corner points and we'll apply the curve as a second step. When you're more comfortable with the Bezier Tool, this can be done as a single step.

Create a point at the 12 o'clock position, then 9, 6, 3 and then underneath the original 12. Then another inside the second twelve and then inside the 3, 6, 9, and between the first and second 12's. Then close the path by clicking on the first point.

Bezier path creation: If you make a mistake with the path, you can either fix it later or press escape to cancel the whole path. Pressing the return-key will end the path without closing it.

Adjusting path control point properties

Using the Node Tool (2nd icon down in the Tool Area) ensure the path you just created is selected. Drag a selection box around the nodes at 3, 6 and 9 o'clock (don't select the nodes at 12 o'clock). In the toolbar at the top, select the "Make selected nodes smooth" button (should be 8th from the left in the toolbar immediately above the window).

Applying a path effect

Leaving the path selected, choose the Path→Path Effect Editor menu item. In the Path Effect Editor palette, select "Spiro Spline" from the popup menu and click the "Add" button. The "Spiro Spline" is an effect that makes smooth curved paths much easier than regular Bezier curves.

Once this is done, you can tweak the nodes in the path (using the Node Tool) until it is the exact shape desired.

In the Fill and Stroke Editer, remove any stroke, apply a faded yellow to faded orange linear gradient fill from left to right across the checkbox loop and it is done.

Stroke to path

Create the checkmark as for the previous icons but set the Stroke Width to 6 "px" and the Style Join and Cap to square corners. With the path selected, choose the menu item Path→Stroke to Path. This will turn the line into a filled path. Set the stroke of this path to "no stroke" and set the fill to an orange to red linear gradient fill from left to right across the checkmark.

Now we need to adjust the checkmark to have a looser aesthetic. Select the Node Tool and the checkmark. Drag the lines in the short stem upwards slightly and the lines in the long stem inwards slightly. Adjust the control points at the ends of each stem so that they are flared outwards a little.

Follow the instructions from "Bevel effect and shadow" from Part 1 to apply these effects. Follow the instructions from the "Apply the gloss effect and round corners" subsection of the previous post to complete the icon.

Icon 4: A document-based Mac icon

Goals in this section

See the common components of a Mac document-based application icon
Use multiple overlapping gradients to achieve softer gradients
Add a texture to a background by filling with text

In terms of colors and effects, Mac icons tend to be far more subdued than iPhone icons. Where iPhone icons are only shown on the Home screen but are small and need to stand out, Mac icons may sit in the Dock for extended periods and shouldn't be distracting during this time.

For this reason, Mac icon colors tend to be slightly more subdued than iPhone icon colors and are frequently much lighter overall.

While Mac icons are typically larger (an average of around 64x64) they can also be shown at smaller resolutions. The approach to satisfying the size range is normally to compose the icon from two key parts:

An object or item that is easily recognizable in silhouette or at small sizes
Texture or subtler elements that fade away at smaller sizes but add structure and context at larger sizes

Mac icons must also handle a range of different background colors as they may be shown against people's desktop backgrounds, white folder backgrounds or against the near black of a vertical Dock. To achieve good contrast against the background, most icons are generally light in color but with a subtle shadow behind them — not for 3D effect but to contrast with lighter backgrounds. Many icons also incorporate a frame or boundary into the representation which further adds to the strength of the icon's silhouette.

A rotated background

To start the icon, create a 64x64 px document. This size will help us optimize for the expected screen resolution.

Into this, draw a 44 by 50 rectangle. Give it an azure to deep blue linear gradient from left to right and a white 3px stroke.

Using the Selection Tool (first in the Tool Area), select the rectangle. Initially, this will show the resizing arrows around the shape. Click a second time to switch these arrows to the rotating arrows (don't double click as that will switch to the Node Tool). Click and drag one of the corner arrows to rotate the rectangle by 8° (the rotated angle should be visible in the status bar at the bottom of the window while dragging but the exact angle isn't important).

Some effects and another gradient

On its own, a single gradient isn't a very impressive effect. The trick in making a background effect that is both attractive and subtle, is normally to layer a few different effects on top of each other.

With the rectangle selected, select "Path"→"Union". This may seem like a weird thing to do but it actually recreates the object using a path at the rotated orientation. We do this because Effects in Inkscape (like the shadow we're just about to apply) look bad (pixelated) when rotated. Recreating the object at this rotation means the effect will not have a rotation applied.

Copy and paste this rotated rectangle and put the copy next to the original. Apply a drop shadow to the original with 50% opacity, Offset of (1,1) and radius of 1.5.

Now remove the stroke from the copy. You'll notice that without the white stroke covering 1.5 px of the copy, the gradient region of the copy actually looks slightly bigger than the original. We need this shape to be the same size as the colored area of the original, so use the Selection Tool and with the rezize arrows, adjust the two to match (set the color to a flat fill like red and overlap the two objects to make it easier).

Now set the second object to have a top to bottom (parallel to its rotated axis) linear gradient fill with four color points:

RGBA=(168,247,249,255)
RGBA=(144,198,215,0), Offset 0.30
RGBA=(95,144,175,0), Offset 0.70
RGBA=(18,49,106,255)

Since this second gradient is transparent in the middle, it will show the first gradient in varying amounts through the middle. Overlapping the two should result in a softer gradient that vaguely resembles diffuse lighting across a slightly convex surface.

A light text-based texture

The formatting of the following paragraph is not an mistake.

The Text Tool is two icons above the Gradient Tool. Click on the document to create a text object and type the text shown and formatted as above. With the text object selected, choose the Zapfino font from the font popup menu in the top toolbar. I like Zapfino because when zoomed out, it seems ornate and indistinct.

Now use the Selection Tool to scale and position the text object over the other gradient rectangles.

To add a gloss effect over everything, create a 53 by 28 rectangle, with a flat RGBA=(255,255,255,60) fill and no stroke and rotate and position it over the top half of the existing shapes.

The "representative" element

For the representative element, I'll use a checkmark in an orange circle. Create a checkmark line (same as in previous icons) set a white 5 px stroke on the checkmark.

Create a 43 by 43 circle (unlike the Rectangle Tool, you can't specify the size of a circle with the Circle Tool selected. If you want to do this, you'll need to use the Selection Tool). Set a red-orange to yellow-orange radial gradient on the object and no stroke.

Using the Gradient Tool, drag the center control point of the gradient to the bottom-right corner of the circle's bounding box, the endpoint of the horizontal stem to the bottom-left corner and the vertical endpoint to the top-right corner.

With the circle selected, use the menu item Filters→ABCs→Diffuse Light. Then use the Filter Editor to set the Gaussian Blur effect of this filter to a Standard Deviation of 1.0. Then apply a drop shadow to the circle.

Finally, position everything together and the icon is complete.

Icon 5: A circular Mac icon

Goals in this section

See the common components of a Mac "appliance" application icon
Apply effects to a path to make the boundary shape more interesting and more distinct from the background
Create a texture using an effect

A circular icon is constructed in the same way as a rectangular backed icon. The only significant differences are:

gradients tend to be various kinds of radial gradient to give a convex feel to the round shape
the overlayed element will be more centered so it helps if it is less solid (thinner and lighter)

Compose a round icon

Since you've seen how to put together basic shapes and radial fills before, I'll just show you the components I used to create this icon as a graphic:

Notice how bright the elements all are: Mac icons are normally quite bright — you want to avoid a "muddy" effect with too many dark colors.

When composing elements, if one of them is at the wrong depth (overlaps other objects wrong) you can change the depth by selecting the object and using the Page Up/Page Down keys (or by using the "Object"→"Raise"/"Lower" menu items).

Make the checkmark look interesting

The checkmark must stand alone in this icon, which means that it should have a few special effects applied to it so that it doesn't look sterile and boring. I applied the following effects to the checkmark:

Filters→Non-realistic 3D shaders→Comics
Filters→Shadows and Glows→Inner Glow. For this filter, I changed the Flood color to a medium blue and reduced the Gaussian Blur (now the second blur in the Effects list for this object after the Comics blur from the previous effect) to a Standard Deviation of 1.0.
A drop shadow.

To texture the circle, I used the RGBA=(176,112,42,140) circle (middle element shown above) and applied a Filters→Image effects, transparent→Marbled ink effect. This gives a slightly moon cratered look that matches the somewhat planetoid shape of the object.

Conclusion

You can download an Inkscape SVG file containing all the icons and their compositions (482kB).

This two part series has been outside the normal domain of programming information that I provide. However, applications programmers will regularly find themselves needing to create, edit or adjust artwork-related assets in their applications. I hope I've given some useful tips on the way artwork assets are composed and ways you can make your artwork look good, even if it is very simple.

With iPhone or Mac icons, they are typically composed from the same elements:

A background gradient (or two).
A texture or additional effect.
A gloss or lighting highlight.
A foreground element or symbol representing your application which, after the other elements are applied, need only be very simple.

With gradients and effects, it is helpful to use a few so that your icon seems rich on close inspection but to keep each one very subtle since they shouldn't distract or make the icon harder to perceive (in a quick glance, the user shouldn't even see the effects you've added).

Icons do not need to be complex; the most professional icons are often very basic. Lack of artistic skill need not be a hinderance if you keep it simple.

And while we’re at it, your kids are ugly

2009-11-07T12:00:11Z

Vanity Plate Win
STFU-PLS

Picture by: dunno source Submitted by: dunno source via Fail Uploader

Why version control is important for solo developers

2009-11-07T15:22:28Z

It’s common practice for any software project with multiple coders to use some version control mechanism. CVS or Subversion used to be popular. These days distributed systems like git and Mercurial are the quickly replacing the old standards. But what about the cases when you’re the only coder?

Let me tell you. Whatever the initial setup cost, coding is much easier with version control than without it.

Firstly, if you think that you only work with yourself and you can handle yourself, have a quick look at the I Am A Moron section of this post or this recent tweet by Kevin Hoctor.

Now a few years ago, I started work on a helpdesk ticketing system called tina. In the early days of tina development, I’d didn’t use any version control. I was frequently confused by my own code. I’d look at a piece of code and wonder, “What was I trying to do here?” or “When did I change this? Wait, did I change this?”. Occasionally, I’d tar-up my code for a historical record and I’m not sure now if I ever referred to those tarballs. When I eventually put the tina code into a Subversion repository I was much happier because of it.

With another project, that I wanted to put under version control, I found I had no less that 3 different versions of the code lying around on my hard drive. It look some investigation with diff in order to find out which one was the most current. Fortunately I didn’t have some files more recent in one copy and others more recent in another copy, but that could have easily happened.

With version control, it’s easy to find out what changed in my code, especially if I write useful commit messages. The most unexpected (and incredibly positive) side effect was that once I started using version control, the quality of my code went up dramatically. By tracking exactly what was changing between revisions, unwanted changes and debug code did not slip into the shipping code.

It’s worth noting that this approach goes hand-in-hand with unit testing. Version control lets you know what is changing and unit testing lets you know that your changes don’t result in regressions. As solo developers without QA teams or even a QA person, using these best practices seriously improves our ability to complete with larger organizations.

So, I recommend version control for any coding project bigger than a few lines of code. I used Subversion for a while and have now moved onto git.

My tips for version control success:

Make small commits – don’t commit a whole day’s work if you wrote 2 features and fixed 8 bugs. That should be at least 10 commits. For sure, commit every-time you complete something – a bugfix, a feature, fixing a typo, a formatting change. It’s makes it much easier to find regressions and other issues later. Oh, and try not to work on many things at once especially if the changes overlap in the code.
Compile before commit – each commit represents a known state of your code, so make sure the code compiles correctly without warnings or errors before committing.
Diff before commit – before each commit, look over the diff of your current code compared with the last commit. Then you’ll know for sure what you are committing. If you don’t like part of the proposed commit, change it, diff it again, repeat until you like it and then commit.
Write useful messages – When you commit a message is required is usually. Make sure it makes sense to you and to others looking at your repository.

What I Learned About Entrepreneurship From Watching the World Series of Poker

2009-11-05T01:00:36Z

I can’t play poker, but I do enjoy watching it on TV. We’re in the middle of the 2009 World Series of Poker, an event that draws thousands of professional and amateur players to Las Vegas every year. The grand finale is the Main Event, a massive Texas Hold ’Em tournament with thousands of players and millions of dollars for the winner.

Tournament poker used to be the province of professionals. But starting a few years ago, a huge wave of amateurs has invaded the game. As a result, of the thousands of entrants into the Main Event, only a few hundred are real pros.

To my surprise, I’ve actually learned a lot about entrepreneurship from watching the World Series of Poker. But it shouldn’t be too surprising. Both rely on acting strategically under conditions of extreme uncertainty. And, in both, small changes in your odds of winning can have a big impact on the final outcome. In fact, I now routinely use the Main Event to help entrepreneurs cope with a frustrating paradox.

Why are some terrible entrepreneurs so successful?

Because the structural barriers to creating a high-tech startup have been lowered dramatically in the past few years, we’re experiencing a huge influx of entrepreneurs. This is a great thing. But it’s meant that there are an awful lot of startup stories floating around. When those stories take on the status of myths, they create tremendous confusion. Naturally, we want to emulate those that have been successful. But that’s not always a good idea.

In the World Series of Poker, no professional has won the Main Event in seven years. When you think about it, this is very surprising. Professional players are so much better than amateurs that they can make a living – in many cases, becoming very very rich – by exploiting the difference between their level of skill and the level of the people they play with. The best of the best win many tournaments each year. By any objective measure, they are much better players than the amateurs. Yet the Main Event has been won year in and year out by a complete unknown player. Some of those amateurs go on to become semi-pro players. But most have never won another tournament after their big win. Why?

The reason is that being a professional player shifts the odds of winning a given poker hand in the professional’s favor, just a little bit. Over the course of a year, a given pro will play thousands of poker hands, and so this shift in probabilities adds up to dramatic winnings. But on any given hand, they still have a significant probability of losing — even if their play is perfect.

Similarly, given enough amateurs in the field, the law of large numbers means that at least some of them will get lucky enough times to outperform even the best pros. That’s why I can say with some certainty that an amateur will win the Main Event this year, even though I have absolutely no idea which of the six thousand entrants it will be.

Entrepreneurship is similar. So much of what makes a startup successful is totally out of our control: the timing of the market, the behavior of competitors, the IPO or M&A window, underlying technology trends and, of course, the human factors of investors, co-founders and employees. Truly successful startup methodologies like customer development or the lean startup can only hope to increase our odds of success — they can’t guarantee it. The converse is also true: even entrepreneurs who do everything wrong sometimes get lucky and make a lot of money anyway. Some even do it repeatedly.

That’s why, for any tactic or strategy — no matter how hare-brained — you can find some “proof” that it works in some company somewhere. That’s what makes processing startup advice so hard. Just because someone has had a success doesn’t necessarily mean they understand why they were successful at all.

Which brings me to the second thing I’ve learned from the WSOP. It’s called a disciplined laydown. In poker, winning requires that your hand beats your opponents hand. The problem is that you don’t know what your opponent has. Amateur players often believe that their success depends on the quality of the cards they are dealt. Consequently, they fold their bad cards and wait for that one big hand to get their chips in with. Unfortunately, having a big hand doesn’t mean you’ll win — your opponent could have an even bigger hand. That’s why the most important skill in poker is not bluffing, counting cards, or computing the odds. It’s figuring out when you need to fold a big, big hand. Watching the pros do this on TV is amazing. Over time, they develop an uncanny instinct for knowing when they are beat, and not throwing more money after bad.

In fact, once you realize that this is the most important skill in poker, it becomes clear that when professional players bet, they are really probing for information. Everything is calculated to help them figure out if their opponent has one of those big hands that might beat them. Folding in those situations saves chips that can be used more profitably later in the tournament.

I think there’s some wisdom here for entrepreneurs, too. We get attached to our big ideas, but it’s those big visions that get us into trouble. Just because we’ve sunk a lot of time and energy into an idea doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a good one. In fact, the main reason we need to get out of the building and validate our ideas is so that we can realize we’re beat before it’s too late and pivot. Once you have that insight, you realize that all of the work we’re doing in building an initial idea — from minimum viable product to split-testing to customer validation — is all designed, like the bets of a poker pro, to promote learning about where we stand.

And that provides another possibility for dealing with startup advice. Instead of making an exhaustive search for all the smartest, most successful people and copying them — learn to place small bets. Take any advice (including mine), and think it through for yourself. Do you understand the underlying principles? Can you see how it applies to your specific context? Can you tease apart the impact of luck? And, once you think you have some advice you might like to follow, try it out. Find a way to pilot it without betting your whole company. And then be prepared to fold if it’s not working. Each time, make sure you do a root cause analysis, and figure out what you learned.

And, if you find advice that seems to work, be ready to go all-in.

Eric Ries is a serial entrepreneur and author of the blog Startup Lessons Learned.

Image courtesy Flickr user banspy

TapLynx Webinar: sign up now!

2009-11-03T20:25:55Z

Our sign-up page for the webinar next week is live. Please go here to sign up!

http://taplynx.com/webinars/

The webinar takes place Thursday, November 12 at 1pm ET, and will feature input from the entire TapLynx team. We’ll also have a question and answer session so start thinking about what you would like to ask us.

As a side note, since new versions of TapLynx will be released quite frequently, I added a FAQ to the wiki that explains how to apply the new versions to your existing projects: http://developer.newsgator.com/wiki/index.php?title=FAQs

Holiday Lighting Win

2009-11-03T15:00:00Z

Picture by: JackBrimstone Submitted by: JackBrimstone via Fail Uploader

Copyrights and trademark infringement with iPhone Apps: A developers tale.

2009-10-30T19:27:02Z

Redneck Jokes and More was an app we built for some fun and to learn about the iTunes App Store. I would not call Redneck Jokes and More a flagship application for Ninth Division. It was built as a good way to learn the App Store and the (so called) science in purchased apps. I even wrote about why it was a great idea. It was a lot of fun to make and it was intended to be a learning tool for the business. I think it has gone full circle as a learning app as you will read.

RIP: Read the legal tale that lead me to pull it.

Vaccines

2009-10-29T23:46:09Z

An interesting link on Daring Fireball today has me thinking about vaccines.

I’m still living with the effects of the chicken pox I had in third grade.

There was no vaccine then. Every kid just got it. It swept through school, and nobody tried too hard to prevent the spread, because every kid would get it, and it was better to get it when you were young.

It was just a thing. We thought we were modern because it was just chicken pox — not polio or smallpox or one of those scarier diseases that had been conquered.

But now there is a vaccine, and I wish like crazy there had been a vaccine when I was a kid.

I was nearly hospitalized — my Mom tells me I was within an hour or so of having to go the hospital when I could finally sip a few drops of water without vomiting.

I remember vomiting so much that the vomiting itself didn’t even bother me any more. I started crying out of frustration. Just when I started to feel a little better, a little cooler, and hungry and thirsty, I’d try the smallest sip of water, and whatever was left in me to come up would come back up. It just went on and on.

For days? I don’t know. It seemed like weeks of nights. Trying to sleep. Itchy, exhausted, unable. The screaming heat inside that wouldn’t end. Then the stomach convulsions.

I was told I had chicken pox not just on my skin but inside me, too. Could that be true? Was that possible? I still don’t know — but I didn’t question it, because it sure felt like it.

Of course I had chicken pox on my head. So I had pink hair — pink with the Calamine Lotion my Mom applied. The pink was mortifying to a third-grade boy.

A friend of my Mom’s, a woman from down the street, came by one day. (She was cool: she drove a white Corvette. Here’s one.) I can still feel the embarassment of my pink hair. The spots all over my face I could deal with: the pink hair was devastating.

I was finally able to drink water, and then I moved up to jello and then on to chicken noodle soup. I was able to sit at the dinner table and watch the network news. (ABC news broadcast from WPVI in Philadelphia.)

I got better. After about three weeks of the chicken pox, I could return to school, even though still slightly scarred. Prepared to be teased.

I was the smartest kid in the grade. I won every spelling bee. I got 100% test scores. I always had.

And though I was prepared to be teased for the visible remains of my chicken pox, I was not prepared to get in trouble with my teacher for cheating.

Cheating? Me? People cheated off me, not the other way around.

But I was looking at someone else’s paper. Because I couldn’t see the chalkboard anymore and I couldn’t read the questions to copy them down.

I kept getting in trouble, and I kept getting teased, and I was angry and hot-headed a whole bunch of the time. I started getting in trouble for accidents, and for things other kids had done. (Which wasn’t that new, actually: I was in trouble at school, or about to be and dreading it, most of the time as a kid.)

It was a few weeks before news got to my parents and they took me for an eye exam.

Chicken pox had ruined my eyesight.

So I got glasses, and that worked. But my vision, once gotten a head-start down that path, kept getting worse for a few years.

Though it pretty much stabilized while I was in high school, it got bad enough that it’s dangerous for me to walk around my own house with my contact lenses out.

I can tell you that my staircase has 16 steps. (Easy number for a programmer to remember!)

To read with my contacts out, I have to hold the book so close that I have to close one eye.

I can look down at my feet and not see the cat.

My parents were both near-sighted — they both got glasses in the eighth grade. Their eyesight is better than mine. Odds are I would have gotten glasses around the eighth grade too, and had eyesight about like theirs. Not great, but not terrible.

I wish, to this day, that there had been a chicken pox vaccine.

I later got shingles when I was 20. I won’t be surprised to get it again, but I sure hope not. Shingles hurts.

So I was out about three weeks from school. I hated school anyway.

But we were doing a special unit on the history of native Americans, which I thought would be pretty cool.

I missed some arts and crafts things — creating a diorama, carving a miniature dugout canoe out of Ivory soap. I was just as glad to miss that stuff, as I liked reading and writing better.

I also missed out learning about the history of native Americans, though I did pick up some later.

Which brings me back to the subject of vaccines. And, you know, I thought I was going to, but I don’t really need to state the obvious.

Fed-up Dawg Pound Cleveland Browns fans plan protest for Nov. 16 game

2009-10-29T22:24:53Z

Hoping to make a statement to protest the NFL team's abysmal record -- this season and since the team returned in 1999 -- some Browns backers are encouraging fans to walk in late to the Nov. 16 home game against Baltimore.

GPS makers jubilant as Google "validates" their market with Google Maps Navigation

2009-10-29T18:46:00Z

That's what they will say, anyway, and who can blame them? They're fucked, and they know it, now that Google has introduced turn-by-turn navigation on Android. Google has become what Microsoft used to be -- the evil dicks who look around, find some area where people are making money, and say, Hey, fuck it, we're bored, so let's do the same thing for free and put those guys out of business. Why not? We're a bunch of smart little kids, and our company doesn't need to make money on this, so let's have some fun!

Which is why, around here, we now call Google the New Borg, or NB for short. And why Eric's new nickname, among his peers in the Valley, is "Freeman," because he's such a fucking whiz when it comes to making stuff that's free, but so far hasn't demonstrated much ability to make something that people will actually pay for. For his part, Eric says we can have Google Maps Nav on iPhone just as soon as we approve Google Voice, plus any and all other apps they send our way, and as soon as I drive over to Mountain View, personally apologize, and then turn around, bend over, and let the Wonder Twins kick me in the ass.

Which is to day, we're talking about it.

But back to the GPS guys. We haven't seen any comments from Garmin or TomTom yet but I'm sure they're working up some version of the old, "We're so glad this big mean company has come into our space because that will raise awareness of the category and then people will look at all the products and they'll choose us because the Google product is new and free and ours is old and ridiculously expensive. We think consumers are smart enough to look at all the choices in a market and go with the company that has a proven track record of gouging customers with high prices for a service that some other company has now demonstrated is so easy to create that it can be delivered for zero dollars. Our takeway: this is great news for the sector, and especially great news for us."

Katie is watching the wires to see how long it takes them to say this. More as it develops.

FeedDemon, NewsGator, and Mr. Bradbury

2009-10-29T16:19:36Z

Shared by Nick Harris
I've learned a ton from Nick. I'm sure I'll learn more too since he's also become a good friend.

Way back in 2005, NewsGator acquired FeedDemon. I vividly remember sitting down with Nick Bradbury and talking about our shared vision for the future of FeedDemon and the NewsGator platform…and many a night drinking a lot of beer and talking about RSS and what we now call social computing. Through it all, Nick remained laser-focused on both the future of FeedDemon, and his customers and how they would be brought forward.

Along the way, we added NetNewsWire to the family, as well as SmartFeed (renamed NewsGator Go! for Windows Mobile). All of it was part of building out the original vision for a core online content platform, and best-of-breed applications on nearly any device to consume content. All in all, I think we delivered on this vision – we built the platform, added the best applications on the most popular platforms, and made it all work together.

Since then, as you may have gathered, our enterprise business has grown faster than we anticipated (this is a good thing!). As the company has started to focus more and more on enterprise customers, we made the difficult decision to shut down NewsGator Online, and focus our online platform in on our commercial clients. As part of this transition, most of our client applications (FeedDemon, NetNewsWire, and NetNewsWire for iPhone) were re-released to sync with Google Reader as an online store, rather than NewsGator Online.

As part of that transition, Nick has gone “back into the wild” as an independent developer. FeedDemon remains a NewsGator product, but Nick is 100% focused on it, and he has complete control over the product direction and feature set. I like to think of this not as the end of anything, but rather the beginning of the next phase of FeedDemon’s life. Just as the initial deal with NewsGator opened up new opportunities for it, so does this new direction…and FeedDemon customers will see lots of exciting things coming up.

On a personal note, I’d like to extend a big “thank you” to Nick, on behalf of myself and everyone at NewsGator. Nick has been instrumental in forming our consumer product direction, always makes sure we’re taking care of our customers in the best way we can, and has provided a huge amount of input on our other products. He’s been a very influential person at the company, and we look forward to this continuing in the future!

Windows 7 illegal download party

2009-10-27T20:55:00Z

Hosting Your Windows 7 Torrenting Party - watch more funny videos

Microsoft’s Outlook Opens Up to an Uncertain Future

2009-10-27T19:01:23Z

Shared by Nick Harris
"It takes a lot of effort ... to work with Outlook" - understatement of the year.

While most of us were too engrossed in the somewhat ephemeral news of Google’s new attempts at becoming social, something much more profound transpired — something that can have an impact on millions upon millions of people. Microsoft announced that it was opening up its Outlook format and giving external programs access to mail, calendar and contacts. I don’t know the reasons why Microsoft is taking this arguably high-stakes gamble.

Paul Lorimer, group manager of Microsoft Office Interoperability, wrote on the MSDN blog:

In order to facilitate interoperability and enable customers and vendors to access the data in .pst files on a variety of platforms, we will be releasing documentation for the .pst file format. This will allow developers to read, create, and interoperate with the data in .pst files in server and client scenarios using the programming language and platform of their choice. The technical documentation will detail how the data is stored, along with guidance for accessing that data from other software applications. It also will highlight the structure of the .pst file, provide details like how to navigate the folder hierarchy, and explain how to access the individual data objects and properties.

Now you might be wondering what, exactly, is new. After all, developers can access data stored in the .pst file using Messaging API (MAPI) and the Outlook Object Model — two ways folks such as Plaxo and Clear Context access information on your Outlook client. The only problem is that those methods are arguably very slow. So far most of the details from Microsoft are very sketchy and it isn’t clear when the company will reveal its complete plans. To me it seems like Redmond was reacting to pressure from the European Union, which wants to push Microsoft down the road to interoperability.

Or perhaps it was somewhat of a late realization by Microsoft that it could turn Outlook into a platform. Blogger and technologist Anil Dash has argued about the potential of Outlook as a platform for a very long time. While many plugins have come to the market, many have argued that Outlook is not an easy platform to work on. It takes a lot of effort — ask Xobni — to work with Outlook.

I sought the opinion of Gabor Cselle, one of our favorite technology people and founder of reMail. In his past life he worked at Google (on Gmail) and Xobni, so he knows a thing or two about email. “The ability to upload PSTs is one of reMail’s feature requests,” he said, pointing out that it won’t really change things very much because much of the access is available via MAPI and OOM. “If anything this will make it easier to switch away from Outlook; for example Google could just ask you to upload your PSTs to switch to Gmail + Gcal,” he said. “That would be my use case No. 1.”

What do you guys think?

Making an O’Reilly RSS iPhone App with TapLynx

2009-10-27T17:30:53Z

Shared by Nick Harris
Very nice.

Elisabeth Robson, O’Reilly Broadcast: “After hearing about TapLynx, I immediately wanted to try it for myself, and within a couple of hours one afternoon went from knowing nothing about it to having a functioning O’Reilly RSS-based app on my phone.”

The article also includes an interview and a screencast.

Borg bails on Family Guy sponsorship

2009-10-27T17:27:26Z

Shared by Nick Harris
Reason 256 to love Seth McFarlane.

They were going to sponsor a commercial-free episode, the deal being that Seth McFarlane would load the episode with references to Windows 7. Problem is, he also loaded it up with jokes about "deaf people, the Holocaust, feminine hygiene and incest, which all proved too much for the software giant." My theory: Fox made the deal, McFarlane felt like a dirty whore, so he ruined it for them.

Airliner flies by airport, raising hijacking fears

2009-10-23T14:58:23Z

Shared by Nick Harris
Things not to read while waiting for a flight... oh wait Headline News has it on now too... awesome.

A Northwest Airlines flight from San Diego, California, to Minneapolis, Minnesota, overshot the Minneapolis airport by about 150 miles Wednesday evening, and federal investigators are looking into whether the pilots had become distracted, as they claimed, or perhaps fallen asleep. When air traffic controllers finally made contact with the pilot, his answers were so vague that controllers feared the plane might have been hijacked.

Lukas Mathis on Whether iPhone Settings Should Go in the Settings App

2009-10-23T14:53:02Z

Shared by Nick Harris
I never think to look in Settings for app settings. If its not in the app it doesn't exist to me. Maybe my legacy windows thinking but its harder on the iphone since you have to close the app to go to settings.

Lukas Mathis:

If you can at all avoid them, don’t offer preferences.

If you absolutely need to offer preferences, put them into your app.

It’s a subtle distinction, but it’s worth noting that in iPhone OS, they’re called settings, whereas in Mac OS, they’ve always been preferences. Settings are often unavoidable — things like usernames and passwords for online services must be adjustable.

And as for which way the wind is blowing, note that even Loren Brichter, who created the SettingsAreInTheSettingsApp.com web site back in December 2008, has moved the settings for Tweetie 2 out of the Settings app and into Tweetie itself.

★

Lukas Mathis on Whether iPhone Settings Should Go in the Settings App

2009-10-23T14:21:50Z

Lukas Mathis:

If you can at all avoid them, don’t offer preferences.

If you absolutely need to offer preferences, put them into your app.

★

FeedDemon 3.0 Introductory Pricing Ends October 31

2009-10-22T16:38:40Z

Just a quick reminder that the $9.95 introductory pricing for the ad-free version of FeedDemon 3.0 ends on October 31. Starting November 1, the price will be $14.95.

The simplest way to purchase a serial number is from within FeedDemon itself - just select "Purchase/Enter a Serial Number" from the Help menu.

Gift This App, Apple!

2009-10-22T16:34:36Z

Synopsis: The iTunes Store features a “Gift This Song” capability. The App Store does not feature a “Gift This App” capability. It should.

In Q1 of this year, I wrote the Wheels App to address an oft-lamented problem: most apps in the store are invisible. As most of us now know, the App Store is distribution, not marketing. That’s nothing to gripe about; it’s a problem to solve.

In an adapted-for-marketing Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, the bottom layer of they pyramid, the most basic, core element of marketing is that people have to know your product exists. I decided to tackle app-discovery by creating the Wheels app.

Wheels was a free slot-machine app that paid out other apps. People like to gamble and paying out iPhone apps was a nice twist. Replace the cherries and what not normally found on slot machine wheels with icons and tag-lines for applications. Line up four of the same app, win a promo code for that app. Tap an app’s icon and, by launching an itms:// URL, it’ll be opened in the on-phone App Store where you can read about and buy the app.

An app would be shown hundreds of times for each time that it was paid out. Hundreds of people would discover the app. Some would buy. If enough bought, it’d be worth giving away one copy to earn the sale of others. And, of course, the app tracked everything — views, click throughs to the app store, purchases. More sales for app authors, more commission for Apple. Everyone wins.

Unfortunately, Apple rejected the App. In short form, their objection had two parts: (1) it was an abuse of the promo codes mechanism and (2) I couldn’t give away other people’s apps.

Fast-forward to last weekend. My wife Kristy, mother of and primary caretaker to our three kids, went off for a girls’ weekend. Being a thoughtful guy, I put together a gift basket of goodies for her and her friends. She and her friends all have iPhones, and there are some apps that would’ve been great additions. Unfortunately, there’s no mechanism for gifting apps. While you can “Gift This Song” in iTunes you can’t “Gift This App.”

Providing a “Gift This App” mechanism would have made good on both Apple’s issues with the Wheels app and on Kristy’s girls’ weekend. How this solves the girls’ weekend problem is obvious. As for Wheels, when a player wins an app its author (after being notified) could simply go into iTunes and gift them the app. Apple gets its full commission, there’s no promo code abuse, and the author — not I — handles the give away.

Providing a “Gift This App” mechanism would open up a universe of novel marketing, bundling and promotional opportunities — all of which would drive App Store revenues, none of which would threaten Apple’s commission. Taking a page from Amazon and providing a simple API would further support this. Lifehacker could hand pick the best personal productivity apps, negotiate a pay-per-sale arrangement with the authors, and then sell them in a bundle with a single purchase right from their site. TUAW might make a bundle — literally — of apps you can’t live without. It’s nearly Halloween; sell seasonal bundles.

I’ve created a feature enhancement request with Apple. I’m told that the mechanism to put this on their radar is for people to file duplicate enhancement requests. You can do that from Apple’s bug reporter; be sure to reference my request, which is number 7326775.

Mobile Orchard Workshops — Save $200 With “mo” Discount Code
Beginning iPhone Programming: Portland/OR Nov12-13, Los Angeles/CA Nov19-20
iPhone OpenGL Programming: Bay Area/CA Nov19-20