tobin harris

Links for 2012-02-06 [del.icio.us]

2012-02-07T00:00:00-08:00

Back to my roots with the Epson R-D1 | Japanorama.co.uk
Back to my roots with the Epson R-D1 http://t.co/urayvCMY http://twitter.com/digisnap/status/165199148507869184
15 essential tools every lean startup can't live without - We Love Lean | Lean UX, Lean Startup
I'm looking for php & ux help on unassumer, one of "We Love Lean's" 10 15 essential tools. http://t.co/lgaOYWPw \\ interested? ping me http://twitter.com/brantcooper/status/166643996586811392
AFP: iPhone leaps to third place in mobile market
iPhone leaps to third place in mobile market - AFP http://t.co/zRM17S0w http://twitter.com/rgccarter/status/166644024646709248
Tobii’s Eye-Tracking Tech Knows What You’re Eyeing on Dating Sites - Lauren Goode - Commerce - AllThingsD
Tobii's Eye-Tracking Tech Knows What You're Eyeing on Dating Sites - Lauren Goode - Commerce - AllThingsD http://t.co/y2m4kZvR http://twitter.com/customerexplabs/status/166648361947115520
Twitter / Vast: Social Media Explained htt ...
Social Media Explained http://t.co/T5qayx6R http://twitter.com/VastAgency/status/166639264145211393

Links for 2012-02-04 [del.icio.us]

2012-02-05T00:00:00-08:00

Using the Live SDK in Windows 8 XAML/C# Metro Applications
Reading @mbcrump's article 'Using the Live SDK in #Windows8 XAML/C# Metro Applications' #win8 http://t.co/z1hGGkE8 http://twitter.com/wbm/status/165931078610202624

Links for 2012-02-02 [del.icio.us]

2012-02-03T00:00:00-08:00

Customer journey mapping vs process design: Do you know the difference?
Customer journey mapping vs process design: Do you know the difference? http://t.co/uS5ZdjUe http://twitter.com/bobapollo/status/165139359971024896

Links for 2012-01-31 [del.icio.us]

2012-02-01T00:00:00-08:00

Star Trek Online on Steam
Detengan los pipeline de sus CPU: "Star Trek Online" es "free to play" en Steam http://t.co/G4kbYJbM http://twitter.com/alvrod/status/164487168750915584
iOS Game Design This Home Lets You Construct And Create Your Dream Abode | TechCrunch
iOS Game Design This Home Lets You Construct And Create Your Dream Abode http://t.co/IpwriTi3 by @leenarao http://twitter.com/TechCrunch/status/164476152168202240
In The Rush To Mobile, Don't Ignore The Power Of The Web | Fast Company
In The Rush To Mobile, Don't Ignore The Power Of The Web http://t.co/R6vJLtez via @FastCoLeaders @msuster http://twitter.com/FastCompany/status/164048485774139392
Thinkmodo Sends People-Shaped Planes Into Manhattan Sky to Promote 20th Century Fox film Chronicle | Co.Create: Creativity \ Culture \ Commerce
MT @Kiteaton: This flying people campaign is so fantastically amazing http://t.co/rPNk9agp Wonder how many ppl thought they were dreaming. http://twitter.com/FastCompany/status/164479072372654083

Links for 2012-01-22 [del.icio.us]

2012-01-23T00:00:00-08:00

'Star Wars Uncut: Director's Cut' crowdsources Episode IV, 15 seconds at a time | The Verge
'Star Wars Uncut: Director's Cut' crowdsources Episode IV, 15 seconds at a time http://t.co/xdQIcTSU http://twitter.com/verge/status/160742472572600322
Researchers turn your smartphone into a virtual projector -- Engadget
Researchers turn your smartphone into a virtual projector http://t.co/JcZYhqcC http://twitter.com/engadget/status/161144429778964480

Links for 2012-01-09 [del.icio.us]

2012-01-10T00:00:00-08:00

ifttt / Missing link
Our partner @engineroomapps are busy on our all new apps for our wired and wifi thermostats. Yes we are supporting Android and Tablets! http://twitter.com/HeatmiserUK/status/156511868247212032

Links for 2012-01-07 [del.icio.us]

2012-01-08T00:00:00-08:00

Untitled
This is why I don't give you a job... http://t.co/Jf9a52u0 http://twitter.com/hackernewsbot/status/155524578452582401
Silicon Valley Napkin
still appropriate after all these years: http://t.co/LBs12Tlv http://twitter.com/codinghorror/status/155617518143283200
How to: register a company in the UK - swombat.com on startups
How to register a company in the UK http://t.co/2YAKIKwG http://twitter.com/newsycombinator/status/155620963633987584
ParkatmyHouse Lets You Make Money Off Your Empty Driveway | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation
Make Money Off Your Empty Driveway (Really) http://t.co/7UW1Zwpj by @FastCoExist http://twitter.com/FastCompany/status/154925808870363137

3 Months With The R-D1 RangeFinder

2011-09-06T12:05:44-07:00

Well, it’s been almost 3 months since I started learning photography with the back-to-basics R-D1 digital rangefinder.

It’s been fun, and I’ve been carrying the camera around everywhere like a mad man, reading books and farting about in Apple Aperture.

Here are some of my latest shots (more on Flickr):

Chair

York Minster

Stairing

Stalybridge Station

End of a Long Night

Lamp Stand

I think it’s getting easier to get results from the camera now, most of these were all taken on full manual control, I don’t need the camera’s help as much as I did when I got it.

First Photos From the Epson R-D1

2011-06-12T12:42:21-07:00

I’ve been keen to get a new camera for a few years now, something more “manual” that would force me to learn a bit more about photography and also which would encourage me focus on composition rather than anything else.

It’s been tough saving any money whilst on startup salary, but I finally cobbled enough together to pick up a 2005 digital rangefinder - the Epson R-D1.

I’ll post up my noob experiences with it, from the perspective of a complete novice. But first, some images from the first 24 hours of owning this camera.

Old Boots

Wall Light

Gate

Hall Window

Stairs

Hall Upstairs

Light Switch

Window

Clothes (B&W)

Looking Up!

Clothes Rack

It’s obviously early days for me and photography, but it has been a lot of FUN getting my head around manual ISO, aperture, focusing and handling RAW files.

Not that's how you debate

2011-04-19T15:55:11-07:00

Someone asked this on Quora:

“As a VC, how is a $41 million investment in Color, an unproven social media application, justified?”

Yishan Wong gives a great reply, ending on:

“So the question comes down to this: with terms almost certainly negotiated to protect Sequoia’s downside, a team with a proven history of execution, a clearly-expanding market where traction can be easily attained, if Color’s UI weren’t a problem, would this really look like such a turkey? Because if there’s one thing a strong team knows how to do, it’s iterate on a product. If next week Color releases a version with a UI that is easy to understand and use, do you think people won’t use it?”

I think most people think Color is a dud based on R1, but forget that it’s only the first heart-beat of a potentially very successful venture. I did.

3D Bedroom Redesign with Google Sketchup and Podium

2011-03-27T15:08:42-07:00

As detailed the previous post, I’ve been playing with Google Sketchup for visualising small changes we want to make to the house.

Today’s project was looking at our bedroom, since we want to create a small dressing area. Here’s a few shots of the 3D models I put together for that.

This one took about 3-4 hours to do (I’m a beginner!), it’s useful to see how things would look.

Early Stages

I created the room structure based on the floor-plans in the estate agents PDF, as with the previous blog post

Empty room before any textures, doors, decoration etc

Adding a floor texture, a door, and a lamp really picks things up. Note a few objects outside too

Final Result

I added in some ceiling lights and windows to match our existing room.

Room without the partition wall. Yup, we have just clothes hangers at the end!

With the partition wall

Looking out of window

Looking in from outside

Redesigning Our Lounge in 3D using Google Sketchup and SU Podium

2011-03-26T03:56:02-07:00

We’re thinking about knocking a few walls down in our lounge and I wanted to visualise how it would look. Since it’s gonna cost us about £6,000 for the work and materials, I figured I should try more than just imagination.

So… how to do it? My mind immediately thought of the Free Google Sketchup, as I’ve heard people say it’s the simplest tool for producing models of stuff. I don’t have any modelling experience, so this was a brave experiment.

Here’s the process I went through, it took me about 4 hours to create this whilst also getting used to Sketchup and various basic modelling concepts.

I produced the model whilst sat on the couch staring at the room I was modelling, which probably made it easier. Georgina also was running around the room with a tape-measure shouting out measurements when needed!

NOTE: All images are up on Flickr

Grab a floorplan, start tracing

I grabbed the original house brochure PDF from the estate agents. It had the house floorplans with rough layout. You can capture a bit of the plan and paste it into Sketchup. I then started tracing around the walls using the line tool.

Tracing around the walls copied from a PDF. The blue bits are the bits I’ve drawn over.

Sketchup lets you orbit the view to see in different angles

Drag up the walls

You can use the Push/Pull tool to start dragging up the walls you traced.

Basic Render

Sketchup doesn’t render realistic images by default, so I did a bit of searching around for a Sketchup Renderer. Podium seemed to offer the path of least resistance. Since I don’t know what I’m doing, I figured I didn’t want to spend hours learning about various rendering tactics.

Podium rendering the walls. Wow!

Remove Walls

The purpose of me dicking about with Sketchup was to see what the lounge would be like without the walls. So, I took em out! I also couldn’t help drag a few new components in from the Google 3D Warehouse.

Walls, be gone

Adding some stuffs

Once you’ve got the walls right, it’s pretty easy to drag components in from the Google 3D Warehouse. You can also position the camera wherever you want for a nice shot.

Adding in a table, doors and stuff.

Playing with lighting, and adding even more stuff

To try and simulate our new lounge, I wanted to add more things. Podium has some cool lighting effects too, so I chucked lots of lamps in.

Lights and more stuff

Tried a different floor texture

Summary & Tips

This was a fun experiment, and it’s amazing you can grab Google Sketchup and Podium and produce something actually useful without having any experience.

In the 4 hours I spent on this, probably about 1 hour was spent learning. Watching the first 4 Google Sketchup videos was really useful to get the basics of what the tool is about.

I also scanned the Podium manual at one point, when the lights stopped working!

Discovering Scenes was really useful. Scenes basically saved camera angles. You can create several and jump between them really quickly.

I must admit, to take this further I feel like I need to re-create the model from scratch. It’s got into a bit of a mess. I’d probably advise reading a book about Sketchup, and watching as many online videos as possible.

There are loads of good resources. For example, this blog explains how to organise your model when it gets bigger. You’ll also find videos of people like this dude who had a whole shop of people producing massive models for a living. Very cool.

NOTE: All images are up on Flickr

UPDATE - A few more shots with more fireplace detail

JetBrains market IDE to iPhone Devs

2011-03-04T15:11:17-08:00

JetBrains have announced an IDE for iPhone & iPad devs. Exciting!

I’ve used JetBrains ReSharper from day 1, so I know they understand how to empower the developer with awesome refactoring and code-analysis tools. It’s exciting to know they’re now targeting that expertise at iOS developers.

Tim suggests that they might struggle to compete with Apples’ XCode. This is true, XCode 4 is looking awesome. And many developers will want to taste iPhone development as it’s “meant to be”.

On that note, I bet XCode 4’s new “Fix It” and “Assistant” are heavily inspired by similar features offered by JetBrains, which have proved incredibly popular over the last 10 years.

I wish JetBrains success in this venture, seriously.

They should be able to capture the interest of their loyal IntelliJ, ReSharper and RubyMine fans who are moving to iPhone development. They already have an audience. And, iOS has been thriving for a while now, so they don’t have to get it perfect on day one; they’ll have plenty of time to chip away at the market and win popularity.

MongoMapper Extract Superclass Refactoring

2011-01-05T07:29:46-08:00

I was recently wanting to do an Extract Superclass refactoring in a Ruby on Rails solution which uses MongoDB and the glorious MongoMapper. Being somewhat new to MongoDB and MongoMapper, I was a bit scared about this refactoring. I also had collections full of data that I didn’t want to screw up. I knew it would require massaging those documents, and also playing to the way MongoMapper handled inheritance.

Fortunately, it was a piece of cake.

Step 1: Change Ruby Classes

Step one was to do the Extract super class in the Ruby MongoMapper classes. Starting with two separate classes:

  class Dog
    include MongoMapper::Document
    key :name, String
    key :bones, Integer
  end

  class Cat
    include MongoMapper::Document
    key :name
    key :fur_balls, Integer
  end

…you can extract the superclass to give this:

  class Animal
    include MongoMapper::Document
    key :name, String
  end

  class Dog < Animal
    key :bones, Integer
  end

  class Cat < Animal    
    key :fur_balls, Integer
  end

Step 2: Update Mongo DB

Now, what about Mongo? If you’re in development and can drop/re-create your database then great, just run your boot script. But what about if you need to keep the existing stuff? You need to somehow merge the collections into a single hierarchy. It turns out to be pretty easy.

Firstly, logging into the mongo shell and looking at the collections will give this

  > mongo -ublah -pblah some.server.com:27085/my-db
  > show collections
  cats
  dogs

So, first off we need to create a collection for Animals.

 > db.createCollection("animals")

Now, since Cat and Dog are a subclass of animals, we need to move them into the animals collection, and also let MongoMapper know that they are a subclass. This is done like so in your mongodb shell.

  var cursor = dogs.find(); 
  while(cursor.hasNext()){
    var doc = cursor.next();
    doc["_type"] = "Dog";
    db.animals.insert(doc);
  }

  var cursor = cats.find(); 
  while(cursor.hasNext()){
    var doc = cursor.next();
    doc["_type"] = "Cat";
    db.animals.insert(doc);
  }

Basically, this just loops through the dogs and cats adding them to the animals collection. But, we also add the type field needed by MongoMapper so it knows what Ruby class to hydrate the MongoDB JSON structure into.

Step 3: Done!

You should probably tidy up and drop your old “cat” and “dog” collections too.

  > db.dogs.drop()
  > db.cats.drop()

TaDa! We’re done.

iPhone Tip: More Fun Video Demos

2010-09-04T06:55:51-07:00

Here’s a video tutorial showing how to make a fun video demo of your iPhone app.

Note: best watched in high-def, so you can read the cards

This video shows our Writers Dream Tools app.
I created the desktop background wallpaper using Inkscape.
The notes were done using StickEmUp.
The video was recorded with ScreenFlow.

iPhone Tip: Record Demos With ScreenFlow

2010-09-01T02:12:08-07:00

Customers like to see progress regularly, it helps them gain confidence in your work and let’s them know things are moving forward.

If you can meet your customer face to face, you can easily show them progress of the app running on your own iPhone. Or, you event can send them the app to install ad-hoc on their phone.

If your app isn’t quite ready for that, or if time is tight, another option is to send them a video.

Make a Video

Full Size

This screen shows the iPhone simulator running on my own computer. I’ve set my desktop wallpaper to this cool wood surface. For additional coolness you can draw on a shadow, so it actually looks like the iPhone is sat on a surface.

At Engine Room Apps, we record our videos using Screen Flow, it’s a very simple and cool video recording app.

Add Audio

When recording videos for your client, it’s useful to record them with an audio commentary. That helps you put the work into context, and point out bugs, or where things can be improved.

We export our videos at 50% size, Web-High standard. Because the iPhone is small, we also set a small crop area the video in ScreenFlow. We set it to just the size of the iPhone, with a little room to show some of the desktop. They usually come out under 20MB.

We then upload to Basecamp where customers can download the video. We find it’s best to keep videos 2-5 minutes long.

iPhone Tip: Achieving Dev Speed in xCode

2010-08-30T10:53:47-07:00

When using development tools, I personally prefer it if my hands don’t have to spend time moving between keyboard and mouse. Keyboard shortcuts rule the roost.

I’ve only been developing in xCode for a few weeks, but I’ve managed to get a workflow that comes closer to the speeds I’m used to with Visual Studio + Resharper, or TextMate.

Learning a 5-10 keyboard shortcuts greatly helps your speed of development I find, here’s the ones I use, in rough order of frequency used. Start learning the top ones as they’re the most useful, and work down.

Key Legend

= Apple (Command) Key

= Shift Key

= Ctrl Key

- Option Key

Symbols come from the handy Key Me site.

Oh, First Setup xCode!

I find it better with less visual noise when coding, so I like to work in a single code window, rather than having tons of code windows open. The default xCode pane as 3 splits - left, top and bottom. I just get rid of the top one to make more space.

To toggle the top pane:

++E

Navigating Between Files Quickly

Open By Name

Rather than using the tree view on the left hand side, I tend to use the quick Open Quickly feature. This is invoked using ++D, and you can then just type in the start of the file your looking for and it will suggest the right ones. Use the up and down arrows, then enter to select.

Recently Opened

+ 1 will get you a quick list of recently opened files. Use up-arrow and down-arrow key (or page up/down) to move around in the list. Enter to select the file you want.

Header/Footer

You can switch between .h and .m file using +-arrowup

Moving Around Within File

History Back and Forward

++left or ++right

Jump to Method

+ 2 will get you a quick list of methods in the current file. Use up-arrow and down-arrow key (or page up/down) to move around in the list. Enter to select the file you want.

Build and Run

If I just want to check things are ok, I use +B. That does a build and reports errors.

If I want to run the code on the Simulator, I use +R.

I usually want to see the console output, so I do an ++R to see that. I also clear the console quite often using +++R.

If you get errors or warnings at build time, you can make them visible in the editor using ++H (toggles errors and warnings on off).

Help

++? will bring up some quick help for the item under the cursor. Use that quite a lot when I don’t know what method signature parts are, etc.

Editing

Commenting selection is done using +/. Quite handy for bulk operations.

Refactoring

xCode 3 doesn’t have great refactoring, but I use Extract Method and Rename a LOT! ++J gets you the refactoring window, then I usually have to grab the mouse to select and type from there.

Links

There’s a handy pdf showing a small summary of these shortcuts and more.

This PDF is even more in depth.

Note: I created a little site called Key Me to make it easy to embed key images into this file. View source of this page to see how you use it.

iPhone Tip: Test Your App Unplugged

2010-08-29T06:33:41-07:00

Developing your app with a speed limiter is a great way to make sure your User eXperience isn’t suffering because of connectivity problems in the wild.

However, you also want to go one step further and test the entire app without any internet connection. This way you can make sure you give the appropriate messages to your users when your app is unable to grab the latest data.

The easiest way to do this is to unplug your OSX network connection. This is your best option until the simulator eventually gets an “offline” mode.

To make this easy for me, I have a Rakefile for switching the network on and off.

> rake offline

And

> rake online

The Rakefile.rb is very simple.

require 'rubygems'
require 'rake'

desc "Take network down for simulated offline mode"
task :offline do
  `sudo ifconfig en0 down`
end

desc "Put network up for online mode"
task :online do
  `sudo ifconfig en0 up`
end

You can then take your network offline, run the simulator, and make sure everything is cool.

iPhone Tip: Develop With a Speed Limiter Switched On

2010-08-29T06:22:40-07:00

Your users won’t always have blazing fast 3G connections when they’re using your iPhone app. They might be in a building that impedes signal strength, or on a train, or whatever. Therefore, you’ll want to make sure that your app has a great user experience even with low speed connections.

The simplest way to do this is to turn on a speed limiter whilst your developing your app. This way, as you test the app in the simulator, you’ll get a feel for how it will be for users on slower connections.

I particularly like Speed Limit.

You can download and install it on OSX, and then setup the sites you want to slow down. When the simulator attempts to connect to those sites, it will be slower.

I leave the Speed Limiter on at all times during development, and set it to it’s lowest speed setting - the equivalent of a 48k Dialup connection.

iPhone Tip: Always Download Data Asynchronously. Always.

2010-08-29T05:58:50-07:00

Most iPhone apps I have worked on need to grab xml, json or images from a web service.

If you do anything like this…

NSData *data = [NSData initWithURL: someUrl];

…you’re going to get in trouble. Much of the handy “grab some data from the web” methods in the iPhone SDK work synchronously, and block the UI thread. This means that your users won’t be able to do anything with your app whilst the remote data is downloading. UX fail.

It’s really tempting to use these synchronous methods because they’re so easy. Seriously, DON’T DO THIS!!! Not for thumbnails. Not for tiny xml files. Not for files coming from a blazing fast server over a 1TB pipe. Not anywhere :)

So what do you do? Use an async technology instead. I’m enjoying using Seriously right now, it’s very easy. If you like Javascript, you’ll probably appreciate the use of blocks to handle different outcomes. It’s really straight forward.

Example (from the README):

NSString *url = @"http://api.twitter.com/1/users/show.json?screen_name=probablycorey;"

[Seriously get:url handler:^(id body, NSHTTPURLResposne *response, NSError *error) {
    if (error) {
        NSLog(@"Error: %@", error);
    }
    else {
        NSLog(@"Look, JSON is parsed into a dictionary!");
        NSLog(@"%@", [body objectForKey:@"profile_background_image_url"]);
    }
}];

Obviously a quick Google search should find you tons of other libraries for asnc calls you might prefer.

How To Use Twitter

2010-07-20T11:05:44-07:00

My sister just asked me how she can learn about twitter. The best answer is Just use it. But, she appreciated my short instructions on Skype…

Marnie Harris George said:

how do u get twitter links up? can u direct me to a twitter education site u like? im looking online and not clear

Tobin Harris said:

Ok, to understand twitter you have to use it :)

Step 1 - Sign up.

Step 2 - Download TweetDeck

Step 3 - Setup searches for things like “dog training” and “dog kennels”

Step 4 - When you see the search shows someone who says interesting stuff, press the follow button

Step 4.5 - Also consider pressing the ReTweet button, to tell other people that you liked what the person said

Step 5 - Start tweeting interesting stuff yourself, like “Trying to find some good dog kennels software, XYZ is a bit complicated”

Step 6 - People start replying to you, and following you, because you’re interesting

Step 7 - Within a few weeks/months, you will have hundreds of followers.

Step 8 - Every time you tweet something, hundreds of your followers will hear it and possibly re-tweet it. Suddenly you have marketing power for free.

Step 9 - Take over the world :)

Marnie Harris George said:

roflmao ! thanks bro !

JSON definition for your yUML Diagrams

2010-06-26T05:19:33-07:00

If you’re writing a client for yUML like an iPad or Android app, then you want to be able to load up the original DSL for a diagram. This was not possible before, but now is.

For example, take this image http://yuml.me/5f5ed221

To ge the underlying info about that image, you can now load this file here.

http://yuml.me/5f5ed221.json

{
digest: "5f5ed221"
customisations: "scruffy;"
mime: "image/png"
type: "usecase"
extension: "png"
file_only: false
dsl: "[Mobile User]-(Draw Diagrams{bg:green}), (Draw Diagrams)<(Edit Existing Diagram), (Draw Diagrams)>(View Gallery Items)"
}

The file contains the DSL text and a few other useful bits of information. This means that clients can create their own edit pages like the online one does.

Here’s a sneaky hint at why we’re doing this :)

tobin harris

Links for 2012-02-06 [del.icio.us]

Links for 2012-02-04 [del.icio.us]

Links for 2012-02-02 [del.icio.us]

Links for 2012-01-31 [del.icio.us]

Links for 2012-01-22 [del.icio.us]

Links for 2012-01-09 [del.icio.us]

Links for 2012-01-07 [del.icio.us]

3 Months With The R-D1 RangeFinder

First Photos From the Epson R-D1

Not that's how you debate

3D Bedroom Redesign with Google Sketchup and Podium

Early Stages

Final Result

Redesigning Our Lounge in 3D using Google Sketchup and SU Podium

Grab a floorplan, start tracing

Drag up the walls

Basic Render

Remove Walls

Adding some stuffs

Playing with lighting, and adding even more stuff

Summary & Tips

UPDATE - A few more shots with more fireplace detail

JetBrains market IDE to iPhone Devs

MongoMapper Extract Superclass Refactoring

Step 1: Change Ruby Classes

Step 2: Update Mongo DB

Step 3: Done!

iPhone Tip: More Fun Video Demos

iPhone Tip: Record Demos With ScreenFlow

Make a Video

Add Audio

Sharing

iPhone Tip: Achieving Dev Speed in xCode

Key Legend

Oh, First Setup xCode!

Navigating Between Files Quickly

Open By Name

Recently Opened

Header/Footer

Moving Around Within File

History Back and Forward

Jump to Method

Build and Run

Help

Editing

Refactoring

Links

iPhone Tip: Test Your App Unplugged

iPhone Tip: Develop With a Speed Limiter Switched On

iPhone Tip: Always Download Data Asynchronously. Always.

How To Use Twitter

JSON definition for your yUML Diagrams