I have been recently asked why comments are disabled for this blog.
Well, nice question. To be honest, and maybe humble, I do not think that the number of would-be commenters for this blog is so high as to make this an urgent matter. Still, comments are turned off and the main reason is: I feel fine with this. For me, blogging is mainly a way to express some personal thoughts on topics related to my profession and “to give back” to the community, as they say. I find plenty of useful information on the web and I like the idea of contributing some, whenever I have some to share. (Which also comes down to when I have time for it, but this is a different issue.) The other side of my stance is represented by the fact that in all my web-active-life I have never left a comment on anyone’s blog. Linking is, of course, a completely different matter, and I always do when appropriate, useful or righteous.
If you feel like going deeper in this discussion, I would suggest this very interesting post by Matt Gemmell, who decided to switch off comments on his own blog a few weeks ago and also discovered a few benefits of that decision. Take notice of the fact that I am not trying to compare Matt’s blog to mine: his is a very highly visited (and commented) blog. So, again, a completely different matter overall. Still, some food for thought.
Coming back to my personal view, I have to also say that whenever I come to a highly commented page, then invariably comments distract my attention. Sometimes this is ok, because comments contain some additional information or corrections to the initial post (still, I think, it is a pity that that information be scattered through comments, when the place it belongs to is the original post in the first place).
Other times, this is a real nuisance. Just witness this admirable post by The Verge about a visual history of iOS and how it has become a casualty in the holy Android vs. iPhone wars (if you read the comments. By the way, speaking of wars, don’t forget this other admirable post by The Verge about a visual history of Android). In the end, I am not sure I have fully read that post, because I got lost in the comments from the start, and moved somewhere else. But, hey, this is just me!
One thing must be admitted about Google and Android: that the PR effort aimed at making Android appear as a system based on free/open software has been hugely successful. Indeed, I am ever more amused at the number of non-technical-savvy people that candidly tell me: “I prefer Android, because it is free.”
After the introduction of Twitter support to iOS 5, it has become really difficult to find reasons not to add it to your app. Indeed, Apple made adding Twitter to your app really a snap. As you can find out from several sources on the web, all that is needed is:
One of the most versatile classes that the iOS SDK offers is UIWebView. Indeed, it can be used as a very flexible tool to display a vast range of content types: rich text, graphics in SVG format, PDF files, and so on. It is also, IMO, the cornerstone of any sane approach to supporting multiple mobile platforms, e.g. iOS and Android. Inevitably, when you integrate UIWebView into your app, you come to face a problem: how you handle pinching and swiping correctly. As flexible as it is, in fact, UIWebView has got a major shortcoming in its “greediness” to touches: it wants them all and it handles it its own way, i.e., like a web browser would do. This is not what you want in most cases and this post will outline an approach to make UIWebView behave like any other views under iOS.
On Comments
I have been recently asked why comments are disabled for this blog.
Well, nice question. To be honest, and maybe humble, I do not think that the number of would-be commenters for this blog is so high as to make this an urgent matter. Still, comments are turned off and the main reason is: I feel fine with this. For me, blogging is mainly a way to express some personal thoughts on topics related to my profession and “to give back” to the community, as they say. I find plenty of useful information on the web and I like the idea of contributing some, whenever I have some to share. (Which also comes down to when I have time for it, but this is a different issue.) The other side of my stance is represented by the fact that in all my web-active-life I have never left a comment on anyone’s blog. Linking is, of course, a completely different matter, and I always do when appropriate, useful or righteous.
If you feel like going deeper in this discussion, I would suggest this very interesting post by Matt Gemmell, who decided to switch off comments on his own blog a few weeks ago and also discovered a few benefits of that decision. Take notice of the fact that I am not trying to compare Matt’s blog to mine: his is a very highly visited (and commented) blog. So, again, a completely different matter overall. Still, some food for thought.
Coming back to my personal view, I have to also say that whenever I come to a highly commented page, then invariably comments distract my attention. Sometimes this is ok, because comments contain some additional information or corrections to the initial post (still, I think, it is a pity that that information be scattered through comments, when the place it belongs to is the original post in the first place).
Other times, this is a real nuisance. Just witness this admirable post by The Verge about a visual history of iOS and how it has become a casualty in the holy Android vs. iPhone wars (if you read the comments. By the way, speaking of wars, don’t forget this other admirable post by The Verge about a visual history of Android). In the end, I am not sure I have fully read that post, because I got lost in the comments from the start, and moved somewhere else. But, hey, this is just me!
Android, Google, and Free software
One thing must be admitted about Google and Android: that the PR effort aimed at making Android appear as a system based on free/open software has been hugely successful. Indeed, I am ever more amused at the number of non-technical-savvy people that candidly tell me: “I prefer Android, because it is free.”
iOS 5 Twitter Integration with soft fallback
After the introduction of Twitter support to iOS 5, it has become really difficult to find reasons not to add it to your app. Indeed, Apple made adding Twitter to your app really a snap. As you can find out from several sources on the web, all that is needed is:
convert RGB image to grayscale
convert is a very powerful tool from the ImageMagick toolbox.
Swiping and pinching with UIWebView
One of the most versatile classes that the iOS SDK offers is
UIWebView. Indeed, it can be used as a very flexible tool to display a vast range of content types: rich text, graphics in SVG format, PDF files, and so on. It is also, IMO, the cornerstone of any sane approach to supporting multiple mobile platforms, e.g. iOS and Android. Inevitably, when you integrateUIWebViewinto your app, you come to face a problem: how you handle pinching and swiping correctly. As flexible as it is, in fact,UIWebViewhas got a major shortcoming in its “greediness” to touches: it wants them all and it handles it its own way, i.e., like a web browser would do. This is not what you want in most cases and this post will outline an approach to makeUIWebViewbehave like any other views under iOS.