The Sundays' Programmers
Lazy Saturday, today. I have just had a check with StackOverflow; you know, just for that sort of a conditioned reflex we all know; and I actually found two gems of a question. Look at them in the two pictures below.
To me, the inability to explain what you tried to do with a minimal of clarity for anyone else to understand anything is the clearest sign that you do not have a clue at what you are doing. But, hey, it’s Saturday, this must be the Sunday Programmer in action!
Quick iPhone app for offline traveling
Offline traveling may well be a neologism. The fact is that I am about to set off for a 2 week travel to the South of Italy. Now, I will bring my iPod touch with me, but it will be of limited use, since it has no 3G capability, and anyway 3G roaming is expensive; furthermore it is not always available as soon as you get away from the most beaten track.
User Experience @ CES
Among the many reports from CES 2012, this one is really interesting to me because it focuses on User Experience. Indeed, how boring all the hype around device specs when really all that matters is the experience that device grants you! But this is just a reminder of how difficult it is changing mindset, forgetting about details no one really cares about, and focusing on those details that really provide a benefit in terms of user experience and usability.
Using iOS SDK 5 with Xcode 3
I have been lately using a quite older MacBook Pro (Intel Core Duo 2 2.4 GHz, 4GB RAM) for development and found that it is pretty unpractical installing Xcode 4 for regular use due to its slow performance and huge memory footprint. So I looked for a way to run good old Xcode 3, which is fine under most aspects and works reliably. Turned out it was not so difficult in the end, so I list here the steps I took to make it work: you simply need to copy a bunch of files from a newer Xcode 4.3 distribution to the proper Xcode 3 location.
Core Graphics Image Interpolation Performance
Recently, I have done quite a bit of Core Graphics programming and discovered that one key point in ensuring that an app performs well is choosing the right CGContext interpolation level. Interpolation, according to the Wikipedia, “is a method of constructing new data points within the range of a discrete set of known data points.” Interpolating is what is done when you scale up an image, but also when you scale it down. In both cases, interpolation has a tremendous impact on the result of the scaling.