Beautiful Pixel

I haven’t posted in forever, but I have good news!

We just released an iPhone app side freelance project I have been poking for the last 9 months or so called Timeless Reminders

It allows you to create multimedia presentations of things that mean something to you, and then schedule that they be sent to yourself at scheduled times. It sounds odd, but it can be very powerful when you get a slideshow of your wife in the middle of the Wednesday afternoon doldrums at work. You should check it out. It’s FREE after all.

I don’t really know what I was think when I designed the flight UI for VOID. Someone once described it as “it likes a clown threw up on my iphone”. Awesome.

Well the good news is that there is an update coming out soon with something far less intrusive and much easier on the eyes. Stay tuned for that and more, soon.

I created my first iPhone application recently. It’s been an interesting road.

It’s a small app for browsing the chat threads of a specific community, Shacknews.com, which is a gaming news site with a following of interesting people that like to play games.

Memory management, and cryptic stack traces continue to be the biggest issues for me in this whole Objective-C venture. That, and the app store approval process is incredibly frustrating. Updates seem to be taking AT LEAST a week to be approved, which really sucks when you need to fix a critical bug. And recently, I got denied because a new feature in the update didn’t work. Turns out, this was because of a temporary failure in the website that feature connects to that happened to coincide with when they were doing the testing. That was all fixed pretty quickly, but my app is still rejected, and I imagine it will take at least a week for them to respond to my email.

Come on Apple, I know you can do better than this.

iTunes App Store Link

Next up, I’m gonna try to learn some OpenGL and see if I can muster some cool game or something.

A friend asked me to donate a tiny google maps application to a non-profit cause. The Hillcrest Development Watch monitor housing and construction in their area and they wanted an easier way to do it than emailing a spreadsheet around. Now, being a Rails programmer, of course I wanted to deal with this in Rails. Sadly Rails is a pain to host right?

Wrong. Enter Heroku. Their fantastic setup is free (for now). They create a git repository for your app when you create your app. Then you simply suck down that git, commit to it and push it back. Their server software automatically updates your working code and reboots your app to the latest code, simply by pushing your commits to the server. It is the least painful rails deployment process I have ever used. In fact, I would go so far as to call it pleasurable, which is a big deal to say about rails deployment.

Check out Hillcrest Development Watch

The site itself is a simple single resource web app. It tracks properties, their addresses and development states. For a supre small app like this, Heroku even provides access to its user login system. It lets you use the user logged into heroku.com as a user in your app. So if your needs are simple, you can have a user authentication system, and have your app not care about registration, authentication, or user management. This app simply show some admin function if the user is authorized to edit this heroku app. This wouldn’t stand up to the needs of anything more complex, but it saved a huge bundle of time for this project.

In case this lengthy prose didn’t convey my point:

Heroku is Aweome!

I have been developing a little site for the florist of my recent wedding. It’s a simple custom designed Rails CMS. Its got some page content management, a cool gallery manager, and of course, FlexImage is used to resize images and stamp them with a custom copyright.

The main problem with the images is that some were taken by the florist herself, but other are taken by professional photographers, and proper credit needed to be given. So I provided a simple text field that will write anything to the bottom left of an image allowing custom copyright on a per photo basis. And permanently stamping it on the image meaning it can’t be stolen, at least without a nasty cropping, but there is only so much you can do against that.

It’s been a fun little project.

My latest project just launched into it’s public beta. It’s a wine retail site called The Wine Spies. They sell one wine a day, for a good price.

It does some cool stuff, but this is the first project I have done with OpenID support. Something I am very proud to add. There are not enough sites that use it yet. I see it as my responsibility to make OpenID useful by allowing it as a login option. So on many of my propjects, I am adding the support in, whether the client wants it or not, simply because I feel it’s the right thing to do.

Anyways, go enjoy some wine.

I may be a Ruby programmer that nerds out on meta programming and blocks, but I also enjoy the occasional Photoshop HTML/CSS work.

I recently designed and created a shopify theme for a local bakery here in Sonoma county.

I hope to more Shopify themes. They really do have an awesome system for e-commerce.

Well maybe not. But one of content writers sure got a chuckle out of me.