Here is a little secret that developers have known for years and non-technical people have yet to figure out. It doesn’t matter what language a developer knows, they are all similar. A talented developer has an interpreter and compiler in his head and thinks in pseudo-code anyway. Applying that to a language is just a matter of figuring out the syntax…and that is the easy part.
gaurav khanna
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Dec 10 -
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Sep 10
iTunes 10 by Chris Carlozzi
A re-imagined version of the orb icon with some nice touches like the addition of smaller icons for different media types in the sphere. Includes color variations and versions with/without the tail.
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Aug 10Gmail done right?
So I got Mailplane.app exactly 30 days ago. (I know because my trial expires today) I’ve been using it and I love the approach of putting GMail in it’s own app, but I’ve found I’m really not using any of Mailplane’s built-in features except for multiple accounts. That was the main reason I downloaded it. So time to bash.
(Note: if your lazy/TL;DR, basically, just leave a comment of what you would add to a GMail standalone app) Useless-ness
I love toolbars as much as the next guy, but I found myself never…ever…using it in Mailplane. GMail is meant to be as standalone as possible, so every function is already there. I found this was a pointless addition.Bugs
Don’t know why but sometimes the window would gray out like this. Not too much of a problem but annoying. It eventually goes away randomly.
GMail added support for dragging files into the window, to attach, a few months ago. It works great in Chrome (see below).
This is how it should look but Mailplane seems to be getting in the way.I can’t put a picture of my chat window (for obvious reasons) but, if I rearrange the Chat box below the Quick Links, it goes back to being Chat on top in Mailplane but in Chrome it works fine.
Not a bug so much as an annoyance but if we’re wrapping GMail, let’s give the facade that it’s native at least. I hate the loading bar in my browser as much as in a separate app. I don’t care if you fake the loading with an old image or keep it cached so aggressively that the user never see’s it, but it shouldn’t ever be visible.Price
$24.95 is fairly steep. This, I think would’ve been a fair price when Mailplane originally came out. (~2007) It added a lot of missing features and optimized GMail which at the time wasn’t as full featured as it is today. But now, it really is too much IMHO.
My take
Let’s say I was going to make a “mailplane.” What would I add. The obvious features that everyone under the sun needs, multiple accounts, and dock icon unread indicators and Growl notifications. But what can we do to extend GMail, we’re working with the app here, not just an extension sandbox so their is a lot of room to play with. Extensions like Better GMail, and it’s unofficial Chrome Port don’t get to do whatever they want. They have restrictions, we don’t. :D
So what would you do? (leave a comment) -
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Aug 10Pandorium: 1.0 RC
Just a quick update on Pandorium, moved it to release candidate. Works really well now.
- Keeps Media Keys reliably till the app is closed
- Added the Pandora logo at the top of the window (looks better)
- Switched over to using key’s vs mouse clicks internally
To-Do:
- Pandora has key support for a good amount of things, maybe allow those to be mapped to hot-keys in the preferences
Again, source is up on github, or download packaged app below. Enjoy :)
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Aug 10Pandorium: Pandora done right!
If you guys have been keeping up with my twitter, you’ve known about my work on Pandorium. Well a long time later (but surprisingly only a couple days of work later), i’m ready to release an initial version.
It’s essentially a wrapper for Pandora.com, it keeps it as a stand-a-lone app, and adds Apple Media Key support. This is more a temporary fix as I hope Pandora makes a native Mac app that has Media Key support, don’t like running Flash (and refuse to instal AIR) but I needed Media Key support.
works fine 
works fine, no way to detect when you hit skip limit right now, not a problem if you have a Pandora One subscription though 
does nothing because there’s no similar button in Pandora, thinking of using this to change station if it’s possible
Current Issues: (Restart will fix all of these)- The method used to get the Media Keys right now isn’t being that reliable, either that or something else is causing an issue, but after a while iTunes will take the keys back and they won’t work for Pandorium
- It isn’t setup to draw it correctly every time the window is activated, so it can show up with the left half white sometimes
- Not meant for prolonged use, I left it on for a while, came back and it was eating up 300% of my cpu (well flash was, what do you expect though……….)
Contributions/To-Do:
- I’m not a designer so if any designer wants to spend a few minutes and make a better menu bar icon, that would be kindly appreciated, I can let you use the Pandora logo font (MrsEavesSmallCaps) if you don’t have it, email me: gauravk92@gmail.com
- Wanted to add applescript support for
tell application "com.gkapps.Pandorium" to deactivate
more for personal reasons though
Source is up at github, submit bug reports there. Download the packaged app below if you don’t care about the source.
Update: Download link reflects latest release -
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Aug 10QuickReply is depreciated, not dead, depreciated.
Everyone’s been wondering what’s going on with QuickReply for SMS. It’s buggy, old, and the matter of fact is it’s depreciated. As of today, I’m dropping full support for QuickReply but have no plans to remove it entirely. I have already talked to saurik, so my decision is final. To mediate the fact that I don’t support it anymore, I’m making it free. If you never tried it, now’s your chance. But inevitably you will encounter a bug, which is ok.
QuickReply wasn’t made for iOS4, it was actually made for 2.x, when 3.0 came out, i made the neccesary changes and released it. I was pleased, and it worked great. 1.5.3 was the longest running release I had, and I almost never received an email for support. With iOS4, it has simply lived past it’s prime and I receive too many emails now, I really can’t keep up. I have also tried to mediate some of the huge bugs but while working on it I’ve simply come to the conclusion it requires a re-write….
So, QuickReply 2, is it coming?…..I simply don’t know. There’s a lot of things I need to evaluate before I decide to jailbreak again. My iPhone 4 isn’t jailbroken right now and I couldn’t be happier. Sure I don’t get every little hook and plugin I want, but it’s working great and I don’t have to worry about a thing. At the end of the day, reliability is worth more to me now than before.
Jailbreaking is fun, but it’s not IMHO a venue to release a product. Compatibility became the biggest problem, I worked really hard to make QuickReply as passive as possible so it wouldn’t interfere with other Substrate Plugins, but inevitably problems would arise.
Future plans: I plan to focus on the App Store. I already have a few great apps on the way, that I hope you guys will enjoy. They’re no Tweetie’s but hopefully they serve their purposes well. I have to say, developing for the App Store is a dream, everything just fits together and works. Release cycles are much quicker and LLVM/clang is awesomeee.
P.S. I know a lot of people who purchased QuickReply recently are really upset that it doesn’t work and I do want to help you guys out. So if you bought QuickReply in the last 30 days, I’ll give you a refund. This is a manual process, I don’t have any automated system. Send me an email (gauravk92@gmail.com), subject “quickreply refund”, text: include your UDID, cydia account name, and paypal account. Unfortunately I can only refund you through paypal. I do have the data for when you purchased QuickReply so if you’ve been enjoying it for a while please don’t send me an email hoping to get a refund.
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Aug 10ColorPanel 1.0 - finally
This has been sitting in my local repository for a really long time. I don’t know why I’ve taken so long to release it. Just lack of time I guess. Anyway, it’s - another - standalone Apple ColorPicker app. Here’s the link if you don’t care about my little story, no harm done. ;) http://github.com/gauravk92/ColorPanel
These seem to be cropping up as-of-late.
I wanted to give a little bit of backstory to my decision to create my own. The first time I realized I need a standalone ColorPicker, i went, searched and didn’t find anything free. Some app had the functionality but I didn’t feel the need to pay for it. I eventually used the AppleScript route which is as easy as butter.
- that’s it.Sadly, it’s slower and not as useful as it seems.
So I made ColorPanel, it worked out great for me but through simple usage I added features like constrain the size of the window to make it not resizeable. I like the ColorPickers default window size even if my extra plugins overlap, it looks more…right.
One day I needed to get a color from a window but everytime i would invoke the eyedropper in ColorPanel, I lost the window focus and the color got slightly grayed out. I then though of the idea to add a global hotkey to invoke the toggler so you don’t lose focus. Just haven’t gotten around to it yet, SGHotKeyLib will help, it’s a great up to date library for implementing hotkey’s but the sad fact is shortcutrecorder is pretty much obsolete. I can’t get it to work (easily at least). I plan to write my own, plus I want to work on my own HotKeyLib because while SGHotKeyLib is great, I have a few thoughts on how developers should connect to it. So that will get added.
Now all of this was done a really long time ago (maybe a year now). I then heard of Spot Color by Zach Waugh. It was a fairly barebones implementation, called the ColorPicker and that’s about it. By that time I had a couple extra features so I contacted him about just merging them into Spot Color. I never got around to it but o well.
I also recently heard of Picker by stroughensmith. I do like the concept, I might use that but haven’t had a chance to try it out yet.
In any case I hope you guys like ColorPanel, but I currently use it myself and am happy with it.
- P.S. I based the icon off of something I found a very long time ago, if you know the source, please send it to me so i can give proper credit. I haven’t been able to find it again.
Enjoy ColorPanel, source is up on github! http://github.com/gauravk92/ColorPanel
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Jul 10CSS3 Ads Versus Flash Ads
My workmates at Sencha have created some excellent examples of CSS3 ads, based directly on current Flash ads. While they will only render in WebKit-based browsers, you can see they are actually more performant and smoother than their Flash counterparts.
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Jul 10Why does UISearchDisplayController suck!?
I’ve been working recently on a project that uses search. Not filtering, mind you, search! I’ve come to the conclusion that UISearchDisplayController is a bitch. Excuse my language but developers aren’t the most patient people anyway.
So why does it suck? Because it doesn’t perform search. It performs filtering but has search in it’s name wrongly! Many other sources have covered this misconception.
UISearchBar: (wanted to stick in a pretty photo)
Most of what you see on the iPhone isn’t actually searching, UITableView’s usually contain a number of results and the search bar will merely filter those results. That’s what UISearchDisplayController does, it facilitates the filtering of your existing UITableViewDataSource.
Search is usually asynchronous, usually relying on a server or local database where results are parsed in some manner and returned and displayed all at once. Because of the lag time for all of that stuff to happen to actually “search”, most system’s can’t have live filtering of results. Live filtering would require every result to be available at a moments notice.
UITableView is a highly optimized class, it’s essentially infinite because as you scroll down it simply releases the memory it used for cells on the top and asks the UITableViewDataSource instance for cells going to arrive a head of time. Also it doesn’t even go through the alloc/init cycle and release cycle for really any UITableViewCell’s. Instead it simply takes one’s you scrolled by (not seen anymore) and reuses them. So if a data source can provide infinite (sidenote I like physics and hate using infinite in any computable sense but o well) amounts of data, you can essentially scroll through it all.
So here’s the steps I’m taking to do a search as most other app developers would. Even Apple does, go search the App Store, there’s latency between typing and hitting “Search”. Usually it can get an index of suggestions pretty quickly but once you hit search it brings up a loading screen while it fetches the results.
- UISearchBar becomes first responder (lamen: activated)
- User types full search term
- User hits “Send” button on keyboard (here “Send” should change to “Done” to dismiss keyboard since hitting “Send” again doesn’t do anything
????Profit …..sorry I had too, I’m being serious though- After server interaction, results are received and parsed through (Should show some form of loading or activity while this is going on)
- Display results.
See you have to go through all of those steps to perform a search.
Safari (before 3.x or iOS4 or something) used proper search through this class no less. It kept the content area lightly blackened and let you type your search term[s] and hit search and it would take you to google. Now it has search suggestions there but principal is the same.
Here’s what it looks like for filtering
- UISearchBar becomes first responder;
- User types a letter (Data is adjusted accordingly, displayed)
- Go to Step 2 (loop)
A good example of this is the Contacts app. It’s search filters the results. And here’s one thing I won’t understand of that ideology.
Why is there a “Search” button on the lower right? It should read “Done” because all it does is dismiss the keyboard. That’s one fundamental aspect of this redefinition of “Search” that UISearchDisplayController has created.
That’s why it sucks.
I’m working on a way to make it work like Safari, that’s what I’m going for.
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Jun 10[People] seem to be getting dumber and dumber. I mean we have all this amazing technology and yet computers have turned into basically four figure wank machines. The Internet was supposed to set us free, democratize us, but all it’s really given us is Howard Dean’s aborted candidacy and 24-hour a day access to kiddie porn, you know. And people don’t write anymore, they blog; instead of talking, they text; no punctuation, no grammar. LOL this and LMFAO that. You know it just seems to me that it’s just a bunch of stupid people pseudo-communicating with a bunch of other stupid people in a proto-language that resembles more what cavemen used to speak than the king’s English.
— Hank Moody (via pkstef)
