Rick's Random Ramblings: Archive

Details : Path's "+" Button

I felt like one of the last people to finally download the new Path app for iOS the other day. It seemed like everyone on my twitter feed thought this app was the coolest thing ever, but the “It’s like a social network!” aspect of it turned me off. I don’t need another social network in my life. But… since everyone praised the UI, it was time to give it a try. I...

Dec 5th

3 notes

Sidekick! Finally!

It’s been two years since I started the big “reworking” of core parts of NetworkLocation. It was my first real Cocoa app. The codebase grew and morphed as I learned the do’s and dont’s of how to write a proper Mac app. Some of the code was still present from v1.0, which could either mean it was doing a really good job or that we had painted ourselves into a corner...

Aug 4th

2 notes

Wanted: Ottawa Apartment

As some of you may know (and some of you may not) I am leaving Winnipeg and heading to Ottawa in a month. My girlfriend got into grad school there, so we’re heading there at the end of August. Why does this matter? Why am I blogging about this? This is a plea for a very huge favour from those of you from the Ottawa area. You see, we have been searching for apartments for over a month...

Jul 26th

Jun 3rd

2 notes

WWDC Prep-time

I was reading Twitter last night and saw someone mention “Monday’s keynote,” and thought.. “I think you mean… a week from Monday.” Then I realized, holy crap, nope, it’s THIS Monday. WWDC 2011 is just around the corner. This will be an interesting one, I’m sure. Besides the normal “The sessions will be awesome, the beer will be fantastic, and...

Jun 3rd

Raw Syntax: Importance of Side Projects →

Completely agree. rawsyntax: Side projects are important for a few reasons. Programming is a creative process. Side projects allow programming without deadlines or restraints. Side projects allow programming in an exploratory way.

May 30th

73 notes

Breadcrumb in action

We recently made Breadcrumb available for private beta over at freshcode. I’ve since put it into NetworkLocation so that we can use it, and see how it works in the real world. When we designed Breadcrumb, we wanted it to work with any store so we tried to make it as generic as possible and not require any server software. NetworkLocation is sold via a slightly customized PotionStore install...

Mar 7th

Expectation Management

I work with a bunch of different teams… and I think my #1 issue I run into with people is the concept of expectation management. There are a few different definitions of what expectation management is, but here’s what it boils down to for me: Knowing what’s expected of you (deliverables), when it’s due, who needs it, how it affects them, and managing those relationships. ...

Feb 16th

FogBugz counts in Geckoboard

I’ve been playing with Geckoboard the last few nights since we’ve been wanting to build something like that at freshcode. Geckoboard is really neat. The problem is that apparently we’ve bet on all of the wrong horses as far as things it connects to. And so I’m having to build the glue code that can talk to the services we use, and provide a data feed that Geckoboard can...

Feb 10th

wild chocolate: 13 Reasons Why Software Is Not... →

wildchocolate: Lately it seems more and more evident that the general population expects software to be free or at the very least cheap. This is reinforced when companies like Apple, who make a tremendous income off of their hardware, the iTunes store, and many other revenue streams, heavily discount their…

Jan 29th

375 notes

CoreLocation for Mac is Broken.

Sort of surprised that I haven’t written about this yet, actually… considering the thing has been a thorn in my side forever. In case you’ve been living under a rock, CoreLocation is Apple’s framework for finding a user’s geographical location based on either nearby WiFi networks, or cell radio towers. It was originally developed for iOS and then ported over to the...

Jan 3rd

Ahoy GitHub!

Last year some time I released a bit of code on our site (http://centrix.ca/code). The page has gotten quite a few visitors and downloads, but as that code was evolving it was a pain to update the site, and so we just didn’t. I’ve just moved the code over to GitHub under our Oomph organization. You can find it here: https://github.com/Oomph. From now on I’ll be pushing...

Jan 2nd

Taking Cues from iOS Multitasking

It took iPhoneOS err… iOS quite a while to get multitasking. Every geek who’s had a Windows Mobile device before (guilty right here) has thought “What can be so hard about including multitasking?” And we were right… technically speaking, adding multitasking isn’t difficult, iOS supported it from the get-go for a few apps. But Apple wanted a BETTER...

Nov 13th

Written Communication

I like writing. I like reading. It’s probably my favorite way of communicating with people. I’ve been trying to figure out why that is recently, and I think I’ve come up with some decent reasons. The small things: It frees up my ears for music. Love me my music. And it generally creates a nice paper trail (the number of times I say “let me go find that email” in...

Oct 26th

Operating System Competition

I grew up with PCs. So much so, that I remember at one point thinking motherboards came with DOS installed on them (shut up, I was young! :P). By the time I became really interested in software the OS wars were largely over, and Windows was the winner. I knew that Macs were different, and always assumed they were inferior. I was perfectly happy with my “re-format every 30 days”...

Sep 29th

2 notes

Pretroducing... MapKit for Mac

I’ve been spending bits of time over the last few months working on a little project that I’ve not told too many people about. I’m finally at a point where I’m ready to talk about it and start showing it. I’ve been working on a clean-room re-implementation of iOS’s MapKit, but for Mac OS X. What’s MapKit? MapKit is a framework Apple provides with iOS...

Sep 17th

1 note

Great Free Tools

I’ve been wanting to write quick recommendations of these two apps for a while. I use them daily, they’re free, and awesome. Sequel Pro http://www.sequelpro.com/ I never really used GUI SQL tools until I did a stint on a .NET project where we used MSSQL Server and got to use their SQL tools. It was like an eye-opening experience for me. ”You mean… SQL tools...

Jul 4th

Unrecognized Selector

This post is a little more technical than I’ve done, but I figured I’d share this in hope that it can help other ObjC developers. Objective-C is a pretty dynamically typed language. I’m sure there’s a great Computer Science term for exactly the type of typing ObjC fits into, but I probably slept through that class, cause honestly… who the fuck cares. What matters...

Jun 20th

Indie Game: The Movie

BlinkWorks, a little film company I’m quite fond of, made an announcement today: They’re trying to get funding for a documentary on KickStarter. Awesome. For so many reasons. Let’s start from the top: who BlinkWorks is. As far as I know, it’s just James and Lisanne over there, two super cool individuals who I’ve had the opportunity to share some drinks with on a...

May 19th

Email As A Process Component

With our Bodega 1.0 launch and our new way of doing things (e.g. purchase tracking), I’ve had to deal with a lot of e-commerce store providers out there. I now know way more than I ever wanted to know about a ton of stores out there… but what has struck me the most is how in this day and age, a company can still use email as a process component. Which is a fancy way of saying…...

Apr 24th

Splunk: Analytics done right

With Bodega and Centrix.ca, I’m always looking at analytics data. I try to get as much data as humanly possible (within reason) to be able to make good business decisions. That usually means a mix of SQL queries in stuff that I’ve logged to a database, awstats, and Google Analytics. They each serve a different need, but often I’ve hit questions that they can’t answer,...

Apr 21st

Classical Interpretations

In March there was a performance by the Noord Nederlands Orkest, where they played “classical interpretations” of some of Armin van Buuren’s most popular Trance tracks. These interpretations were done by a guy named Tom Trapp. The track list went like so: Hymne In And Out Of Love Zocalo (guest Eller van Buuren) Touch Me The Sound Of Goodbye Wall Of Sound Serenity Blue...

Apr 16th

Security NDAs

I posted a security issue radar to Apple about a year ago. A few weeks later I got an email from them thanking me, and letting me know that this issue was now under NDA. Time went by, and eventually they emailed me to ask me what name I wanted to use for when I’m credited in the release notes of the build that fixes the issue. Awesome! But also, they said that if I mentioned this issue...

Apr 9th

Locked Private API

The iPad’s out… go somewhere else to read about the device. :) Apple decided to make a few of their iPad apps be available on the AppStore as opposed to baked into the OS. There are very good reasons for why they’d want to do this, like being able to ship out bugfix releases without having to release whole new OS builds. And the extra few bucks per app certainly doesn’t...

Apr 9th

git-bisect, coder's best friend

We’re slowly gearing up for another release of Bodega at the office. I’ve been sending builds to some people to have them start testing things for us, and hopefully catch things that our normal testing process hadn’t caught. Basically every tester returned the same complaint: “The stuff in the Featured section isn’t centering correctly.” Oh… well that...

Mar 10th

Mar 9th

No one right way

I think business is a lot like politics… if you think there’s one right way to do it, you’re an idiot. I’m always amazed at how people are so eager to run their business like someone whose blog posts they read, without any regard for reality. I’m talking mostly about software development companies, since that’s about the only thing I know anything about. :P ...

Feb 23rd

Support Matters

This is a topic that gets brought up fairly often, but I don’t think it can be said enough: great support makes a company. I want to bring up a couple examples that I’ve encountered recently. The first I want to mention is about BuySellAds. We’re in the process of converting Bodega’s ad system from our homebrew setup to one managed by BuySellAds. We did some research...

Feb 18th

Conscious subconscious

I’ve come to find out that I’m a sleep-talker. Twice now, in the last month my girlfriend tells me that I woke her up in the middle of the night by saying stuff out loud while sleeping. The first time… I actually woke myself up in the process. Apparently that time I said her name (at least it was hers :P ). Now last night I had a whole conversation with her. About iPad apps....

Feb 8th

The Second iPhoneOS Gold Rush

In Apple Keynote today, they mentioned a second gold rush coming for developers, due to the iPad opening up a whole new market for developers. There exist no real tablet apps. Whoo! New Market! I think it’s interesting that they actually referred to it as a gold rush, since I don’t recall Apple ever calling the initial AppStore wave a gold rush. But I got to thinking tonight…...

Jan 28th

Game-developer welfare, get it while it's hot!

Alright, I’ve got an axe to grind. I’ll come right out and say it… if you’re a game developer in Winnipeg who hasn’t released a game ever, and have taken any of that “media” funding from the province… I hate you. You should be ashamed of yourself. And now for some context. Apparently a while ago the province of Manitoba decided it wanted to...

Jan 27th

"None shall pass!"

I have an idea for an iPhone app. More precisely, I’ve had this idea in my head for about 3 months, sitting there, thinking “that’d be neat, and hellishly fun to make… too bad you can’t do that on iPhone.” Today while talking to Chris, he told me that that thing… that I thought you couldn’t do, you can. (yay me for actually reading documentation) ...

Jan 20th

First half of Drive

I’ve been reading Drive, by Daniel Pink over the last few days. I’m just past half way through the book. I first heard of Daniel Pink a few weeks ago when I heard him mentioned on NPR, they said they’d have a talk with him for an hour about motivation in the workplace. The way they pitched it was interesting enough for me to actually connect at work (something I’ve never...

Jan 19th

Time to start giving back

I’ve been developing with ObjC/Cocoa since 2003-ish… so like… a hell of a long time now. I really like coding in it, and I love the Mac Developer community. I’ve learned a ton from others, and being able to drop some of their classes or frameworks into my projects has saved me days, weeks, sometimes maybe even months of work. I’ve been wanting to start being a...

Jan 12th

Hindsight: 2009

I’m late to the game with my ”What was 2009” post but I’ve been really busy working on some stuff. 10 days late… sue me. 2009 was a big year for me. I set some real goals for the year, some a little far reaching that I missed, but that’s alright. How the year started I went into 2009 rather optimistic. We had just gotten the green light on starting up the...

Jan 12th

Jan 2nd

Winnipeg Burlesque

So… as I tweeted earlier… the Government of Manitoba had a documentary made about the Burlesque scene in Winnipeg named… waiiit for it… “Winnipeg Burlesque.” As it turns out, it’s really just about this one woman named Gladys who acted as the sole agent for all of the “dancers” for the longest time. Here’s the trailer for it: ...

Dec 26th

Oct 5th

Talking, I guess.

I’ve been struggling to figure out how to go about writing this… and I’ll be honest with you… I still don’t know. So be prepared for a bunch of loosely connected thoughts. Cause god forbid I do some editing after writing a draft or anything. I hate talking about myself. The actual act of talking, I mean. Or well… the act of just going on about myself, as...

Oct 5th

1 tag

Sep 23rd

1 tag

NetworkLocation 3.1

We released NetworkLocation 3.1 tonight. I always forget how much work it actually is to release software once it’s done. Version 3.1 is our first official Snow Leopard compatible version of NetworkLocation, and also our first version to require Snow Leopard. Version 3.0.7 ran in Snow Leopard, but AutoLocate was mostly (err… complete?) broken, and various actions ceased to work due...

Sep 23rd

Worst. Dreamworld. Ever.

Let’s start this off with something easy. Every night, I dream. A lot. I dream significantly more than most people I know. That or I just tend to remember them more. Or maybe it’s that I just wake up during them more. I wake up often during the night, if only for a split second; enough to kick me out of the dream. My mind seems incapable of just chilling out and enjoying the...

Sep 22nd

First Post! what? people don't do that anymore?

So I haven’t had a blog since my 2nd year of university… back in the day when you still had to roll your own if you didn’t want to use the likes of livejournal. I literally posted stuff via INSERT sql statements back then (quotes were a bitch). ANYHOW… I’ve been thinking lately that I want somewhere to post my little rants. Twitter’s 140 character limit just...

Sep 22nd