A few years ago I decided I wanted to try my hand at iOS app development. In January 2012 I started working my way through the excellent iOS Apprentice tutorial series, which I completed three months later. Straight afterwards I started work on my first app, named Daily Offers . After more hard work than I’d ever imagined would be necessary, Daily Offers 1.0 finally went on sale on the UK App…
Every year the same films tend to be shown on British terrestrial television during the Christmas holidays. You know the ones: The Wizard of Oz, The Great Escape, The Towering Inferno, The Italian Job and Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory amongst others. I guess they’re shown because they’re family favourites and indeed I like all of those films. I mention this because Steve…
I was never one of those children who was steered in the direction of learning a musical instrument, probably because neither of my parents ever exhibited any musical ability. Which is being truthful rather than unkind. Plus we weren’t middle class enough to have a piano. Music wasn’t one of my favourite lessons at school, seeming mainly to consist of playing scales on a glockenspiel.…
When Apple announced the original iPad back in January last year I must admit that I was underwhelmed. Watching the keynote presentation afterwards a lot of people present in the room seemed to feel the same way, so subdued was the audience reaction. I’m not quite sure what we were expecting from the long rumoured and awaited Apple tablet, but it was surely more than the outsize iPod touch…
2011 saw the passing of the file system as an end user-visible feature within mass market computing devices. Ask someone with an iPhone or an iPad how they work with files on their device, creating, opening and saving them and chances are that they will look at you quizzically. You may get a response that mentions saving photos sent in an email or perhaps syncing documents via iTunes, but files?…
With 2010 having finally flown the nest of time after spending far too long living off its parents, I once again wanted to record my favourite tweets of the year just passed. Here are the winners in reverse chronological order: On Technology @despo periodic table of elements http://joshduck.com/periodic-table.html . #html_elements 9 Dec 2010 @avalanche123 "Java is a DSL for taking large XML files…
I bought Metaprogramming Ruby by Paolo Perrotta because although I’ve been writing Ruby code—for fun, not for a living—on and off for about five years, I still feel that I’ve barely scratched the surface in many ways. In particular, in order to feel like I really got Ruby I wanted a deeper understanding of how its object model worked and I wanted to properly learn about…
Microsoft Windows is a quarter of a century old today. It seems hard to believe that Windows 1.0 was finally released in November 1985 after being formally announced as a product named “Windows” (when the project started it had the less inspired name “Interface Manager”) two years previously. Although I have favoured Mac OS X and Apple hardware for my own computers since…
At the end of March I started to learn the Vim text editor and four months into my journey I thought it would be a useful experience for me to document the commands I have committed to memory so far. Please note that this isn’t particularly intended as an introduction to Vim or a tutorial, but if that’s what you’re looking for then there are many fine ones out there as well as…
I’ve just released my first ever RubyGem . It’s a simple gem named Manifesto that dynamically generates an HTML 5 cache manifest for offline application caching. I got the idea whilst developing my Truth Tables Sinatra micro web application. It returns a list of files within the specified directory and sub-directories. By default it also includes a computed hash of the files' contents,…