Finally got a chance to finish Nicole Sullivan’s (of Yahoo fame) presentation on OOCSS. On the surface, it’s kind of obvious that’s where things should be moving. But it’s surprising that I haven’t seen more about it on various UI/UX development sites I follow. The Compass framework is one that uses OOCSS.
Can’t wait to start implementing this strategy.
Discovered Spritemapper over the weekend. You simply point to it a css file and let it lose. Spritemapper does the rest. It combines all the images being used in the css into one big image sprite, writes out an updated css with all the corresponding coordinates to the images, and voilà…
Now that you can only install Lion via Mac App Store, it’s a little weird not having a boot disc with you at all times just in case… (though you shouldn’t need one).
But I made one anyway, primary reason being so that I don’t have to re-download it when I install it on Grace’s iMac.
After painstakingly backing my 27″ iMac, I upgraded to Mac OSX Lion. Not a whole lot changed total UX wise. But I do like what I see except for Launchpad.
Speaking of changes, one thing that broke was the driver for my old black & white Samsung ML-1710. I ended up having to install Splix-2.0.0 which worked decently… Well, it prints — and that’s really all I care about.
So yay.
Been thinking about giving my blogging a reboot for the past couple of years. Hopefully this time it’ll stick. But Facebook just makes it so much easier to “share” my thoughts. But one thing sucks about Facebook is I can’t easily search for my previous status updates (I’d have to go through 3rd party apps or websites to do that). And more importantly, there are often things I’d personally like to keep handy (like videos or photos I’d shared).
So going forward, I’ll try to be more proactive back on my own blog creating content that I will own. And I’ll probably find a plugin (or maybe write one) that’ll publish my blog entries (and maybe images?) to Facebook.
I knew not knowing the good old traditional c/c++ language would come back and haunt me one day.
The demand for iPhone developers exceeds the supply and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. The going rate for iPhone developers, at least the developers I know and trust, is $125/hour and up. I have some friends who are booked out at $200/hour for the next few months, although $125/hour seems to be the going rate in my network. At that rate, a full-time contract iPhone developer costs $5,000/week and it may take four to six weeks for an application to be developed. Sometimes it will take less and sometimes it will take more. Add to development the other costs – project management, design, QA, and marketing, to name a few. It’s not uncommon to spend $30,000 and up on an iPhone development project. iPhone applications are not cheap.
In this particular case, money is not necessarily the thing I am after, it’s really the excitement and possibility of working on a product I love and use everyday…
A typical conversation with Bryan, my three-year-old….
Me: Bryan, Look. It’s raining.
Bryan: Why is it raining?
Me: Because there’s too much water in the cloud. And when there’s too much water in the cloud, water drops fall and becomes rain.
Bryan: Why is there too much water in the cloud?
Me: Because water evaporates into the air and eventually end up in the cloud.
Bryan: What is “evaporate”?
Me: ….
Bryan: Why is water falling from the sky? Is there a big hole in the sky?
Me: …. Um, no.
Bryan: Is the sky hard (as opposed to soft)?
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I need to visit some science 101 sites for kids….
I’ve been meaning to set up Subversion for source control on my various projects. After having worked in an environment with tight source controls for almost half of a year, I’ve gotten used to the convenience and peace of mind of having a source control in place. So today I took the plunge and got svn to work with a SVN client, Versions, along with my favorite lightweight code editor Coda, on my MacBook Pro.
Life is good.
Firethorn released a pretty cool iPhone app today that allows mobile banking (check balances, transfer funds… etc). But Citibank is simply not ready for this roll out.
First the website on CitiMobile was buggy. Then I found out they don’t service the iPhone. I wonder how much longer I can take their crap before going with BoA or another tech savvy bank in terms of customer-facing applications…
Why am I still banking with them anyway?!
Update: Citibank has been rolling out incremental updates to the app. Unfortunately it still sucks and is not very intuitive when it comes to mobile UI. Some companies just don’t get it.
Insecurity breeds suspicion.
Suspicion leads to misunderstandings.
Misunderstandings bring out the worst in people.
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It’s as if we didn’t already have enough to worry about on daily basis to go the extra mile to be insecured about ourselves to be suspicious of others just so that we can misunderstand each other. Gosh, people can be so annoying sometimes!
Bryan started pre-school… He secretly loves it but always tries to get our sympathy by fake-crying about it….
Amelia is growing up fast — sleeping through the night pretty much within the first two weeks of coming home. We are pretty sure she’s going to outgrow Bryan in a few more months… That’s what happens when a baby gets baked a few more days in the oven…
Bryan sings and tells his teddy bear stories on his spare time. He even prays (yes, prays) during meal (it’s a Christian-run pre-school he’s going to… long story). And his smart mouth is going to get him in trouble soon enough like mine always got me in trouble in school…
It’s bee a few months since I last actively blogged. Maybe it’s time to pick it up again…
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It’s been seven months since my dad passed. And in this seemingly long time, quite a bit has since taken place — the birth of our daughter, a huge almost grant-like photographic assignment, a well-paying full time job that my cousin hooked me up with, and a fallout with the same cousin that got me the job over the very job he helped secure… Oh, the ironies of life…
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The busy life style of the job, coupled with the fall out with my cousin, makes going to work somewhat unpleasant. Yes, the money is very good but the life style and all the misunderstandings that caused the fall out with my cousin make it almost unjustifiable. I now know that when money was more of an issue but time and patience weren’t, everyone seemed happier then. There are certain things money just can’t buy — time and happiness being on the top of my list.
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The same client who hired me to photograph her action pistol shooting event offered me more money to help promote her cause by becoming her campaign manager of some sort. I know that I can pretty much name my price and she’d be happy to pay for every penny with her trust in my work. But after some soul searching, I decided that I just couldn’t be part of any campaign that has anything to do with pro-guns (even though the whole campaign is really about her, not the guns, but because of the nature of the work, dealing with the NRA and pretending to not dislike that part of the world is a prerequisite… something I can’t live with no matter how much I’m paid).
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The real reason I stopped blogging was a promise to myself to first finish my clients’ projects before I can indulge myself in blogging. Today I finally posted the final edits of the “gun event” for the client to see. Technically I still owe her a few things that came with the package. But I think I’ve crossed the biggest hurdle that’s made me feel uncomfortable about doing what I like before giving my clients my priorities. I’m thankful for my clients’ patience to allowing me to slack for a few months… I’ll find some time to post some images shortly… and hopefully even find time to post process images of my own family!
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I love photography. But until I can find a way to live off of it comfortably, being a programmer will have to do.
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To be continued….