iOS Ā· Mac Ā· Web Ā· Coffee
23 May 2013 ā”
If this were any other games, I’d go, “meh, pre-rendered shit. The game won’t play like that.” Yes, I’m looking at you Metal Gear. But both Arkham City and Asylum have delivered everything Batman.
Too bad Mark Hamill won’t be the voice of Joker. Nevertheless, I’m still excited.
22 May 2013 ā”
22 May 2013 ā”
21 May 2013 ā”
Early on, in the mid to late 2000s, I was a self-hosted open source WordPress user and making sites using it for customers. I have an account on tumblr, post a few things, and thought it was cute but not powerful. A self-hosted WordPress however is a wrench with Swiss Army Knife (or Leatherman for Mericans out there) for handles. You can literally build any sites with WordPress, from generic 5 page + contact form site, to full on e-commerce site, to a groupon clone.
How cool is that? A wrench turn sideways to be use as a hammer. The problem arises when you need to hammer in a few nails everyday for the foreseeable future. The custom WordPress site that were hack together with spit and duck-tape becomes a pain to use and maintain. Security updates literally mean sleepless weekend powered by Doritos and Coke.
By the time I decided to get my own domain and have my own blog, the open source WordPress is no longer an option, even though technically I could just use WordPress without plugins and custom codes, but I know the programmer in me would succumb to the temptation.
First thing I attempted was of course build my own blogging platform. The php code just get a read-only MySQL access, so it’s 100% secure. Disqus for commenting system. Write posts directly through phpmyadmin. And phpmyadmin turned out to be a horrible way to do a blogpost, and I need a wonky way to post some pictures where I need to upload them with ftp first then add them later, and there were no way to preview the post. Needless to say, it was a failure.
So I went shopping for options. I’ve looked at a hosted Joomla, Drupal, MovableType, TypePad, Expression Engine and a few more that I can’t seem to recall.1 None of them seemed to be the exact fit for my need, and yet most of them were overkill for a blogging platform. So I drill my options down to two. WordPress.com and tumblr.
As Arment pointed out in his recent post about tumblr’s acquisition;
David and I were like-minded in prioritizing user-, geek-, and designer-friendly needs. Our priorities, free custom-domain hosting, and full HTML-template editing made Tumblr a big hit among creative people from the beginning.
That. The free custom domain option was the only reason I try tumblr first and never look back. Until today, I believe tumblr stroke the perfect balance of simplicity and power, vis-Ć -vis the iPhone. I don’t think things would have gone any differently had WordPress.com have a free custom domain option. I’d just arrive here a few months later than I did.
Looking at them now, a lot has changed since I tested these platforms.Ā ā©
21 May 2013 ā”
As a user, Iām okay with this acquisition.
I understand that $1.1 billion in cash is a lot of money to turn down.
Yahoo! is more interesting since Mayer took helm.
And I think Iām okay if they pull a flickr…
…and leave tumblr the way it is for the next five years.
19 May 2013 ā”
I chose the Messages icon simply because it displays the three factors that I believe need addressing in iOS design and especially in the launcher icons: the gloss, the stripes, and the loud colours. I tried to apply the stylings and approaches that I discussed before and made another simple change, pulling the Label text down in boldness to Helvectica Neue Medium and upping the font size to 26px to give it clearer counters and a smoother, more legible readability. The colourās still bright, as I donāt believe the pastel tones that are popular at the moment reflect iOS styling enough, but I tried to at least tone it down a notch.
Stunning as it is, it’s still reminded me of the new Dropbox icon. As the author pointed out, it made sense the next iOS will take this approach.
18 May 2013 ā”
It’s like current Firefox’s dev tools with the 3D view for iOS, and it’s only $40.
17 May 2013 ā”
Flat UIKit + Colours for iOS = interesting… that said, why aren’t there many more UIKits? Maybe it is, and I just don’t know any. I know there’s this, but not quite ready to use UIKit.
15 May 2013 ā”
I guess this is a thing now. Since the iCloud kerfuffle (like this, this, or this), I’m looking into a few that’s more mature with pricing that made sense, for both the provider to be profitable and not to expensive for me.
15 May 2013 ā”
