Tuesday: December 18, 2012
Panic takes a look at the magic behind the album art color schemes in iTunes 11.
If you've used iTunes 11 you may have noticed the adaptive colors used in some of your favorite albums. Apple could have just displayed a thumbnail and used the same colors for text everywhere but instead chose to theme each album to go along with it's individual art. This kind of little touch is really what has always se Apple apart from the rest. The good folks at Panic delve into the kind of programming and logic that may have gone into this kind of display paradigm. It's a great read even if you aren't a developer but its an even greater read if you because they include sample code.
Why Google's GMail outage may be a sign of things to come.
The answer is that most of the coders behind today’s popular websites and services are deploying their code when it’s ready—not at some pre-determined point when downtime may not be noticed. It’s called continuous code deployment, or some variation on that theme, and everyone from Facebook and Netflix to smaller services do it. While it may occasionally cause a few blips, those blips should be shorter and less catastrophic.
Monday: May 10, 2010
Ten sites that every developer should have in their bookmarks file.
No matter what kind of development you do, at least three of these sites will be helpful to you in some kind of programming endeavor. I've just recently discovered the browser sandbox over at Spoon.net (though I'm a still little partial to IETester).
Tuesday: April 20, 2010
Seven things about JavaScript you wish you'd have known earlier in your career.
As usual, another quality post from the folks over at Smashing Magazine. I have to admit that I'm guilty of still not knowing some of the tidbits contained in this article despite (for all intensive purposes) this being my career for quite some time. How irresponsible is that?
Thursday: April 15, 2010
Adobe to sue Apple sometime in the near future regarding recent SDK changes.
This really shouldn't be a surprise given Apple's recent barring of none-native code on the iPhone and features that Adobe had ready for CS5 in those regards for development. Apparently this was the final straw and not the relentless bashing they've endured for lack of Flash on Apple's various mobile devices.
Monday: April 12, 2010
Paramount teams up with Seagate to deliver movies via external hard drives.
The new FreeAgent Go 500 gigabyte device will have 21 movies preloaded, including a free offer of 'Star Trek.' Users can unlock access to any of the other 20 movies after paying for a passcode for a price of between $9.99 and $14.99.
Wednesday: February 24, 2010
Support for front-facing camera found hidden within the iPad SDK code.
Along with the references to camera in the code, others have even discovered GUI elements that reference it as well. Perhaps there are still some suprises in store for the iPad or maybe this is just for future-proofing version two.
Tuesday: December 1, 2009
Ten front-end techniques you can use to improve your site usability.
Usability is a very important part of website building. Sadly, this is often neglected by designers and developers. In this article, you’ll find 10 great techniques that you should definitely implement into your website.
Monday: November 30, 2009
Microsoft's top developers prefer old-school coding methods over those fancy modern ones.
Graphical programming environments are usable when they are useless, but unusable when they would be useful,' said Jeffrey Snover, another Microsoft distinguished engineer and creator of Microsoft's PowerShell scripting tool for Windows.
Wednesday: October 28, 2009
A handy tutorial on how to compile software from source code.
...thanks to the popularity of open-source software, where the source code is available for one and all to read and enjoy, the impetus has been put on the end-user to compile their own code if they want to use the software.
Wednesday: June 17, 2009
Amazon decides to release the source code to their beloved Kindle device.
Should be interesting to see what the development community can do with this.
Tuesday: June 16, 2009
Barcodes could be used to reveal extended information about your food's credentials.
Most manufacturers already use barcodes or RFID chips to track their products. But with the help of cheap cellphone and internet access it is becoming possible to collate data from remote locations around the world and make it available to the people who are actually going to eat the food.
Wednesday: May 6, 2009
An introduction to iPhone application development. Thanks MIT!
This helps with the afformentioned need to learn XCode from two posts back.