This year started out great. Spent the night in my van after Andrew & Sam's (not me, different Sam) NYE party then went climbing with new friends that morning.

I spent the rest of my time off after New Years working on decorating a bit. It was so nice to get situated after so much time in the van last year while I remodeled.

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For Christmas 2023, I drove to Kentucky, left my van for a few days, and flew back to San Francisco for New Year’s.

Started out the year in my rental in Sausalito. That place had such an amazing view.

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I started the year out in Florida. Spent some time in the Keys with Granger & Cass then went cave diving in Florida for the first time. So intense. The caves there are about 100ft on average and there is a ton of flow. You have to pull yourself along the walls with your hands instead of kicking when it's super strong. It was a really great experience, but I definitely prefer Mexican caves.

My mom's 70th birthday was in February. She had been talking about maybe wanting a larger van to do longer trips. I got her a Ford Transit and built it out for her.

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Here's a video I recorded when I moved out.

Some friends were going to Tulum, Mexico and asked if I wanted to tag along. Booked my tickets on my phone and slept on the couch in their Airbnb.

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I shot all of these on a Sony a7R iii in a Nauticam housing.

Feel free to follow me on Instagram to see more scuba and travel photos. I’m @soffes over there.

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Most of 32 for me was resetting.

After almost a year and a half of waiting for my divorce to be finalized, it was finally official in August 2021. That was such a relief.

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I remember thinking about this a lot after being fortunate enough to have lots of job options later in my career. I definitely considered trying to do good (by whatever measure at the time) in my new role. For example at Lyft, I remember being really excited that it was helping folks that had limited job options make a living, etc. (In hindsight, this logic is a bit questionable.)

Lately, I realized I don’t care about “world impact” as much as I used to. I feel like it’s kinda stressful to always try to do what’s best.

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A lot has happened in my life since this trip. I’ve been meaning to get to these photos for a long time. I took over 1,600 photos on this trip, so narrowing them down took some time. Since I’m headed to Mexico this week for more diving, I figured it was time to finally finish these.

This trip was my first time in Asia. Unfortunately, I didn’t get to see much besides the resort and underwater while I was there. Definitely need to go back.

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I think about the shop from MythBusters all the time. Shelves and shelves of labeled boxes of everything you could ever need to make stuff. Living the dream.

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This morning, I read my Thirty and Thirty-One blog posts. These usually reflect on my last year some and look forward to the next year. Thirty was mostly about how work stuff isn’t the most important thing and I want to focus on family and hobbies. Thirty-One was mostly about goals for my free time. Needless to say, I didn’t accomplish many goals from that post this year thanks to COVID.

Last year on my birthday (March 2020), I was with some friends in Joshua Tree for the weekend. I remember being shocked to see the paper products aisle being completely empty in Wal-Mart. A guy that passed me in the store made a joke that all of the beer was sold out except Corona and that was his favorite so he didn’t mind. No one was wearing masks. We didn’t know you were supposed to yet. That following Monday, shelter-in-place started. That Tuesday, I started at GitHub from home. So weird.

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With Ruby 3.0.0, I haven’t had any issues installing it with rbenv. Today, I needed to install an older version and had some trouble getting it. Here’s what I did to figure it out. (This assumes your Homebrews are setup like I described in my post.)

First, install rbenv with your native Homebrew:

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I went scuba diving in the Philippines. It was really amazing. I took some photos I’m really proud of. Maybe I’ll post them some time. (I’ve been saying I’ll post them “next week“ all year. Hah.)

I remember hearing about this COVID-19 thing on the news and not being sure if I should worry about it. When I was reentering the US, seeing the US border folks wearing masks made me worry a bit. I had to sign something promising that I hadn’t been to China. So crazy.

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The biggest issue for me was Homebrew. According to this issue “There won’t be any support for native ARM Homebrew installations for months to come.” No big deal though. Homebrew can work just fine with Rosetta 2 and some things work natively.

Rosetta 2 is Apple’s translation layer. This lets you run Intel things with a little overhead. In Terminal, you can run any process with Rosetta by prefixing it with arch -x86_64.

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Here’s the snippet:

command regex json 's/(.+)/expr let input = %1; print(String(data: try! JSONSerialization.data(withJSONObject: (input is String ? try! JSONSerialization.jsonObject(with: (input as! String).data(using: .utf8)!, options: []) : (input is Data ? (try! JSONSerialization.jsonObject(with: input as! Data, options: [])) : input as! Any)), options: [.prettyPrinted]), encoding: .utf8)!)/'

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That seems like such an old age. I remember thinking when I was 22 that I better get everything done by the time I’m 30 since my career or whatever will be over then. Hah, such a kid.

Last year, I wrote this:

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I plan to do a getting started with Home Assistant post at some point. For now, I just want to go over controlling Sonos with Siri. (I specifically want to play Apple Music on Sonos via Siri. Apparently you can do this with Alexa, but I want to use Siri.)

The key to using Siri to control things in Home Assistant that aren’t supported in HomeKit is the Shortcuts app. Since things you add here are accessible from Siri, you can create shortcuts for things you want to do and then ask Siri to do them for you.

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Now the project is open in Xcode. So quick!

I just extended it to support Swift packages that don’t have a project since that works so well now.

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I think I’m starting to figure out my underwater camera setup. I’m really pleased with some of these photos. You’re probably here for the photos, so let’s get straight to that. More about the gear at the bottom of the post.

Update: My dive buddy, Chris Sohl, shot a really great video of the trip. I’m the one with the big camera.

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I planned to do a 165 mile hike around Lake Tahoe but ended up only doing 40 miles there and then about 40 miles in Joshua Tree. (Check out those links for some photos.) Before leaving, I changed all of my work passwords and locked my work computer in my desk at work. While I was out, I couldn’t access my work accounts even if I wanted to. I forced myself to disconnect.

At first, this was really difficult. I thought about work often on my first few days of my hike. It was mostly bitter and frustrated thoughts. Each day, I thought about it less and less. Instead I started focused on the beautiful scenery and just enjoying the nature around me.

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After getting snowed out in Tahoe, I decided to head down to the desert for some warmer hiking. One of the unique things about Joshua Tree is you have to bring your own water. There isn’t any water in the park and if you happened to find some, it’s protected so you’re not allowed to drink it.

Before I started the hike, I left some water behind some bushes near Belle Camp and Ryan Camp. (I found a lot of good information about this on Bearfoot Theory.) I was pretty worried about water, but it ended up not being a big deal.

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I was really excited about my first thru-hike. I spent a ton of time working on my gear list, doing research, and planning the details of my trip.

The trip didn’t go as planned though. After only 40 miles, I decided to head home. It started snowing really hard on the 4th day, and I wasn’t really prepared for snow or very cold temperatures.

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I recently made my personal website and blog support a dark theme if the user’s device has dark mode enabled. This is really easy to achieve with a relative new features in CSS, custom properties (aka CSS variables). They are already widely supported too!

Here’s how to define variables:

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Twenty-four miles in 3 days doesn’t sound that difficult, but it was actually pretty tough. Almost all of the trail is on sand. Hiking a long distance on sand—especially with the slope of the beach into the ocean—is really though on your feet, ankles, knees, etc. We were all pretty sore by the end. It was super beautiful though. I would absolutely do it again!

If you’re curious, here’s my gear list for this trip.

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Lately, I’ve been learning that you can’t choose to not care. It’s like trying not think about something—it just makes you think about it more.

Instead, I’ve been focusing on acceptance. At first, this seemed like the same thing, but the difference is important. Lying to yourself that you don’t care about it versus saying this is the way it is and I’ll figure out how to live with that is really important.

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Most weeks, I’ll walk to work 3–4 times and walk home 1–2 times.

I’m at my lowest weight since I’ve been tracking my weight (~5 years). I feel better and plan to keep going!

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I remember I was in a Lyft listening to Big Red Machine thinking how exceptional the song Lyla is. It’s not that I was moved by that song. I mean it’s a good song, but it’s not like the best song ever or anything. It’s that that artist has put out such consistently great art. He is great—at least in my book.

I want to be know for being great at a craft. I think that’s a reasonable aspiration, right? I feel like iOS work doesn’t count. I just put pieces together. I’m not being that creative. I guess I want to be known for being great at creating something.

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I remember thinking I wanted to change the world or whatever before it was too late because I was too old because I was 30. I remember wanting to be considered “great” by whatever definition.

I remember spending as much of my free time as possible for years making software so people on the Internet would think I was good at making things. I guess as a result of lots of practice, I did get better at making things. I care less now if you agree or not.

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One of my main drives for joining a company was not working from home any more. Having to physically go to the office helps me really keep things separate. I want to show up, get a lot done, go home, and not think about work at all. Having separate work and life contexts helps you focus on each.

I almost never take my work computer home. It belongs at work. I also only work from home if absolutely necessary. Being at the office makes me more productive and helps me turn off work when I’m done on my ride home. I don’t do any work on my personal computer.

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This iteration is built on top of Jekyll, a static site generator written in Ruby. My previous iteration was built on the idea that I should store my posts separately in a repo that’s just Markdown and the images used in the posts. I optimized for a format that I enjoy writing with the hope that it would help me write more. The blog imported the posts and did a bunch of processing to eventually store the rendered posts in Redis.

Lately, I’ve been playing with Netlify, a great static site host. It’s been really great of a bunch of simple projects. My blog was the last big thing I had on Heroku and wasn’t cheap to run. I figured since it was mostly static already, I could just convert it to Jekyll without too much effort.

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I want to be known for going out of my way to be positive. Hold me to that.

— @soffes on 2018-07-17

I think the value positivity is underrated. When you go out of your way to be positive, it really changes your outlook on life. The idea of being known for always being positive is really interesting to me.

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per·fec·tion·ism noun

refusal to accept any standard short of perfection.

Our team is called Design Systems. We make trade-offs on a daily basis. Our job is to maintain a bunch of components, tools, documentation, technical infrastructure, design guidelines, etc. The goal is to make all of the UI more consistent and to make the teams using the design system more productive.

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A few months in, I decided to design new keycaps. It’s fairly cheap to order a new set, so you can change your mind often if you’re into that. Here’s my latest iteration:

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The s alias is defined as:

This simply opens the current directory in Sublime Text, my editor of choice. I really love how fast this let’s me get started on something. I first ran into this pattern with TextMate’s mate command. So great.

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For this to work, I hide the cursor and have a custom view track your mouse movements. (When I say cursor I mean the pointer on screen you control with your mouse, and when I say mouse I mean your physical input device.) I use a full screen, borderless window and NSTrackingArea to do this. Nothing too crazy there. I do this to avoid dealing with custom a NSCursor since that was a lot more work.

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Usually my scripts are for something tedious that can be easily automated. Here’s a few examples in my own projects:

Some of the most elaborate scripts I’ve written in projects have been to automate gathering dependencies. This can be complicated depending on your setup. My goal is always for someone that isn’t a developer to clone, run the command, open Xcode, and build. That may seem like overkill, but if you make it that easy, you make it that easy for yourself and teammates which saves a ton of time.

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After a long while, I figured out that my window wasn’t becoming key even after I called makeKeyAndOrderFront. It turns out windows with borderless in the styleMask cannot become key by default. You can solve this with a tiny amount of code in a window subclass:

So ya. Frustrating. This is actually documented, but it took me a really long time to realize the window wasn’t becoming key and then why.

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At first I considered making my own share actions for this and disabling the system ones but that seemed like a lot of work for adding a simple “it worked” to the screen. Then I had this idea:

Pretty simple! This uses SVProgressHUD to show some visual feedback that it worked. This was really easy to add. I think this is a really welcome addition. You could obviously do this for any other type that you want. I didn’t want to do it for every type since some types (like share to Twitter) are really obvious when they work or are canceled.

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I use a Heil PR40 mic. I've used it for a few years now. It's a pretty great mic for making podcasts and screencasts. The boom arm for my desk is a Heil PL-2T. This is a great arm. I've seen it used with several other mics too. My mic is attached to the arm with a Heil PRSM-B Shockmount. I also have a Heil Windscreen on it to cut down on breath noise.

The arm mounts into my desk with a Heil DT-1 Flush Mount. I have a Mogami Gold Studio 6' XLR cable cable in the arm connected to the mic. I found 6' is just about the perfect length. There's a little extra to work with but not too much. I know the Mogami cables are pretty pricey. From what I've read, it's the only cables you can audibly hear a difference in quality. They're fine cables. Probably doesn't matter that much though.

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Here’s recent one that made me laugh:

widest prime less than 4000 when written as a Roman numeral in Times New Roman

— @wacnt 2016-02-03

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Add a new Run Script build phase. Change the shell to:

Put the following in the source area (right under the shell field):

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You can download the screensaver here.

It's less than 100 lines of code. Give it a look if you're interested. I'm particularly fond of the font. I'm using new Swift 2 runtime checking:

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Static's goal is to separate model data from presentation. Rows and Sections are your “view models” for your cells. You simply specify a cell class to use and that handles all of the presentation. See the Usage section below for details.

Static is written in Swift 2 so Xcode 7b3 is required. There aren't any dependencies besides system frameworks.

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The main idea was all of my posts lived in their own repo. This is great for a bunch of reason. Being separate from my blog's source code is nice since it changes every few years. Even when I was blogging on Roon and Ghost, I kept this up to date (with some scripts). I saw a talk from one of the guys that works on Archive.org and was really inspired to start saving as much as I can.

Since my posts are in their own repo, a simple post-commit hook can update my blog. GitHub simply posts to an enpoint on my blog that causes it to reimport my posts into Redis. Another added benefit is people can PR typo fixes. When I click the merge button on GitHub, the webhook fires and automatically updates the post on my site. Neat!

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It just checks to see if all of the characters in a string are all the same. Here's the test:

It seemed like there would be a better solution. Terry Lewis and several others suggessted putting the characters in a set and counting the set. Here's Terry's solution (Kelly Sutton suggested making it more consice):

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Personally, I’ve never been a fan of mocks and stubs. At some point you just end up testing your mocks and stubs instead of your real code. When it comes to testing, I want unit tests to test logic and integration tests to test compositions.

I think focusing on testing everything in isolation isn’t great. If you have stuff that is hard to test in isolation, either it should be redesigned to more encapsulated or due to the nature of it, you need to test it at a higher level.

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Since this isn't terribly specific to Whiskey, I decided to open source SyntaxKit. It makes TextMate-style syntax highlighting easy. It works on iOS & OS X. There aren't any dependencies besides system frameworks. Boom.

Carthage is the recommended way to install SyntaxKit. Add the following to your Cartfile:

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I was recently working on a little control for entering in numbers on Apple Watch. Here's the code:

It's really straight forward. There's a little bit of math to insert or delete numbers. It's not bad though. Here's how you use it:

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All I did was tweet the video about it a few days before it came out and then tweeted that it was out early the morning it was ready. Someone else submitted it to Product Hunt after seeing my tweet. The results were pretty shocking!

For launch, the price was $4.99. I may play with that some over time. I was originally thinking $2.99 and a bunch of folks on Twitter said $4.99 was better. Anyway, Redacted was #8 top paid in the US and #1 top paid in Graphics at the end of launch day. It was also at the top of Product Hunt with 538 up votes! Wow!

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My whole setup with new headphones, case, DAC, preamp, and cables was a little under $400 (half for the headphones and half for all of the toys). You could definitely just get the headphones for $200.

If you're looking for something on the cheap, I recommend a pair of Sony MDR7506. Standard issue studio headphones. Can't go wrong for only $70.

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The main this is NSRegularExpression's options. By default Ruby, has AnchorsMatchLines on and NSRegularExpression doesn't. I simply turned that on and had good luck.

Here's my specific case (Jekyll front-matter):

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I got inspired and thought it would be fun to do my own. Not that any of my work is anywhere near as meaningful as theirs, it’s still fun to just do it. I’ve found it’s really enjoyable to summarize what I’m doing each day. I was surprised how much it effect my focus day to day.

Personal Sam is named after a Twitter account I used to have. My friend Aaron Marshall, Over’s founder, used to have @personalaaron. It was just him complaining about his boss and whatnot. I thought it was awesome and started @personalsam. It was mainly me winning about girls and how emo my life was back in 2008. Anyway, it seemed like a fitting name for my podcast thing and I already had the domain.

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#1 Have you found that you really can make a living just by working on projects that you’re interested in?

Sadly, no. I still do contract work to pay the bills. When I’m working on my stuff full-time, it’s on money I’ve saved up from clients. I someday hope to live solely off of income from my projects.

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The Whiskey beta has been great. I have a huge amount of things to build still. My list was a little overwhelming. Among things that still need to be built, there were lots of little bugs that needed some attention I’ve been putting off. No one likes to fix bugs.

Getting lots of email and tweets from people saying they love it and can see its potential is huge. People actually seeing it is good motivation. It also helps get me excited to fix little bugs. For example, several people reported this one thing that took me a minute to fix. I had just been forgetting about it because it wasn’t something I used a lot personally.

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#1 How did you begin programming?

I started “programming” for the first time when I was 10 years old. My mom took me to an HTML class our local ISP was offering for free. I thought it was amazing you could type some stuff and make visual stuff happen. Started writing HTML in all of my free time in Notepad on our white Dell tower.

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I think one of the best parts about Swift is a lot of the simplicity they were able to bring to the language due to not being built on top of C. Explaining Objective-C to someone who has never programmed is pretty difficult. You have to explain all of the exceptions to rules and get into pretty deep computer science topics right from the start. Swift let’s you bypass all of that and just get into the code.

In short, I'm a big fan of Swift. Checkout the full article.

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First we need to understand qubits. Basically, a qubit is a quantum bit. Qubits have 3 states where classical bits (the ones in our computers, phones, etc) have two: 1 & 0. Qubits have a “spin” which can be up, down, or both. Quantum stuff is a little mind blowing since things can be doing two things at once.

Here’s a really great video explaining quantum computing if you want to know more:

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Update: It's out! Go watch season 2 episode 1.

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Cole is an amazing photographer and designer. I’ve been following Cole since 2010 when I saw some of his photography as my friend’s iPad background. I immediately bought his Litely presets for Lightroom when they were released. (By the way, you should follow Cole on Instagram.)

Litely started as a set of photo presets for Lightroom, Aperture, Photoshop, and Adobe Camera Raw. They are very subtle effects that make a huge difference. I bugged him on Twitter one day to make Litely for iPhone and he was into the idea. A few weeks later, he hired me to start working on it.

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Compared to the Android tools, Xcode is fantastic. I plan on doing a more in-depth comparison on Android & iOS soonish. Anyway, if you look at any of the other tools, Xcode is fantastic. It’s pretty, generally works well, and is overall a joy to use. Imagine if we had to do all of this with Makefiles and Terminal.

iTunes Connect let’s you publish to the store. You can upload your app right from Xcode. We have team management in the developer portal. We can make certs whenever we want. There’s a lot there.

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Lately, I’ve been learning Android. I’ve just been watching videos on Treehouse after teaching a course there. Last week, I decided to get serious and ordered a Nexus 5.

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Taken with a Canon 6D + 24-70mm f/2.8L II

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I set a goal to retire at 25 (which really means financially independent) about two years ago. While I still have to work, I have plenty of time to work on whatever I want. I don’t consider the goal met, but I’m on my way. I’ll take that.

Now that I’m older, I feel more perspective. I still constantly disappoint myself. I wish I was more productive. I feel like I can accomplish anything and then work on stuff that doesn’t matter or no one will ever see. It’s depressing.

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After some major frustration last year with CocoaPods, I decided to remove support for CocoaPods from SSToolkit. The maintainers of CocoaPods couldn’t write a podspec that actually worked for SSToolkit and I was tired of fighting with it. I really like CocoaPods, but there have been plenty of bumps along the way.

I decided to break SSToolkit into several libraries. This came with the support from the CocoaPods folks, so I got going about 8 months ago.

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Dash is a great tool for documentation. Apple’s built-in documentation isn’t bad, but Dash is great. It gives you tabs and much better searching. It can do documentation for tons of other stuff too.

I set the keyboard shortcut to launch Dash to the default one to launch Xcode’s documentation in Dash’s preferences and then change Xcode’s to something I’ll never press in the Key Bindings preference area. Best thing I’ve done in awhile. My friend Caleb Davenport got me hooked on Dash.

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It was fun while it lasted.

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We talked about How to Learn, Motivation, how I got started, and what I'm up to now.

Give it a listen!

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Give it a listen. We also recorded an after dark right after.

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We mostly talked about Execute iOS and how we manage our time. It was a lot of fun. (Expect a blog post Execute iOS soon.)

Give it a listen.

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This is the story of designing, building, and submitting the app in one day.

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Here's the video from the panel:

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To me, I immediately dismiss the possibility of it being the best phone. If that is really the case, there is no way they could give it away for free. At least that's my line of thinking. If this is truly the best, it must be using some cutting edge technology and that junk isn't cheap.

Someone twitter had a good point:

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Personal branding is very important to me. It's something that requires effort. It's not random chance people know (or don't know) who you are.

Anyway, give it a watch if you're interested. It's 35 minutes long and in interview format.

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We decided to make another Mac app called Footage Composer. It's been a lot of fun and there are definitely some big challenges with this project. Mac development is hard.

I asked Drew if I could show off some of the stuff I've been working on and he was all for it.

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It's a simple Rack app you can mount in your own app. It provides a simple API for sending a verification SMS and then verifying it.

To get started:

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Here's my favorite response:

Facebook tried to buy Snapchat for 3 billion dollars and Snapchat turned it down. Here's a pie chart to explain why: pic.twitter.com/fX9VUICa5V

— Ray William Johnson (@RayWJ) November 13, 2013

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If I discover someone isn't a good client, I'll do my best to finish the project like we agreed on and then not work with them again.

The most frustrating thing is someone that doesn't know what they want. They'll constantly change the project or add things when it should be finished. If you're billing by the project instead of the hour, this is even worse.

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Sometimes I really impress myself with my work ethic. Most of the time, that isn't the case. I feel like I'm constantly striving to get back when I was super productive.

The times I find myself in these super motivated states, I get incredible amounts of work done. Today, I wrote an insane amount of code and went from zero to an app that sorta works. (I wrote this the day I redid Shares.)

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Give it a listen. Also be sure to listen to part 1, part 2, and part 3 first if you haven't heard them.

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Today is my last day at Seesaw. Seesaw is the second longest job I've had coming in at just 14 business days short of a year. I'm getting married on Saturday and taking three weeks off for my honeymoon and for our move to San Francisco. Like I said, bring on the change.

I figured it was best to just be up front with Seesaw and let them know I was planning to leave soon. I'd hate to waste their time and money with three weeks off only to leave soon after. We both agreed it was best to leave before. The wonderful folks at Seesaw and I are on great terms.

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I redid my little site last night to have a graph. Right now it just pulls in my weight from the Fitbit Aria scale and shows a simple graph. There is a rake task that runs every 10 minutes and stores the data as a JSON string in Redis. The rest is a simple Sinatra app that just sends the JSON straight to JavaScript. The graph is made using Chart.js.

When I have more time (lol) I want to make this pretty and show more data. Fitbit collects a ton of really sweet data. Making a custom dashboard thing sounds like fun.

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Today, my co-workers at Seesaw and I launched a little side project called Everlapse. It's a fun app for sharing life, frame by frame.

Video is beautiful but tough. Photos are easy but boring. Everlapse is something new in between.

— TechCrunch

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• Part 1
• SAMBadgeView
• MIT License
• CocoaPods
• SemVer
• SSToolkit

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You can find the code so far for this on GitHub: github.com/soffes/SAMGradientView. We’ll be adding a lot more in part 2.

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I generally go to bed around 2am or 3am. Since I work from home, I wake up around 8:30 and starting in bed right away. I spend an enormous amount of time working in bed instead of at my desk. On most days, I don't get out of bed until 11 or 12. It's pretty great.

After my Seesaw work is doing around 6:30ish, I hang out with family and such. Around 10 or 11 I'll start working on whatever side project I feel like that evening. Lately, it's been Roon.

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Our assets were taking awhile to load because S3 is a tad slow. We use the fantastic asset_sync to serve assets off of S3 instead of Heroku. This is a big performance (and cost) win by itself since Heroku is expensive and is better suited serving dynamic requests.

The main problem here is webfonts. Users can't see any text on our pages until the font loads for the first time. This is kind of a big deal for a blogging app. Even worse, due to iOS security, if you hit Roon in Tweetbot (or any other app using UIWebView), it will have to download it since it doesn't share the system HTTP cache for security reasons. All of this made Roon feel super slow—especially on mobile.

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I figured it was worth expanding a bit about this though. Mainly two things Roon does that's sorta unique made possible by the fabulous Redcarpet folks.

We have underline support. As far as I know, we are the only people that support this right now. Here's how you write it:

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Anyway, I posted that I was selling Cheddar a few months back. This has been a very interesting process. I learned a lot and met some really cool people. My biggest take away is most people just wanted to find out a lot because they were curious and were just wasting my time.

Today, the money from the Cheddar sale cleared in my back account. It's official. I don't own Cheddar any more. My good friend Josh Long owns it now. He has some big plans for it. He'll be posting about it soon. I'll tweet it out when he does.

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Anyway, there are countless quotes just like this one:

iOS 7 is so far from done that maybe there is a story here, in that Apple has a mountain of work ahead to get iOS 7 ready for actual release this fall (presumably, coincident with the release of new iPhone and iPad devices). But to judge iOS 7 beta 1 as you would a release version is silly.

— John Gruber

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We have big plans for developer stuff on Roon, but for now I'm just using a little Ruby script to pull my latest post.

Pretty simple. We'll be rolling out real documentation and such soonish.

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I started following Chris Hadfield on Twitter a few months ago. Someone had retweeted this tweet that had an amazing photo of San Francisco.

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The big change this year besides how quiet it's been is that Ive is in charge of the software design for the first time. The banners around the Moscone are shockingly different:

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23andMe is a really neat company that has been around since 2007. They process your DNA and tell you what it means. It's only $99 to get yours tested.

Here's the highlights from my results.

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Instead of mindlessly arguing on one side or the other of this, here's my go to points when I'm trying to win someone over.

Choosing to be explicit is my number one reason to do things in code instead. If someone new to the team opens up a view or view controller, they can see right away where everything is and not have to wonder if this file has a NIB.

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When I'm programming, it's constantly running the tests to see what failed, trying a fix, repeat. It's finding a bug, try a fix, repeat. You get the idea. That's how I work. It's constantly iterating on ideas to see if they work.

When I was first starting out, I'd find myself reading entire source files to try to understand everything that was happening and only running the code very rarely. It's no surprise that were lots of bugs in this code. Letting the computer do the work for you is like the whole point. Anyway, this is how I design.

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The code from this video can be found here: github.com/soffes/adder. Here is Ruby's module_function documentation.

Hi, I’m Sam Soffes. I’m going to show you how to create and distribute a Ruby Gem. So, let’s say you have some really fancy code that adds 2 numbers together. We’re going to package this up into a Ruby Gem called Adder and you shoot it on Rubygems.org, so anyone can Gem install Adder and use our code. First off, you’ll need Bundler. If you don’t already have Bundler, you can easily install it with Gem install bundler. Now, simply Run, Bundle, Gem, and the name of your Gem. So, in this case, Adder. Great, and you can see here it generated a bunch of files for our Gem so, we’ll open this up in Sublime and try it out. So, most importantly it generated a Gem spec for us. and you can see it has some placeholder values. I’ll go ahead and fill this in. It’s a good idea to add a required Ruby version, that way if you’re using features that aren’t available in 187 or 192 or whatever, Rubygems won’t let you install it on a Ruby that’s not supported. Kind of on a side note, if all you’re using 19 for is the hash syntax, it’s a good idea to go ahead and use the old 187 syntax, so more people can use your code. I really prefer the 19 syntax, but I usually end up switching, just so I can support 187. If that’s the only change, no reason not to.

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We had a lovely chat about open source & design. Give it a listen.

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Someone on Twitter suggested that I put it in git instead. Definitely a much better idea. Here's my Sublime Text configuration. It just adds packages I've installed that aren't the default, my theme, and of course all of my preferences.

Hopefully you find it useful.

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After being inspired by Waza this year, I decided to have a more durable way to store my posts. Instead of storing years of work in Postgres, I decided to store them on GitHub. I even took the time to go through Archive.org and try to find as my old posts as I could find.

I'm not worried about Postgres durability. I'm more worried about accidently deleting my database or my dev database getting corrupted. Anyway, having them on my computer, external backups, and on GitHub is a good feeling. Granted I could have done that with Postgres, but managing markdown files on my computer is fun and easy.

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This makes me incredibly sad.

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Quesadilla is an entity-style text parser. Quesadilla was extracted from Cheddar. It's what powers all of Cheddar's text parsing. It was inspired a bit by Twitter's tweet entity.

Since Cheddar works on iOS and Mac (as well as the web), I needed something that could give me ranges for special things in the text. iOS and Mac convert this to an NSAttributedString using the indices included in each entity. Here's the source for how Cheddar for iOS does it in Objective-C.

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Here are the links for everything I talked about:

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For the iOS App Store, these would be terrible. Getting New and Noteworthy on the iOS App Store means at least tens of thousands of downloads per day. The Mac App Store is much more sparse.

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Real artists ship. — Steve Jobs

Today I shipped Cheddar for Mac. I'm not happy with it. I actually really hate it. It lacks all of the polish and details that Cheddar for iOS has.

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From Adam:

Core take away? Embrace risk. Stay focused.

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So my work history is pretty hilarious. If I was in any other industry, you'd think I was a deadbeat that can't hold down a job. It's slightly different for engineers in San Francisco, but that doesn't change the fact that I change jobs a decent amount.

Anyway, I was doing Nothing Magical for awhile. It was amazing. I was bootstrapping a company all by myself off of my savings. It turns out when your rent is $3,200, cash goes pretty quickly. (I now live in a much cheaper place, but more on that later.) Anyway, I ran out of money. I had the option to pursue freelance to support myself and not get a day job.

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If you've never sold all of your stuff, I recommend it. It's a great experience. You'll discover how much time you waste doing stuff that doesn't matter and how not doing that stuff effects your happiness.

That said, I now have stuff again. It's nice. I started working at an office with some friends. Getting out of my apartment is really nice. After biking home from the office for the first time, I was tired. I realized all I had was my bed and my desk. "Well, time to get a couch."

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We mainly talked about Nothing Magical, Cheddar, and all of the stuff it takes to run a company. Give it a listen if you get a minute.

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I'm all for Developer ID. I'm really glad Apple spent the time to make it. There is one problem though. If you are using Mountain Lion, it's totally broken. You can't reliably use the Keychain if you build with Mountain Lion. Writes work alright, but every read gives a –25293 ("Authorization/Authentication failed.").

I have read lots on this topic in the two days I spent trying to solve this. Most of them said use 10.7 or 10.8.1. Since I was already on 10.8, I tried 10.8.1, but it don't work for me. I tried the release of Xcode and the latest developer preview. Both didn't work on 10.8 and 10.8.1. Finally, I resorted to installing 10.7 on an external hard drive and booting from that, and that worked!

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Give it a listen.

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The name is terrible. "App" feels so technical. "App.net" is even worse. Now I'm thinking of Microsoft or that they couldn't get the domain they really wanted. I think naming it something that only appeals to such a small crowd is very short-sighted. Right off the bat, I have little faith in them just by the name.

Granted Cheddar isn't the best name for my product. It's not technical, but who doesn't like cheese.

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We talked a lot about Cheddar, running a business, and some other recently exciting things.

Give it a listen. Also be sure to listen to part 1 first if you haven't heard it.

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Recently, I updated my hire page with my new rate: $1000/hr. Lots of people on Twitter have been going on and on about how this is ridiculous or how awesome they think this is.

If you think it's too high, don't hire me. Simple as that.

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Since I use Grater, everything looks great on iPhone, iPad, and desktops. I was using SVGs a few weeks before the Retina MacBook Pro came out. Since I had already optimized for the Retina mobile displays, I didn't have to do anything for the new MacBook Pro!

Anyway, I wanted everything to look crisp and was having trouble at first. After seeing GitHub do it so well, I asked a friend how to do it and spent the time to make them great. It's actually very easy.

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We talked a lot about my life history and things I've learned from Cheddar. I don't think I've ever talked publicly about this much of my life.

Anyway, if you're curious about where I've come from, Cheddar, or what's next, give it a listen.

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I also did an interview with them awhile ago. Their site is so well done. I'm always impressed every time I look at it.

Give it a listen.

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So, I'm 23. Two years to go.

A lot can happen in two years. Two years ago I could barely write Ruby and now I make a living (mostly) writing Ruby. Two years ago, I didn't know anything about making products, marketing, design, etc. I was just a programmer. (Not that there's anything wrong with being just a programmer.)

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Learn by doing.

If you want to learn iOS, pick something to work on and start. "But I don't know Objective-C." Okay, Google "getting started with Objective-C" or buy a book. If you run into something you can't figure out, Google it, search StackOverflow, or ask a friend. This technique applies to anything.

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I wrote a post in 2008 about choosing programming over music. I remember making a conscious decision in high school to pursue programming over music. Mainly because I sucked at music and was way better at programming at the time (by my standards anyway).

It's interesting that the best times in my life have nothing to do with programming, design, making products, or any of the stuff that consumes my life today. I haven't even touched my drums or a guitar in months. It's funny how things change.

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This is what I want to know: What is Facebook doing with all of these acquisitions? I can tell you. Nothing. They haven't shipped anything that works well or looks great in awhile. Their camera iOS app wasn't bad, but from the talent they've acquired, it should be embarrassing.

I mean, Facebook is the worst iOS app on my phone. How many engineers and designers does it take to make a great app in a year? I think it's a really small team and a few months. I think part of the reason nothing is happening is there are too many cooks in the kitchen.

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Once I got it, I took a quick look at Chrome and "Google". Check it out.

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The Cheddar web app is written in Ruby on Rails. I choose Ruby on Rails because I already have a lot of experience with it and it let's me work quickly.

For awhile, the API and the web app were two separate Rails apps. The web app simply used the API. This quickly became hard to manage and test. I ended up merging them back together before launching. The API is still very separate from the web app. At some point, I would like to split it out once I have more time to work on my internal tools.

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We talk about some pretty personal stuff that greatly shaped my life. I'm pretty excited to look back and listen to this in several years. Anyway, give it a listen if you're interested.

Update 08/07/12: Founders Talk Part 2

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After awhile, a pattern became clear. There would eventually be some request queueing visible in New Relic and then all requests would just time out. I was using one of the beta databases on Heroku (Crane). The amazing @mattt suggested that I switch to a dedicated one, but that didn't seem to help.

Now for the best part, everything was down for 12 hours due to an AWS outage. The power went out in the datacenter. This blows my mind. Datacenter 101 is backup generators with backups for those. Anyway, this totally sucked.

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Update 06/22/2013: I no longer own Cheddar. More info.

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Most everything is download stuff from the network, store it in Core Data, and display it in a table view. Make a few custom controls here and there or some fun animations. That part is fun, but that's a small part of it.

I think I'm getting over just programming in general. I love creating stuff, don't get me wrong. Just starting to realize that typing all day isn't the only way to achieve the good feeling that I created something.

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Granted, I can see where someone would be coming from on the other side of this issue. My problem is that my Twitter account is mine. Who is the employer to tell me how to use a website? I didn't see anything in my employment agreement about their right to censor my tweets.

The worst is someone on Twitter telling me what to tweet. I'll run my Twitter account and you run yours. This is the silliest thing ever. If you are greatly offended by some string of 140 characters, don't listen. It's the dumbest thing to get all worked up about.

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Developer & Designer at Nothing Magical. Currently working on http://cheddarapp.com

I never really considered myself a designer, but I spend a ton of time designing things now. A few people asked me how I learned: trial & error.

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I think we’ll start seeing more acquisitions like this throughout the rest of the year. It's Google’s turn.

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Recently, I received an email from the CEO of a company that I'm a big fan of. He wanted me to join his company. After interviewing and thinking about it a lot, I accepted the offer. The whole time I kept thinking that I could keep working on Cheddar on the side and if it took off, I could quit and work on it full time. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that that was more exciting than working at this really cool company.

After much deliberation, I told them I had changed my mind and was going to continue working on stuff at Nothing Magical (my stuff) full time. They were disappointed, but respected the decision. This was a super hard decision, but I think it's the right thing.

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It's fantastic. Aaron does an amazing job explaining how everything works. You should order this book and get started. It's easier than you think.

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Note: currently only Safari support emoji so the examples might be a bit confusing if you're using a browser that doesn't support emoji.

Cheddar's server uses Ruby on Rails. It turns out that there is a bug in ActiveSupport::JSON::Encoding that doesn't encode high UTF-8/UTF-16 characters correctly. (More information on this bug). There's a simple solution that monkey patches ActiveSupport to use the actual character instead of trying to encode it.

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I don't mind doing any of those things for friends. If we haven't talked in 5 years and message me on Facebook with 2 sentences asking me to solve your problem, don't expect a positive reply.

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I've never really been a fan of grid systems. Having tons of divs with classes that correspond to layout all over the place just feels wrong and makes your code look ugly. Anyway, I have a really basic way of doing things that I guess is technically a grid system, but I don't like to think of it like that.

Here's the basic layout:

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After much thought and deliberation, we decided to open parts of RubyMotion. We believe that this will make it even easier for the community to contribute to and extend the RubyMotion platform, leading to a better RubyMotion for everyone.

Today, we are opening the “lib” directory of RubyMotion, which contains the build system, project Rakefile, the configuration object and also the project vendoring system. Check out the HipByte/RubyMotion repository.

I can't wait to see the community start improving this already growing platform.

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Currently, the only furniture in my apartment is my desk, bed, and table. I'll also most likely be selling my table when I move out of my current apartment. Having almost nothing is fantastic. No TV to distract. No couch to lounge on. Focused.

I spend most of my day working at my desk or outside riding my bike. It's been really great for keeping me focused on Cheddar.

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In the tour video, they are editing a WordPress site and uploading files via FTP. Back when I was doing PHP, Coda was my go to editor. It looks like it's still targeted at that market. On the list of new features is "Improved Ruby." Fingers crossed.

Their fancy CSS editor looks amazing. If that and the iPad preview work with SASS, I'll be very, very happy.

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A bunch of people not too far from here just became millionaires (or will be very shortly). All of these now super rich Facebook employees are going to spend this money. Housing near the Facebook office has been going up and up in price. Buying a ridiculous house is where I'd start, but that's only a few million.

What would I do after I buying a sweet house and a Tesla? Invest in some smart kids making something cool in San Francisco. The bubble is just getting started.

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The sad thing is the syntax is just horrendous.

Awhile back there was some discussion on the mailing list about copying how SCSS does it. It's a shame that didn't happen.

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These people are not a-holes. Zendesk does not hire a-holes.

If I was looking for a job, I would consider Zendesk after seeing this amazingness.

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Looking back at it today, I'm proud of it and glad that I learned more than I cared to know about animation curves. It might have been a better use of time to just use a default curve and finish the feature instead of spending the whole time on a single animation.

I'm still not sure if learning something new and perfecting it was better than finishing in this case. Usually whenever I spend hours on a particular detail (like fading in a slight shadow at exactly the right speed) I'm never sure which side of the spectrum it falls on. I think this feeling means you're doing it right.

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(via Kevin Smith)

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SSPullToRefresh is highly customizable. There is a contentView property that allows you to set the view that shows when the user pulls. This is really great because you can simply make a view conforms to the SSPullToRefreshContentView protocol you're good to go. You don't have to hack up the pulling logic.

By default, a basic content view is set if you don't provide one. See the readme for the full details on customizing).

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SASS is better on a whole bunch of different fronts, but if you are already happy in LESS, that's cool, at least you are doing yourself a favor by preprocessing.

Most arguments I've read are just "I like SASS better." His is very technical comparison of the two. It's a really interesting read.

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Google Native Client (NaCl) is a sandboxing technology for running a subset of Intel x86 or ARM native code using software-based fault isolation. It is proposed for safely running native code from a web browser, allowing web-based applications to run at near-native speeds...

This is pretty exciting. This means you can start running Ruby code in the browser.

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Overall, it will be a good improvement to search results. Google should do more of this. Focus on what they're good at, search.

(via Steve Derico)

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As a software engineer, the tech behind a product or feature used to be the interesting part to me. It doesn't matter though. Users don't care about any of those details. They just want it to work well. Solving interesting engineering problems, while fun, doesn't matter. Trying to release a product all by my self makes that so much more clear than it used to be. (I'll post more on the tech stuff later.)

This brings me to my next lesson.

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I know a lot of people (especially in the Objective-C world) that fear progress. We have all of these great tools like Automatic Reference Counting, Core Data, and UIKit to make writing iOS applications easy. Apple has spent some considerable engineering time solving problems that we all have to solve. Quit wasting your time and embrace it.

People give lots of excuses for not using these fantastic technologies. Most of them boil down to resisting learning how to use them. Progress means learning. Learning is good. For these three in particular, the learning required to leverage all of the solutions to problems you're spending time solving is absolutely worth it. Spend your time building something useful instead of reinventing a solution to a solved problem.

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RubyMotion is a revolutionary toolchain for iOS. It lets you quickly develop and test native iOS applications for iPhone or iPad, all using the awesome Ruby language you know and love.

It's a very exciting new product from Laurent Sansonetti, the creator of MacRuby. He was at Apple working on MacRuby full-time, but decided to leave and do his own thing. This is what he made.

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It was a good time. Give it a listen.

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Cheddar will be the first Nothing Magical product that I launch. I'm massively excited to release it so you can see what I've been up to. It should come out in a couple of weeks. I have a lot of other ideas that I can't wait to work on, but more on that later.

Check out Cheddar. I made a little video to tell you about Cheddar. Head on over and watch it.

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It's funny how a 0.2 second animation can make something feel a million times nicer

— @soffes April 13, 2012

The fade in takes 0.3 seconds, moves the element 100 pixels, and scales from 80% to 100%. The fade out takes 0.25 seconds, moves the 45 pixels, and scales from 100% to 90%. (All of these values are relative to the element's size.) The point being, getting all of this right took awhile. It's a lot of trail and error to get it right. When you get it, it will just feel right.

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Most responsive sites are really jarring when they jump between media query sizes. Elements start jumping around and if you were reading something, your spot may or may not still be on the screen. I really wish people would take the time to improve this. It's not hard.

Here's a concrete example. Let's say you have a header on a website and want it to be smaller on mobile. This is easy with the following media query:

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Bootstrapping is hard. I only have so much in the bank. It's really painful to watch it dwindle away. This whole process has put the pressure on. I love it! This is amazing motivation. The only reason I'm contracting is to keep my runway going longer so I have more time to get some products ready. Honestly, I could go without contracting, but the extra cushion will be nice.

I whipped up a little site and posted it at http://hire.soff.es. (The source is on Github by the way.) Head on over and hire me if you're interested. The first 4 weeks are already booked. The following weeks are already in talks so be quick.

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Recently, I bought some Apple stock. (Which, by the way, has been a fantastic investment.) I found myself looking at the price in the stocks dashboard widget then using Alfred's calculator to do the math to see my change. This got cumbersome quick.

I just wanted an app to see my overall gain or loss at a glance, so I made one.

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IncrediBooth is a universal iPad/iPhone app. With the last update, we added support for the new iPad's retina display. This made our bundle huge. IncrediBooth has a ton of full screen textures to help illustrate the physical metaphor. These images as 2048 x 1536 PNGs are just massive. Converting some of these to JPEGs saved a ton of space. It's unfortunate they don't load as quickly, but some PNGs that were 10MB+ were ~200Kb. This was a good first step.

Even after converting as much of the big textures as I could to JPEGs, I was still over the 50MB limit. My goal was to be under 20MB so older devices could download it without WiFi. I turned to my Twitter friends and found ImageOptim.

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I'm a big fan of minimalism. Every so often I get the urge to drastically simplify my life. This time around I have a good reason. It's exciting. I don't need really anything I have. It's definitely nice to have nice stuff, but I don't need it. I'm excited to simplify.

There's a list of stuff I'm selling on Yardsale. If you're in San Francisco and want to buy something, hit me up on Yardsale. If you're not in San Francisco and want to buy something, hit me up via email.

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I'll be dedicating all of my time now to some products I can't wait to show you. My goal is to stay on my own for as long as possible. Hopefully some of the products I'll be releasing will make enough money to pay my bills so I can continue to keep doing this.

When I run out of money, I'll figure something out. Contract work will probably be a temporary means of building back up my cash buffer (or cash cache if you will) so I can get back to my own stuff. (That said, I'm not looking for work.)

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It's funny how quickly things change in the software world. A blog post less can be super horrible advice less than a year later. That's why I never recommend a book to someone wanting to learn Rails. That stuff changes constantly. I still think Aaron's books on iOS programming or Mac programming are really fantastic. I learned with his book on Mac programming before iOS came out. (He has a book on Objective-C too. I haven't read it, but I'm sure it's fantastic.)

Objective-C doesn't change nearly as much as the Ruby world does. Recently we've gotten Objective-C 2.0 (plus the advancements in the Apple LLVM compiler) and ARC. Everything is always backwards compatible without making things too crufty. It's really amazing how well it's held up. More on all of this later though.

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I tried it on a Mac app and an iOS app. At first it was really hard to let go of retain, release, and controlling the details of an objects lifetime. After awhile, it was really nice to not write dealloc and just release every ivar.

When I switched back to work on a non-ARC app, I realized how annoying it is to write memory management code. Now, we're switching all of our apps at work to be ARC. Here's are my two biggest reasons:

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I've kinda of brainwashed myself into thinking I don't have a choice except to pay for this. Doing pretty well as a software engineer in San Francisco makes this a possibility. I realize how stupid this is.

Anyway, I'm starting to hopefully break the habit.

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UITableViewCells don't update when you set the imageView's image. UITableViewCell's imageView is magical and stupid. If you don't have an image in the imageView, it will nil it out and remove it from the contentView. When you set the image, it will cache it and do some silliness so your updates don't work.

Make your own image view. Easy as that. Don't use the imageView property unless you want it to work exactly the way Apple uses it in Music.app for albums. For anything else, just make your own and add it to the contentView.

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“Always initialize your object variables to nil, no matter what, because some day they may be captured by a block and if they contain junk when the block is copied you’re going to crash.”

It's just good practice, but this really sums it up. Thanks for the write up Ryan Perry!

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I recently received this email from a developer using my framework.

Dear Sam

Thank you for SSToolkit. I'm using it to display images from a folder.

your code is easy to use and the instructions to import it into an Xcode project, on your website, are clear and simple.

Regards Ehab

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Notice I run rake assets:precompile after I deploy to Heroku. I am using asset_sync to host my assets on S3 instead of Heroku. There is a known issue with Heroku and this gem, so that's my workaround. Having it in my little rake task means I won't forget any more :)

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We've been running it in all our 1.9 deployments for GC tuning + require speed fix.

— David Heinemeier Hansson

Installing Ruby 1.9.3 is easy. My preferred approach is using rbenv and ruby-build by Sam Stephenson (great name, I know). rbenv makes it easy to have multiple versions of Ruby on your system (and in a much cleaner way than rvm).

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With Everlane we've set out to build a new kind of retail experience, one that exists 100% online and bypasses all the middlemen to create beautiful designer goods, always under $100.

It's basically super high quality designer goods (clothes, ties, bags, etc). I kinda want all of it.

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Anyway, there are a few preferences that I really recommend turning on to make iChat way better. To see your iChat preference, choose "iChat" from the menu bar, then "Preferences". Everything I'm going to cover is in the "Messages" tab, but there are definitely a lot of other fun things to tweak if that's your thing.

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Anyway, for awhile the best way was to hit a web service running on App Engine to use Pygments since that's actually running Python. This totally sucks because you have to rely on that service—it could be down, network latency, etc.

Damian Janowski put out a fantastic gem that solves this called Pygmentize. It's dead simple to use too.

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I might build something, but now, I'll just go back to no comments. If you want to leave a comment or ask a question, I'm @soffes on Twitter. You can always email me too.

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My first big project here was refactoring all of our image processing from Hipstamatic, IncrediBooth, and some upcoming stuff into a library that we can reuse called HipstaProcessor.

This has been a great project. HipstaProcessor runs on iOS and Mac (which I was pretty proud of). This gives us the ability to test out effects quickly as we build them instead of the tedious process of change the effects, putting a build on the device, and testing with whatever images are on the device.

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I sent this email as my last reply from Mark that I received on September 6. I doubt it will be successful, but I thought I'd share my truly awful experience with them.

Daniel from your company first contacted me on March 31. Jens contacted me on April 29 and I politely asked him to remove me from your list and to not contact me again. Daniel then emailed me again on May 11. You then emailed me on May 18. Daniel emailed me again on May 12 and I replied for him to please stop emailing me. Daniel emailed me again on June 21 and I replied again asking him to stop emailing me. You emailed me again on August 3.

Please, please, please stop emailing me.

Sam

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Anyway, it's easy to sell stuff to rock at Craig's List. Here's a few things to think about.

• List stuff for a bit higher than what you want to get for it. People always offer lower than the listed price. This gives you room to go down the price you actually want.

• Be firm with what you're willing to accept. People will usually respect that.

• People usually email asking if the item is available. When you reply, say that is (if it is of course) and ask when they want to meet. Making the transaction as soon as possible is key. Waiting gives them time to change their mind, find something cheaper, or whatever else.

• If there are other people interested, I always mention that. People knowing that other people might get it before they can makes them move faster. I've had people cancel dinner plans and come meet me to buy something because they didn't want to lose the chance to buy the item.

• Only accept cash. If anyone won't pay with cash, they are trying to scam you. (While we're on scamming, if anyone ever offers to pay more than what you're asking, that is definitely a scam.)

• People love stuff in the original box and when you say what cables are included and such.

• Good photos are a must.

• Keep descriptions short and to the point. People rarely read them anyway.

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It's really cool to be a part of something instead of a hired gun. The decision was easy. This is an amazing place to work. I really can't wait for our releases coming up! We will blow some minds.

If you wanna work on some awesome too, we're hiring iOS and Rails engineers. Email me: sam@synth.tc

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Whiteboards are fun and all, but I think they are a little more distracting than useful when you're working by yourself. All of the setup required to just put your thoughts down is a bit much most of the time. Once you're done at the whiteboard, then you have to figure out a way to save your thoughts so you can reference them later. Don't get me wrong, great when brainstorming in a group, but I've found they are way less productive than a notebook when working a lone.

My favorite notebook is the Behance Dot Grid Book (only $14). It's super high quality. I'm a big fan. (I also really like Moleskin too.) The Pilot G2 Pen is my all time favorite pen. I've used it exclusively (when possible) since 2007.

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Gemfile excerpt:

config/compass.rb excerpt:

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I've been having a lot of fun learning about image processing. Who knew writing your own gaussian blur was really hard?

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Nothing! Taking some time off to rest after working crazy hours to finish the project. I have a pretty exciting contract gig I'll be starting soon that will last for a few months that will be a lot of fun. I have a few interviews at some pretty cool places, but I'm not in a hurry to get a real job again.

Sigh, yes. This will be the third time I have moved to being a full-time contractor. Yes, I hated it in the past. Yes, I've said that I won't hate it this time around before. Yes, I probably will hate it in a few months :) Anyway, I'm excited. I want to focus on my own projects more this time around.

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As starting college approached, I soon realized I would have to spend almost all of my free time driving from work to school, sitting in classes, and doing homework. I was totally dreading this. I wasn't a good student in high school and didn't want any part of the busy work, writing papers, and all of that nonsense.

My mother really wanted me to go because neither of my parents went, so I said I'd stick it out and go. A few months later, I got a job offer from LifeChurch.tv in Oklahoma City and decided to take it. Obviously, I would have to drop out of the University of Louisville where I was enrolled since I would be moving away. Trying to keep my promise to my mom, I enrolled in Phoenix.edu.

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Anyway, they've done some really cool stuff. The little app that servers your drops is written in Sinatra and open-source on GitHub. Awesome, right?! I forked and customized a bit.

Checkout my fork. It's super simple, faster, and very HTML5-y. Before it included jQuery, some other Javascript, lots of CSS, etc. Now it's just one stylesheet and 2-3 images. I was proud.

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There are literally hundreds of images in the Scribd app I've been working on. Designers changing their mind plus everything custom leaves a lot of images behind that are no longer used. Our application was starting to be several megs and a lot of it was unused images. So... being the programmer I am, I wrote a script.

It basically searches all of your source files for references for [UIImage imageWithName:@"image_name_here"]. Then it looks at all of the images on disk and removes any you didn't reference. I setup a whitelist for icons and other images I don't reference directly. You might need to tweak the paths a bit to work for your setup.

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I was curious how typical I am. Here's the typical traits and how I line up:

• Right handed: Yep
• Makes less than $12,000 a year: Nope
• Owns a cell phone: Yep
• Doesn't have a bank account: Nope
• Male: Yep
• 28 years old: Nope
• Chinese: Nope

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My application pulls a ton of data from the network and puts it in Core Data when you login for the first time. From using the application, I noticed that performance totally sucks at first and then goes back to normal. (My table views all scroll at 60fps, but I'll save that for another post. Sorry. Had to throw that in there. I'm way proud.) This was troubling since it usually works really great, (okay, now I'm done bragging about my cells) so I investigated.

Just so you know, I am doing all of my networking, data parsing, and insertion into Core Data on background threads via NSOperationQueue.

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Leave a comment on vimeo and let me know what you think. Follow Kyle on Twitter while you're at it.

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Hopefully someone will find that useful. I also switched to LLVM 1.6 and increased the warning level to be more strict. Lately I've been a big fan of stricter warnings. I feel like I'm writing better code when it makes me check types, etc.

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It's a really great tool for sketching quick stuff. I've really been enjoying it lately. For me, it's great for drawing quick ideas.

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It's pretty nuts that you can download Tweetie 2 (now called Twitter for Mac) and pre-order Duke Nukem Forever. I almost don't believe it myself.

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I have flown out to San Francisco for a few interviews and done tons of phone interviews as well. I had a pretty sweet interview at Apple for the iChat engineering team (even though I didn't get the job). Steve Jobs and Jonathan Ive walked right by me while I was eating lunch at Cafe Macs (which is awesome by the way). It was epic.

I accepted an iOS engineering position at Scribd.

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Anyway, crazy multi-columns layouts are bad. Think of the average user.

If you think about it, the average person that uses Facebook is significantly less technical than anyone who reads my blog. They are the kind of people that freak out when Facebook changes their design and have to re-learn how to do their crap. This is who I'm talking about. It helps to picture the average user as my mom.

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I know that Twitter's infrastructure is crazy. I know that writing that much all at once to the same place is really difficult. I'm just saying I wish they would solve the problem cause I want to use it more. I really do love Twitter and it really is quite impressive. Especially #newtwitter.

You can follow me on Twitter if you want to read about my random complaints, technology babel, or personal randomness. I'm @soffes.

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We can all agree that native apps have a much better experience than web apps, especially on slower devices (like the iPhone). Pull up your contacts in your iPhone and flick through them really fast. See how smooth that was. Now pull up any website and do the same. Not so smooth. Checkout Cover Flow in the iPod app. Amazing, right? Show me a website that does that that smooth. You can't.

The reason that native apps greatly out perform web apps is that there is a lot more processing power used to render website than it is to render native apps because they are... well, native. Websites need to run through some sort of engine, in this case WebKit, to convert them to something that can be used by the device.

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This is a special thing to me. I really enjoy this process. Everything about it is great. The problem solving, the perfecting, the design, everything.

I don't know how I feel about selling this. I mean, I just labored away on this code and I'm really proud of it. I understand that I can sell the rights to someone to use, which is fine. It just feels wrong to have worked on something for a really long time and then someone else owns it and I'm not allowed to do anything with something that I made. I know that the money is the trade off. It just feels like I made a baby then sold that baby.

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I'm already booked for the next 3+ months with a lot of iPad and Rails work. It's for a client or I'd say more. It's a really cool project. After that, I'll be doing looking for some contract projects and work on my own stuff.

I plan to focus more on fun open source projects now that I'm my own. I already have a bunch of stuff started on my GitHub account, but more on that later. It will also be good to have more time for music and life in general.

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I want my fonts on all of my computers. Dropbox makes it easy to share files between computers. Why not put my fonts in Dropbox?

Disclaimer: Backup your stuff before doing this.

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Apple would never ship an app that looked and worked as bad as Final Cut that they expect normal people to use. Why is it okay if it's a "Pro App"?

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Here's the email:

Hey man,

Rails is awesome. If you're not familiar with Ruby, I'd recommend getting acquainted with it first. I spend 2 hours reading a PDF online and then jumped in. The more you understand Ruby, the less magical Rails seems. The Ruby Programming Language is a great book. Matz (the creator of Ruby) is one of the authors. A lot of it is like "this is they way it is because when I designed it I though this". I liked it a lot.

The Poignant Guide is another really popular way to learn Ruby. There's a bit of history to it, but nevermind that for now.

Once you feel semi comfortable with Ruby (i.e. you can make a class that has methods, inheritance, control structures, etc), watch this 15 minute video. It will blow your mind. My next step was going back through it and trying to build it myself. This was really hard at first cause I had no idea what I was doing and didn't understand the syntax yet. Don't worry.

Try to write something simple in Rails. Maybe a blog or to do manager, etc. I learn by doing. This was the best for me. I've rewritten my blog at least 20 times. (By the way, it's open source on GitHub.)

The best resource I've found is Railscasts.com. They are really well done. Pretty much anything you could want to do, he has already covered. After I got several under my belt, I sorta "got it" and started really understanding what I was writing. #carlhuda on freenode (IRC channel) was also super helpful. @wycats (he's on the core team of Rails and jQuery) is in there and he's really great about helping new comers and teaching you stuff.

Ruby5 is also really great. It's a biweekly 5 minute podcast about news in the Ruby and Rails community. I've found lots of great stuff there.

Let me know if you need any help or have questions. I'd be happy to help.

Sam

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Thoughts on the @oldspice videos and retweet contests.

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Thoughts on the iPhone 4 antenna debacle.

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You can't put just any object in a plist. This mainly gets people when they want to put something into NSUserDefaults and get an error (because NSUserDefaults archives to a plist under the hood).

Plists only support the core types: NSString, NSNumber, NSDate, NSData, NSArray, NSDictionary (and their CF buddies thanks to the toll-free bridge). The key here is NSData. You can convert any object to NSData with the NSCoding protocol.

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I wrote a post awhile ago about JSON benchmarks. I was telling a friend he should use JSON Framework based on my old benchmark post. He asked if I had run them again recently, so I figured I'd run them again.

I updated my test app and added a new library called YAJL based on a C library. My results were very similar to before. This time I tested it on an iPad and iPod Touch.

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Even if you aren't a developer, these videos are totally worth your time.

This is a short 26 minute talk by Yehuda Katz (@wycats) on development in general. This is so inspiring. He talks about doing the impossible and just getting stuff done. Really worth your time.

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I've been telling a few people what I think Jobs is going to announce tomorrow at the keynote. I figured it would be good to post it so I can brag about how right I was. (Just joking. I'm not really that arrogant.)

There will be a new iPhone. All of the crazy rumors, phones left in bars, and cops raiding apartments aside, historically Apple has always announced a new one every year since it was released at WWDC.

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I wrote this little shell script to make life easier. It installs everything I need to run a Ruby on Rails app in a matter of minutes. It's designed to work with Cent OS 5.4+. Here's the script's main tasks:

• Install Git 1.7.1.1
• Install Ruby 1.8.7p299
• Install RubyGems 1.3.7
• Install Passenger 2.2.15
• Install Nginx 0.8.45 (with Passenger and SSL modules)
• Install Postgres 8.4.4
• Initialize Postgres
• Install ImageMagick 6.6.3-0
• Install Bundler (latest)
• Open port 80 in iptables
• Open port 443 in iptables
• Start Nginx
• Start Postgres

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The first thing your probably noticed is the sexy vinyl look. I got this from Komodo Media (all of their stuff is awesome, you should check it out). Some simple CSS plus their images and it looks dang sexy.

I'm using the Last.fm API to get my listening history. The call to get your top albums for the week doesn't return the album art for that album, so I have to get all of the albums and then get the art for each one. This whole process is pretty slow (source here) so I shove it in memcached on Heroku using the memcached gem so rendering is fast on my homepage.

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I needed to persist an array of NSManagedObjects to NSUserDefaults to persist the state of the application between launches. Obviously, I could have done this with another attribute on the Core Data entity, but this approach seemed a lot simpler. I was surprised that NSManagedObject didn't conform to NSCoding. I guess that makes sense because if you store any custom types in your entity, it wouldn't know how to archive them. In my case, (and I would assume most others) I didn't want to archive the entire object since it was already store in Core Data. I just needed to store the object ID.

This was actually really easy. See:

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I love Heroku. I did a screencast on how awesome they are a few months ago. Since then, I've moved all of my personal apps and all of Tasteful Works's apps to Heroku. They've been really great until recently.

I have two big complains (and one small one) with Heroku.

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I was just at the post office and this old lady in front of me was trying to buy a shipping label for her package. This is a very easy thing to do. There are lots of instructions, big buttons, and even instructional videos to help you if you want.

After two tries she gave up and went to go stand in the super long line to get someone to help her. (Why are the lines always stupid long in post offices? It was 2:30 in the afternoon. Why is there a line?)

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I type a lot and make stuff happen.

That sounds cool, right?

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We have reviewed your application and have found that it is accessing and displaying the contents of the iPhone OS filesystem outside of your designated container area. The iPhone Developer Program License Agreement provides specific guidelines about this behavior in section 3.2(e).

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I started writing HTML when I was 10 years old. Back then, it was easy. We were writing our tags in all caps (HOW AWFUL), not closing tags if we didn't feel like it, frames were regarded as professional, and the animated gif was cool (some would say it still is).

I remember when Javascript became popular and JavascriptKit.com was the place to get copy and paste scripts for your site. I can remember when CSS started to become popular and when table layouts finally died out. It was easy to pick stuff. The technologies evolved at the rate that I learned them (which was awesome).

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I've had my blog on GitHub pages for awhile. I recently came across a good article on running Jekyll from the Ruby5 podcast. It was really easy to get setup. So far, I'm a fan of my new setup.

I'm still working on my Rails 3 version of my blog when I have time. Lately, I've been playing a lot of music and occasionally dabbling with Markdownr.com due to a recent spike in traffic (thanks to @defunkt).

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Apple changed the rules recently, which is fine. They change the App Store every month or so. Normally, you just click accept to the new terms and go about your business. Do you ever read EULAs? I don't. Basically the same thing.

The important change to note (that they obviously didn't highlight, but expected you to read the massive terms in legal speak) was their new policy on undocumented APIs. Before, private APIs were not allowed and undocumented APIs were just frowned upon but still allowed.

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Lately I have been playing with Homebrew, an awesome package manager for Mac OS X. I really like not having to worry about dependencies and such when installing. The "rarely sudo" mentality is also pretty great.

When I noticed the Nginx (a sweet open source web server that is way better than Apache) had a --with-passenger option (which is also way awesome), I figured I'd give it a shot. I was using the built-in Apache with Passenger Preference Pane, which was pretty cool, but I really like Nginx, so I switched. I also really wanted to start using PostgreSQL instead of SQLite since all of my stuff is hosted on Heroku and that's what they're running. (I do plan on writing a Preference Pane for doing for this setup eventually.)

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You can get my terminal shortcuts from my dot files repo on GitHub. You can also find the test app and test library on GitHub.

The git submodule documentation might also be useful to you if you're new to working with submodules. If that's a little hard to understand (I know it is for me), just try googling it. There's a lot of good resources on submodules.

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Like the other apps from his company, the don't do much besides play an entertaining sound. Apple rejected the app because it "contains minimal user functionality". He goes on to show many other apps that also just play a sound.

Here's my take on the whole thing. If Joel or anyone else wants to release a bunch of fun little sound, fine. Personally, I think they are dumb and wouldn't pay for one, but a lot of people have enjoyed iFart and other similar apps, so more power to them. (By the way Joel's company also makes other kinds of apps like this, this, and this. Cool stuff.) My big issue with all of this is the same as Joel's: consistency.

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Have you ever wanted to override some functionality in UIKit that was in a hard to reach place? A lot of applications on the App Store have custom UINavigationBar's. I really wanted to do this one of my company's upcoming apps.

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I've been wanting to play with GemCutter for awhile now. How hard could it be to release a Rails plugin as a gem, right? I sat down and rewatched a Railscast on how to build a gems with Jeweler and push it to GemCutter. It turns out, that was the easy part. GemCutter and Jeweler made it so easy to publish my plugin as gem.

So I know this is very backwards, but after it was on GemCutter I tested it my new gem. (Yes, many smacks on the hand for not writing test. I'm still learning all of that.) It turns out, that it was completely broken. I started to try and fix things, but ended up doing a complete rewrite.

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Heroku is worth checking out even if you're happy with your current host. Their architecture is really impressive and the add-ons are really cool.

At first my app gave me an error saying it couldn't load gems. I thought I needed to unpack my gems, but Heroku replied to me on Twitter and provided a really good alternative to unpacking!

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Yesterday I wrote a post on parsing JSON with Apple's private framework. I thought it might be worth benchmarking TouchJSON, JSON Framework, and Apple JSON (what I'm calling the private framework). My results were very interesting.

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All of this got me thinking about how Apple does their JSON parsing, since they are obviously using JSON in several of the built in apps. I happened to notice that there was a JSON.framework in the Private Frameworks folder this evening. I tried class-dumping it and it surprising worked! (Most of the other private frameworks I tried to class-dump didn't produce any results.)

I figured what the heck, might as well try it. It turns out that it was really easy to implement. I posted a sample project demonstrating this on GitHub.

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It's a pretty simple site. Just type on the left, and see your rendered HTML on the right. All of the parsing is done with Maruku in a Rails Metal, so it's real fast.

I wanted to be a good citizen, and give it all away, so you can get all of my code on GitHub. Feel free to fork and improve.

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Failed to register for remote notifications. Error: Error Domain=NSCocoaErrorDomain Code=3000 UserInfo=0x2782a0 "no valid 'aps-environment' entitlement string found for application"

You need to make sure that your provisioning profile has the app id of the app you have setup push for. Double check that you are actually building with it.

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Gowalla is about going new places, doing remarkable things and meeting great people along the way.

I really enjoy using it. I took a small vacation with my mother to Denver, CO this week. We were hanging out in Estes Park wondering where to eat. I popped open Gowalla and found a nice little place to eat dinner. After we ate, we walked around town and got all of the other spots in Estes Park (I even created one).

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The main reason for moving to the new setup (besides the fact that I love redoing my blog for some reason) was being able to manage all of my posts via Markdown files locally, then pushing then up with Git when I had a good version.Jekyll lets me do this easily and quickly.

I'm going to give this a shot for now. I don't really want to write a blogging platform, even thought I've written a ton. I just like programming. Now that I have more projects than I have time for, I'm looking for something simple that I can simply post with. When I roll my own solution, I end up working on it for a few hours each time instead of just writing my post.

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I started working for Tasteful Works a few weeks ago. Tasteful Works develops iPhone, Android, Rails, and Mac apps (I only work on iPhone, Mac, and Rails there). It's good times. I am running all of my freelance through there now, so if you want to hire me, contact Tasteful Works. It's all the same rates as when I was doing it on my own just faster because we have more people.

I'm moving to Dallas because that is where all of the Tasteful Works guys are. I'm pretty excited about it, but sad about leaving all of my friends, my band, and my house.

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This session was a non-technical overview of how to make a successful app. Download slides PDF.

This session was a technical discussion of how to make table views scroll well. See Atebit's blog post for sample code and further reading. Download slides PDF.

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All I had to do was [NSTimeZone localTimeZone]. Awesome. I love Cocoa.

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Update: There are simpler instructions at http://9to5mac.com/iPhone-3G-tethering. I have heard rumors that this no longer works with iTunes 8.2. I personally haven't tried it in awhile.

So with iPhone 3.0 you can tether you computer to your iPhone, but not yet for some carriers. It's pretty dang sweet and works really well so let's do it early. It's actually pretty easy to get setup. I would write an app to automate it, but I'm sure Apple will release an update and break all of this soon, so follow my steps to get going.

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I was so into plists because at the Austin iPhone Tech talk I attended, they encouraged you to transfer data in plists because it had native parsing. I have to admit the native parsing is quite awesome. One method and everything is all parsed and ready.

I was using JSON (javascript object notation) to transfer everything with the JSON Framework. I had started switching everything to use plists. I spend a ton of time writing a PHP class to convert arrays to and from plist strings.

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Almost all of these app ideas are iPhone apps. I welcome iPhone work as I absolutely love the platform. Now that I'm doing iPhone work, I've had clients want to profit share with me instead of paying upfront. They have an idea they probably spent a few hours on and they want me to work on it for weeks and then share all of the profit with me. There are several reasons why I do not do this, ever.

1. I am fully capable of coming up with my own ideas and then getting all of the money. Why would I work on the customer's idea that I'm less passionate about and get half of the money?

2. If the customer really believed in their idea, they should take out a business loan and pay me the small amount of money compared to what they will make if their ideas is as good as they think it is.

3. It is a bad idea for the customer because I will be way less motivated to work on something with future compensation that I may never receive.

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I wish I could be in both places. I have such great friends in both cities. Buying a house is one of the things that is keeping me here.

I'm excited about a lot of things to come. Life is good.

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Now that I don't have a "job" I have freedom to live where ever I want, which is awesome. I will really miss all of my Oklahoma friends, my house, and the band I play in.

I am looking forward to a lot of old friends in Louisville. I love it here.

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This is a scary and exciting time for me. In the short term, I'll be doing freelance work full time. I already have about 3 months of work booked. It was awesome get that much work lined up just days after I officially resigned at LifeChurch.tv.

Most of the stuff I'll be doing is iPhone and web apps. The end goal will be doing Trimonix (my company) full time. I absolutely love creating my own software. Freelance pays the bills and is fun because you get to work with lots of different people and learn new things, but I'd rather make my own stuff.

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I was a huge fan of MooTools (and still am), but I decided to give jQuery a chance. I liked MooTools better. I thought it was superior to jQuery in its organization and many other things. You have to admit that MooTools's animations look way better.

All of that said, two things made me switch: the amount of code I didn't have to write and the huge community around it.

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OpenBeta is an unconference focused on web development, software development, and design. There were over 200 people there. It's awesome to have such a community here in Oklahoma City. I always love meeting other iPhone developers in person. So far, I've only met two.

Another really cool thing happening here in Oklahoma City is OKCCoco. OKCCoCo is the Oklahoma City Coworking Collaborative:

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If you're not already using git for source control management (or not using source control management at all, which you should be doing anyway) you should check out git. There are tons of great resources for getting started on git's website and in GitHub's guides.

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Many people transfer data to and from web services to the iPhone via JSON. This is a much better way than using XML. Parsing XML on the iPhone just plain sucks. It's overly complicated and super confusing. Currently the YouVersion app, Bible, uses JSON to transfer everything back and forth from the server and it all works great.

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Chuck Norris has counted to infinity, twice.

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Compare that to going at noon on a Saturday or after work on a weekday. You have to park far away, it's crowded, you have to wait in line, and then walk all the way back to your car. Why would you do that?

This concept applies to the gym as well. I usually go about 10:30pm or 11:00pm. There are usually less than 10 people there so I don't have to wait to use any machines and there aren't those really intimidating, ripped beyond belief guys (you know the guys I'm talking about) either. I much prefer going late versus when it's crowded.

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There are some pros. Easily allowing anyone with a Mac to be able to search for my apps easily would be awesome. Also, having the ability to update apps automatically is really great too. Probably the best pro for me would be Apple handling taking money with all of the weird currencies. (I hate dealing with money.)

All of that is great, but for an app to be in Apple's App Store, they are going to want to review it and put it through some sort of approval process. For any apps doing unusual stuff or stuff that Apple doesn't really want you doing for whatever reason, won't make it in the store. The developers that have apps that can't get in the App Store would be screwed. People would probably be scared to get non App Store apps.

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Anyway, here is some of our newer stuff that we've been working on. We wrote this intro as something to open our shows with. The band starts playing when everything drops out and it's just piano. It sounds amazing. Hopefully the full recording will be done in a few weeks.

Check it out on my music page or on my SoundCloud profile. It also threw it in my podcast feed, you can check it out there too. Enjoy.

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I'm not a huge fan of WordPress because it is a resource hog, but it makes it easy for me to update my blog, which is what I want. If I happen to stumble across a large amount of time, I might write my own again, but I'll probably stick with this for now.

I'm really loving WordPress 2.7. It's really pretty. For the original move from my stuff, I just copied all of my old styles and such over. I need to add commenting to my template and possibly a sidebar at some point. As always, it's still a work in progress.

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So the first thing to note is you don't actually register ♹.com, but xn--06h.com instead. This is also difficult because a lot registrars don't let you register xn-- domains because it is reserved. xn-- means that it is puny code encoded. Puny code is basically is a notation for encoding unicode characters into a more common character set.

So once I discovered that, all I had to do was pick a fun combination character, encode it into puny code, and then register it. The registrar that I used was Verio. Overall, I'm not a fan of them, but they were the only one that would let me register a xn-- domain.

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I’ve been using Dropbox (a really sweet file syncing service) for a while now. It’s really hand for syncing files between my computers seamlessly. The MobileMe iDisk is super slow and doesn’t support PCs (not that I care about them though). I mainly used Dropbox to sync all of desktop wallpapers between my computers or to transfer a file quickly. We also use it at work to share a file quickly.

A few weeks ago I started syncing my iTunes library between my computers with Dropbox instead of using my portable hard drive. I had to up my space to 50GB (only $9.99 a month). It’s been awesome! It’s really easy to setup too.

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My favorite part of SoundCloud is their sweet player. It shows you the waveform as it is playing, which is super cool. You can also leave comments along the timeline kind of like you can in the Viddler player. I was using an old, crappy flash MP3 player I found for awhile, but it was driving me nuts to I scrapped it. I like using their play a lot.

Another really cool feature I'm excited to check out is the Dropbox. You can send someone a music file to listen to. Here is a link to my dropbox. Check out my SoundCloud profile if you get bored or take a look at their player in action on my music page.

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So along the way some pretty crappy stuff happened to me that I won't go into. If you remember, my tweets were real depressing for a bit around July. Anyway, life is good. I know there is some way better stuff for me in Oklahoma than what I have worked on so far.

The only thing is that I'm 19. Everyone I work with is way older than me and most of them are married with kids. Who does a 19 year old with a career hang out? I don't know any college kids because I don't go to college. Pretty frustrating right now.

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I also put up a new song called Something I Wish I Had on the podcast feed. Check it out if you get a minute.

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Anyway, there is this thing called Twitter that is pretty cool. I use it a lot. I was thinking about something and remembered seeing a little action someone had written to twitter from Quicksilver. I thought I'd download it and try it out.

I must say, it's pretty cool. I still enjoy using my favorite client, TweetDeck more, but for posting something quick, it's kinda cool to use Quicksilver. I found this script that enables Tweet as an action in Quicksilver. I thought It would be neat to add Growl support to it (as it takes several seconds for it to actually work).

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I also put up a new song I've been working on for years up tonight called Years. This is the song that I play when I pick up a random guitar in a guitar store or I'm just bored sitting around my apartment picking away mindlessly. I think it's turning out nicely so far. I'm digging the piano a lot. Give it a listen.

Update: I no longer maintain this podcast. You still see all of the music on SoundCloud though.

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I get this all of the time. Whenever I get a call from a 405 number that I don't know I just assume they are trying to order pizza. I usually tell people you meant to dial 354-4440 instead of 365-4440 (my number). It's pretty annoying to say the least.

I've tried to mess with people and take orders before, but it never really works out. One time I tried it the girl said the driver locked her out of her house and she needed the phone number of his girlfriend or something like that. I just hung up.

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• Add an iPhone specific stylesheet. Something you will probably want to do is make your site narrower. The wider your layout is, the smaller everything has to be. It is much easier to scroll just vertically than vertically and horizontally. Something else to watch out for is mixing font sizes between px and em. You'll probally get some weird scalling issues if you mix units. You might also watch out for positioning issues due to Mobile Safari's scaling.

  You might also want to adjust your font sizes a bit. I know I had to make my footer a tad smaller. In your case, you might want to make important things like navigation larger and easier to tap. Feel free to check out my iPhone specific stylesheet at http://samsoffes.com/css/iphone.css.

• Add a viewport meta tag. This will tell Mobile Safari how to intelligently scale to fit your page. It's super easy to do and it will help a lot. My iPhone stylesheet makes my site 320px wide so I set my viewport to 320 to give a new bit of padding around my main content area. Here's the code:

Remember if you have something that is wider than your viewport, it will automatically expand, so be sure to resize it in your iPhone specific stylesheet.

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I like how my pagination is simple. Unlike Digg and Google, I decided to just have two buttons and an indicator of where you currently are. In a blog sort of format, I doubt you'll be wanting to rapid advance through the pages, so I removed the feature to keep it simple and why build something if only 5% of your users use it? Keeping it simple.

What do you think? Like the new stuff? O wait no comments yet, ha. I guess once I add commenting, I will have somewhat of a full featured blog. We'll see how much free time I have this weekend to build it. I was thinking about using Disqus, but I want a simpler solution and looks really clean, which isn't easy to achieve with the Disqus API.

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Especially as I got older, I could make money doing a website, but playing drums in my room for hours on end just left me sweaty. I still love music, but I'm glad I chose the more monetary of the two for a profession.

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I think it's pretty good. It's relaxing at least. I was looking through my old recordings and found some more ideas I had started. I think I'll try to get together a few of my more developed ideas and put out a CD (called The Experiment). Sounds fun to me. Besides, I like making stuff people enjoy using/listening to.

I'll be posting all of my music on my blog and over here. You can subscribe to my RSS feed if you want. Send me some email and let me know what you think.

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I really need to write an admin panel or I know I wont use it. Hopefully I'll get time to do that soon. I guess I should add commenting too.

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I still need to write some stuff to do rss and such. Hopefully I'll get to that real soon. Sorry for breaking your feed readers again.

Enjoy the new look. I doubt it will be around long.

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The thing that sets Countdown Maker out from its competitors (believe it or not someone else has also made a program that makes countdowns) is its super simple user interface first off. Countdown Maker is written in Cocoa which means that it looks really pretty on the Mac and that it works really well with Mac OS X. You can also export out videos in multiple, professional-grade video formats. You can even export uncompressed if you want to use in FinalCut or AfterEffects. Countdown Maker also offers a real-time preview of your video that is powered by Apple’s farily new Quartz Composer technology.

Definitely head over to our website and download a free trial. You’ll love it.

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So I just wanted to put some wallpapers on my iDisk to I could use them on my iMac at work. It takes so long. It has to close every file, which takes forever. When you want to delete something, it has to check it for several seconds and the deletes it. If it was speedy, I would like it a lot better maybe. Even trying to drag a file to it in Finder, it gives you an error. You have to click it first and wait almost a minute for it to connect, then you can drag your files (and then wait for it to check and close each file). The $99 is worth syncing everything between my two macs, but the iDisk is worthless. I’d rather use email, FTP, or a flash drive instead.

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We’ve detected that your 404 (file not found) error page returns a status of 200 (Success) in the header.

That is what Google says kills my PageRank. ExpressionEngine says that this is feature. Routing all of my not found pages to my home page and returning a success error code. I asked if they would fix it and they said no.

Solution: write my own engine. I’ve already started. This will make the 8th engine I’ve used and the 10th design. I like making web sites.

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My new number is 405 365 4440. My old number doesn’t work anymore.

Moving into my new apartment was awesome. I love it here so far. I can’t wait to get started tomorrow at LifeChurch.tv!

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I guess I’ll just list what’s going on and talk about each of them. Here I go: I’m engaged, I just bought a new car, I quit my job at Southeast, I just moved out of my apartment, (here’s the big one) I’m moving to Oklahoma in two days to start a new job at LifeChurch.tv.

I just asked my girlfriend of a year and a half, Bethany, to marry me on December 2nd. I got the diamond ring and everything. In short, I made her one of her favorite meals, ravioli, (when I say made that means I heated up some sauce on the stove, and boiled the pre-made ravioli) gave her a box of chocolate from Godiva with the ring in the box, got down on my knee when she opened it and asked her to marry me. After all of that, we went to her house where all of our family and friends were. We all celebrated together. It was good.

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So now I'm really angry because I have to buy two Christmas presents again because I knocked over my 360. Who knew that bumping it while it's on it's side scratches the crap out of your disks… ugh. I went to GameStop to see if they would do anything for me. The guy at GameStop was like "Did you buy it here?" "No." "Do you have a receipt?" "No." "Hold on Mr. Smith, let me look up your account. Here you are. How are you feeling today Mr. Kevin Smith?" "Fantastic!"

He just returned some guy named Kevin Smith's Halo 3 disk and gave me a new copy for free! I was pretty happy to say the least.

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Coda does a really good job of integrating all of the things that I want and not adding much else. I’m a big fan how simple the app is. I rarely use the books feature or CSS tool, but they are cool anyway. In the newest version, they really improved how the terminal tab works. I like it a lot.

Speaking of version 1.1, they added a ton of Leopard features. It’s really nice. The sites animation finally looks good on my MacBook Pro now. I like the glow on the buttons at the bottom. That wasn’t there before. It looks nice. You should give Coda a try. They have a free trial.

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I saw this story about the browser war on Digg and started thinking about how dumb all of this is. People are arguing about which browser should be the new mobile platform in the comments. Firefox, Flock, or Opera were the options. First of all, Firefox is running Gecko. That is the engine it uses to render (X)HTML, CSS, etc. so you can see it (in other words it takes code and makes it pictures on your screen). Flock is running Gecko too, although a newer build which was funny to me. They are the same thing with just different wrappers on them. (Even Netscape in all of its crappiness is running Gecko now.) Opera, Safari (which runs WebKit), and Internet Explorer all have there own engine.

The fact that people are comparing Flock, Firefox, and Opera amazes me. I really don’t like Opera. It’s slow, ugly, and not very user friendly. I rarely check my stuff in it because so few people use it. They do have a few innovative features, but overall I don’t like it. Flock is cool. I like that they’re trying something new, but I still like Firefox over Flock. As far as my personal preference goes for a browser, I like Safari. It looks nice, it’s quick, and easy to use. What can I say, I like Apple? When I’m developing, I always use Firefox because of FireBug, an awesome web development plugin for Firefox. The ugly form fields bug the crap out of me though. If they’d fix that and make it faster, I’d switch from Safari.

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I really liked how my new design looked in Photoshop with Myriad Pro Light. It just didn’t look as good with Lucida Grande. I just happened to mention to my friend Sam McDonald. He reminded me of sIFR. I forgot all about sIFR and how awesome it is.

sIFR uses some Javascript and Flash to replace certain elements on the page with flash versions with the non-web font. It’s kind of hard to explain. Check out Mike Industries for and example or his post about sIFR.

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It’s pretty nice too. I really like the 360. I was going to buy a Wii, but I changed my mind. I figured that, at the end of the day, I’d rather sit on my couch and play Halo 3 or something instead of run around and play tennis or something physical. Doesn’t that defeat the purpose of video games. I thought the whole point was to be lazy. The Wii is awesome if you have a group of people. If it’s just me in my apartment, I’d rather play the 360.

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ExpressionEngine is awesome. It is really flexible, powerful, and still easy to use. I am using it currently at Southeast for the Student Ministry web sites. It works really well for us there. I know that LifeChurch.tv is redoing their website in ExpressionEngine as well. They all love it too.

The cool thing about ExpressionEngine is that it is built by the same people that built CodeIgniter. ExpressionEngine uses a lot of the same core classes that CodeIgniter uses. From what I’ve heard, writing modules, extensions, and plug-ins is really easy. I haven’t written any yet, but I will be soon for work related things. I’ll probably get a podcast maker of some sort going here in a bit.

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I have had the Behringer FCB1010 for awhile. It's a MIDI controller with 10 stomp boxes and 2 expression pedals. I have only spent a few hours playing with MainStage with it. It's going to be awesome! I am really excited about having an awesome guitar rig.

I think I am going to sell all of my analoge pedals, pedal board, power supplies, and Mbox. I'll probably just buy a better audio interface and save the rest. I've been having latency issues. I need to test my setup with some different interfaces.

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DO NOT INSTALL SUMMERBOARD!!!! This totally screwed my iPhone up. It put the dock at the top and freaked it out. I tried deleting the plist file that contains the list order and stuff. It completely broke my SpringBoard (the application that shows all of the icons and such on the home screen).

An interesting thing happened after I deleted it though. My background changed to look like the iPod Touch. It had the same dock too. Even the AT&T icon in the bar at the top said iPod. It appears that that is the default configuration for the SpringBoard. Unfortunately, I didn't back that plist up before SummerBoard screwed it up. I had to start the entire process over. Darn.

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After hearing Kevin Rose speak so highly of installer.app, I decided to give it a try. I love installer.app. It makes doing stuff so easy. For someone that isn't that code savvy, it is perfect.

When I saw the iPhone 1.1.1 update today, I got scared. After reading this AppleInsider story, I was even more scared. This is at the top of the EULA of the update:

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While we’re complaining, why doesn’t IE6 not display PNGs when it can? You can hack it to display them (with this clever script). It's so annoying. This is why samsoffes.com will not be supporting IE6. I give up.

Update: I can’t get it to validate now. I need to do some work on that little piece of code.

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Solution: write my own. I figured why not. I've been messing with PHP5's xml classes and thought it would be fun. (Notice http://samsoffes.com/rss written entirely in PHP5's SimpleXML class.) After struggling to open an external file with file_get_contents(), I resorted to using cURL...

It works well. I had some problems grabbing the digg count and had to use xpath(). The xpath() method of the SimpleXML class always returns an array. This is very annoying when you would expect it not to return an array if you only get one result.

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In my simple web site, I use CodeIgniter, which is an open-source PHP framework that makes OO PHP easier and quicker, to run things. I have created several libraries (or classes) to take more work from me and moving it to my libraries. The ones I use the most are Page, Sidebar, and Widget. For the first time in PHP, I have used multiple instances of the same class on the same page. In CodeIgniter, this isn't done that often because you rarely have to, but I decided it would be fun, so I am.

My Page object is my page. It creates my <head> tag, page template, and assembles the rest of my views. One of it‘s views is the sidebar of course. The sidebar is also an object that contains an array (think of it as a list if you don‘ know what it is) of widgets which are also objects. After adding all of my widgets to my sidebar, the page objects asks for the final HTML version of it when it‘s ready to display the page. Inside each sidebar widget, there are several methods for manipulating how it looks and acts too.

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I also plan for a portfolio of all my work. From Cocoa, PHP, MySQL, XHTML, CSS, Javascript, AJAX, Quartz Composer, music, Linux experiments, and other random stuff, I got a lot to put there. I‘m real excited to get all of this up and looking really pretty.

The reason for the delay in a real site is that I am real busy! Between work, having a social life, all my random projects, my two LLCs, and freelance web stuff, when do I have time to make myself a site? It‘s coming in all of it‘s XHTML, CSS and AJAX goodness. I promise.

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I love those commercials.

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Prepositions aren’t words I end sentences with.

— Sam Soffes

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Apple reported quarterly profits surged 78% to a record $1 billion.

— Business First

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Honesty is the first chapter of the book of wisdom.

— Thomas Jefferson

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You know, Steve Jobs at Apple Inc. just kinda makes life more fun. It’s like the exact opposite of terrorism. It’s amazing. It makes me feel code green. And also wanna say that I did the math backstage until June first.

— John Mayer at MacWorld 2007

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It looks pretty, but I don’t know what it does yet… Let’s use it.

— Sam Soffes

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Google ads are content specific (so if you’re looking at guitars, there will be guitar Google ads). Some times I’ll see one that looks interesting and click on them just to check out what someone is selling in relation to what I’m looking at. Just a thought.

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Procrastination is the art of telling yourself you won’t do something and then changing your mind at the last minute. It involves a lot of kicking yourself and reminding yourself how dumb you are. I do it everyday.

— Sam Soffes

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My spiritual gift is procrastination. I’m really good at it.

— Sam Soffes

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Update: I didn't go to college. Wrote about that here.

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It’s really easy to setup. All you need is a guitar (or bass), an amp, a Mac with audio in/out (I use a 12-inch PowerBook), and a preamp of some sort. The best would be an M-Box or a FireWire Solo (also by M-Audio) which run from $200-$400. I use a $30 DJ mixer that I bought in seventh grade. I put my guitar in the mic in and put the output into the line-in on my PowerBook. Now in GarageBand, create a real instrument track and setup whatever effects you want on that track. You could add some delay, phaser, chorus, EQ, etc. Now make sure that the monitor option is turned on. Now plug your Mac into your amp or pedal board and there you go! I have my PowerBook first in line with all my pedals after it. It’s fun to play around with. E-mail me if you have questions.

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I thought I’d take the time to help all of you out who use iDVD 6 with this issue I found. When you click on burn (or if you go to save disk image, same thing applies) it encodes all of your video. You can press command-I whenever you are in iDVD and see all of your project options and stats, etc. I change the encode type to quality from performance because I like stuff I make to look good, just a thought. Anyway you can see that it encodes your video in the background while you are designing the menus and stuff for your DVD (which is awesome). If you wait long enough it will say ‘done’ next to your video in the Info window (command-I to get it).

Back to what I was saying, if you burn it after it has encoded your entire project or before it will check it and encode what’s left. Once it’s done it says ‘Encoding Audio’. At this point it says iDVD is not responding. I was like what the crap and restarted the entire DVD process. After the third time of restarting it after it ‘locked up’ (to mac haters: this never happens normally, that’s why I was so confused. on windows you just expect it to crash when you’re doing something big.) I thought I’d search the Internet. So I googled my issue and after a few minutes I found a forum that was discussing it.

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Two days ago I thought, how hard could it be? I bought a cable for it on eBay for $9.99 and today I sat down to try and unlock it to work with Cingular. After 3 hours and lots of frustration and flashing the firmware 4 or 5 times, it worked! I thought that I would never get it, but it popped up and was like you have voicemail. I looked at the top and it said Cingular! When you turn it on it still says AT&T, but it works!

If you need a Treo 600 unlocked, e-mail me and I’ll help you out. It’s not that hard once you figure out what you have to do and get the right software (which is really, really, really hard to find). I’m still not sure if the software I used is illegal or not. It didn’t say it was but it was really hard to find.

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1. Mac Pro - The PowerMac G5 is no more. It is now the Mac Pro. It features quad-core Intel Xeons at up to 3.0 GHz, 16GB of memory, and 2TB of disk space. It’s freakin’ nuts. (O, and it’s cheaper than a Dell with the same specs and $800 cheaper than a G5 that had half the speed and a quarter of the disk space.)

2. Displays - The Apple Displays didn’t change that much except for one thing. Price. They now start at $699 for the 20-inch model. It’s only $999 for the 23-inch and $1,999 for the 30-inch. You might be saying, “It’s still freakin’ expensive!” Ture, but the 30-inch just dropped $1,000 in price, so I’m happy.

3. Mighty Mouse - The Mighty Mouse is now wireless! It made me really, really happy. Now at $69, it’s still a little expensive for me to go buy one, but it’s cool.

4. Spaces - Spaces is like the Xwindow system for Linux. (I love Fedora 5 by the way. It’s the nicest Linux I’ve used so far, but it’s still Linux…) You can have 4 work spaces and move between them. You can also show all of them and drag windows from one to another. It’s really cool, just go check it out.

5. Core Animation - Core Animation look amazing. I can’t wait to use it. It’s like Flash and Quartz, only in 3D space and easier. It looks awesome. You have to go watch the keynote to see it in action.

   Basically everything I saw in Lepard looks amazing, but I’ll just hit on two more.

6. iChat - The new iChat and Mail look amazing and I must say I am looking forward to them the most. iChat now has integrated tabs and a new, cleaner look. It features real-time video effects during video chats. You can show a presentation or slideshow right in iChat while you are chatting. My personal favorite is Backdrop. You just step outside of the shot and tell it you are about to use a backdrop. It figures out what the background is and you can ad pictures or video behind where you are to make it look like you are green screening… only you’re not! It’s awesome.

7. Dashboard - The new Dashboard include a sweet tool called Web Clip. You can use any website as a widget. Like if you wanted to watch an eBay auction, you just drag the page to Dashboard, crop it to where ever you want it and now you have a live little clip of that page everytime you load Dashboard. It’s freaking sweet. I want it now.

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With the new look, comes a new style. I’ll be switching from WordPress (my blogging engine) to my own CMS (content management system). Why? Because I can. That will take a little while to get going, but once I do, rock on.

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dude a second ago my spam was 1337 lol i so win

— Ian Wilder

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Anyway, click on my blue tie (up above) or here for a little surprise.

Adding all that AJAX and Adsense slows down my site a little bit, sorry.

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That is the best tunning ever. I love it. I found this on the David Crowder* Band website. It’s like all of their songs from the Can You Hear Us? CD. I really like playing with this tunning, even in other keys than E.

I just bought B Collision by David Crowder* Band. It’s pretty good. It’s A Collision, only acostic. There’s lots of banjo too, its cool. I think it’s funny that they call it their acostic CD and they still use Reason and other loops and stuff in the background. They rock though. Go buy it, now.

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One time I said “he” and my girlfriend thought I was talking about God, but I was really talking about Mike Davidson.

-Sam McDonald

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Violets are blue

I am schizophrenic

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I think I’m going to buy a LaCie 300gb Extreme Triple Interface. Though about the LaCie Bigger Disk Extreme 2TB, but I figured that was a little excessive and pricey at $1,655. I’m just hlad they are fixing my computer for free.

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O Christ Be the center of my life Be the place we fix our eyes

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I am really looking forward to this. If Apple added a right click to the MacBook Pro, everyone would want to buy one. Personally, as soon as Adobe releases Photoshop and Studio 8 (perviously by Macromedia), I will be buying a 20" iMac. I think I'll keep my little 12" PowerBook G4 around. It's perfect for note taking and checking my mail on the road.

See full description at http://www.apple.com/macosx/bootcamp/

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The moral of the story: If your iPod dies a few times in one week, check the alarm clock.

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The Motorola ROKR is amazing! I upgraded my Motorola V180 to it a few weeks ago and I love it. It got bad reviews saying that it wasn't a true iTunes phone. I agree. It is a phone with iTunes. Even if it didn't have iTunes, it is still a sweet phone. I like a ton more than the RAZR, even though that is one awesome phone. I have heard that the ROKR is just like the SLVR only thicker and the ROKR doesn't have FireWire.

Anyway (back to the ROKR), when you plug it in through USB, it shows up like an external hard drive. I can drag wallpapers, ring tones, pictures, etc. to it and drag my pictures off it to my desktop. That alone is amazing. I have spent hours making ring tones with Audacity.

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