Today is Ada Lovelace Day, an international day to celebrate inspirational women in technology. Part of the day’s aim is to encourage people to blog about the women who have inspired them. This is my contribution.
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++[[]][+[]]+[+[]] evaluates to “10″ in JavaScriptThis comes from a popular question on Stack Overflow. Given the popularity of the question, the fact that it is now closed and the fact that the highest-ranked answer there is a little imprecise, I’ve decided to write up an explanation here.
I run an app development company. Hardly a day goes by without someone telling me they’ve had “a good idea for an app” – usually just before asking me to develop it for them.
Publishing has had many saviours in recent years. Apple, Amazon and Google have all been touted as potential messiahs by an industry desperate to work out its role in an uncharted digital world.
Big technology companies haven’t been the only saviours. Small independent producers such as Touch Press and Inkling have experimented with the boundaries between books and apps, with interesting results.
Today sees another entry into the Future of Publishing, launched with considerable fanfare by Al Gore and Push Pop Press. Our Choice, the sequel to 2006’s An Inconvenient Truth, claims it will “change the way we read books, and quite possibly change the world.”
Yesterday I attended the NESTA / Rewired State Make It Local hack day. Myself and five other developers were challenged to create something useful with local data in six hours. My contribution was “My Commute”, a travel planning web site for your daily commute to work.
What do I mean by “apps that work”? Well, the most successful apps – those that really work for users, those that are used time and time again – are apps that make the best of what a mobile device can do.
We’ve updated our National Rail Enquiries app ready for iPhone 4, and have converted all of the app’s assets into beautiful high-definition format. We’re really pleased with the results, so I thought I’d post some screenshots as a sneak preview of how the app will look.
Even though the BBC’s planned iPhone apps have been postponed for a review, it’s still possible to get full-screen iPlayer video on your iPad, thanks to a neat web app workaround by the BBC. Here’s how to do so.
I run an iPhone development company. We’re currently making our UK train times app fully compatible with VoiceOver. We’re being helped by users of the ViPhone Google Group, which is a forum for discussing the iPhone 3GS and its support for visually-impaired users.
I saw a comment from a member of the group the other day, shortly after Section 3.3.1 went mainstream:
Could this mean more accessible apps for VO users?
Note the meaning behind the comment. Not “how dare they”, or “shame on you”, but “hurrah – this will mean that apps are more likely to be accessible via VoiceOver.”
Making better quality iPhone apps isn’t just about how they look – it’s about how they sound. And that’s another reason to develop your apps in Xcode.
I’m an iPhone app developer. I’m interested in new apps that do interesting things. I also have an interest in data privacy. So when I heard that the Conservative Party had launched an app with a canvassing feature, I thought I should try it out.
We’re just putting the finishing touches to VoiceOver accessibility support for our National Rail Enquiries iPhone app. When adapting the app for VoiceOver, we found that Apple’s developer documentation for accessibility was pretty good, but there were still several questions we couldn’t answer. After some help from Apple, and some experimentation and research, we’ve managed to answer most of our queries. I thought it might be useful to share what we discovered, in case other developers have run into the same problems. Here are our questions and findings.
Apple is the world leader in digital music sales, and is making big inroads into digital video and TV. The iPad completes the deal, bringing Apple’s magic to the world of eBook sales.
Lots of suggested iPad downsides on the Internet this morning. Thought I’d tackle a few.
Here’s the problem: HTML and XHTML pages containing empty elements with no end tag such as <span /> break JavaScript DOM traversal methods in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8, resulting in nodes after such an element showing up in more than one node’s childNodes collection. Continue reading
One of the more interesting additions to the updated iTunes 9 Store is a new “Top Grossing Apps” view. This is displayed bottom right on the main App Store screen in iTunes, and has also been added to the Mobile App Store in iPhone OS 3.1, under the Top 25 tab.
I’ve recently had to export a bunch of emails from Entourage and into Outlook, in order to send them to someone in a format they can browse and read on a PC. You’d think that exporting a selection of emails from one Microsoft email management tool to another would be easy, right? Sadly not. Thankfully, a bit of Applescript and a relatively cheap utility got things working for me. This post describes how.
I’ve struggled to find a way to deduce if an iPhone OS device has the ability to make phone calls or not. There is a way to do so in iPhone OS 3.0, but I want to compile my code against the OS 2.0 SDK to enable it to run on as many devices as possible. I could just check if the device is an iPod Touch or an iPhone, but who knows what weird and wonderful iPhone OS-based devices Apple might release in the future, and I’d like my check to be future-proof. So I’ve come up with a hybrid way of detecting the device’s ability to make calls. This post describes the approach I’m using.
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Apple’s Ad Hoc distribution process is a godsend for iPhone beta-testing, but a right pain to use in practice. I’ve tried several different approaches for creating and managing Ad Hoc testing; this article describes the one I now use for my National Rail Enquiries for iPhone application.
Whether it’s Shazam’s grey-on-black background on the App Store, arsenal.com’s subtle top bar, or the new Messages, iPod and Phone icons in iPhone OS 3.0, there can be no denying it: 45-degree-diagonal-one-pixel-stripes are this year’s curvy-cornered-box. You heard it here first.
According to the latest reports from WWDC, QuickTime X finally brings the one feature that’s been missing for years: full-screen playback for non-Pro users. It’s long been a bugbear of QuickTime users and developers that you have to buy QuickTime Pro to play movies at full screen. It looks as though QuickTime X (currently being demoed with Snow Leopard) finally removes this restriction.