A wallpapers search app
Got multiple screens or use spaces? I wanted a lot of space themed desktops once so I took some of the GIFs code, and converted it to be a wallpapers search app.
Got multiple screens or use spaces? I wanted a lot of space themed desktops once so I took some of the GIFs code, and converted it to be a wallpapers search app.
I got annoyed at the amount of times I had to open tweetbot then go to a username. So I fixed the root of the problem which is that people link to twitter.com/name
with a Safari & Chrome extension. It will take any twitter link and convert it to one that opens Tweetbot instead. Perfect.
I can't think of where to start. The band was something I did for 6 years, and still defines a lot of who I am today. Originally started so I could hang out with floatstarpx and Goat Boy.
We made huge amounts of music, did stupid music videos, games & magazines. We're on spotify, you should check out the Kierononon Pop hits playlist. There's an amazing page on the wesite just for complaints. I'm not sure we recieve those emails anymore.
Being in a band is a lot like a relationship, we had our ups and downs and came out very different people. It was an amazing time.
It was with the band that I really learned product design.
Unsurprisingly if you know who I am, you know I'm pretty adverse to writing things from scratch. At Artsy we needed an indoor mapping system and the choices on CocoaPods were pretty bare. I took an existing mapping library and basically rewrote it for our internal use. Then dblock turned it into a real open source project.
So I have no commits, but many, many hours of keyboard time.
One of the cool things about writing the mapping almost from scratch was that I could re-use our existing architecture for asynchronous zooming into images. Doing this meant getting some of the oldest code in the Artsy apps out into the light, and getting it robustly tested.
Finally, working with dblock in OSS has been a real pleasure. Mainly cause he did all the work.
Before I used automated testing, I did a lot of manual testing. To get this setup right I would keep states of the simulator around. Chairs is a way of automating the process around storing and saving sets of simulator documents and preferences.
gem install chairs
Mixtapes is a digital love letter. It's a way of creating easily updated mixtapes via spotify. My girlfriend moved to Australia for a year, and I wanted to share songs. This worked out great. You assign it a folder in your Spotify account and any playlists created in there are synced for offline play.
To keep the pace that I wanted on dev I had to give up on videogames. This kinda sucked. I find gaming to be an interesting art form and love the narrative abilities of the medium. So I traded playing games for occasionally watching Starcraft 2 matches on sc2casts.com. The downside to this was that it gave depth but not quantity.
To make up for the lack of diveristy I created a screensaver that downloads speed runs of classic games. It keeps the last played state and will continue through thousands of games. You can choose between different systems and whether to stream or download. I wanted to add a CRT emulator to it but eventually just gave up on pixel shaders - PRs welcome.
We've been using Snapshots in Artsy to ensure visual awesomeness in our apps. I was finding it annoying to compare diffs. So I built an Xcode plugin to make that easy. I did a little writeup also on the process on making an Xcode plugin.
Slack is now being used by both Artsy, and by CocoaPods. I don't want to get confused which instance of slack people are talking on. So I made a CocoaPods variant of the logo, and cleaned it up so people can quickly change some colors and export a png to use in Fluid.app.
It's annoying trying to keep track of which Xcode is the one you're doing work on, no in. I had heard that there is a hidden Red Xcode mode to differentiate between debugging Xcode and dev Xcode, but I could never find out the trigger. Instead I built a plugin that checks for an attached debugger and it will hue shift the icon. Nothing big, nothing fancy, but it's a useful tool to have under your belt.