Inert Detritus The dust bunnies of the Internet

What’s the Deal With CPU History?

Development on CPU History has stalled while I speak with my manager about it. I hope to be able to start back up on it soon, but I can’t make any guarantees. It’s on GitHub, so fork it and start hacking if that’s your style. I’m working on a round-up of advice and improvements stemming from my (Re-)Designing a Preferences Window post, and this should provide a good jumping-off point for anyone that’s interested.

The First Day

A month ago yesterday, I began my first post-college job: working for Apple. I’ll borrow a page from a similar post on Antipode and say simply this:

Quite obviously, nothing I say here is speaking on behalf of the company: trust me, they can come up with much more interesting ways to announce things than through my corner of the internet. I don’t plan on sharing any job particulars in any way. I’m still quite active on Twitter, and blog posts about CPU History and other topics are forthcoming.

A Post From an iPhone

I’m writing this on my phone. Not because I have to, but because I can.

I just realized that my first day at Apple post never went up like it was supposed to that morning. I guess I can rewrite and publish it late. Way late.

The App Store: My Purchases (and Two Gaming Gems)

I ventured with our summer intern to the Los Gatos Apple Store early on Friday morning: we were in line by 4 AM, and were numbers 23 and 24 in line. We were back at Apple by 9 AM, iPhone 3Gs in hand: we both got the 16 GB model. I went with white (didn’t you hear? It’s the new black!), while he opted for fingerprint-revealing black.

When our iPhones finally unlocked for use and synced with iTunes later that afternoon, the Great App Store Purchase Binge began. I’ve bought somewhere between 30 and 40 apps: most of them have been free, but a few weren’t. Here’s my recommendations in no particular order (and a couple of games that everyone needs to try):

• Twitterrific Premium. Twitter on your iPhone: it was meant to be used this way. Quite useful to stay connected when wandering away from a laptop, and much easier than text message updates.
• Exposure Premium. Neat Flickr browsing application from Fraser Speirs, knowledgeable Mac developer and wrangler of the Flickr API.
• Instapaper. A lightweight, quick web page “bookmark to read later” app. I’ve used the web version since days after its initial creation. The iPhone app is even better: it downloads offline copies of articles, with both the original page, and an extracted text-only version. A little birdy told me that 1.0.1 is forthcoming with deletion capabilies; currently, you have to delete or mark articles as read via the web interface.
• Graffitio. You can create walls and post to them, anonymously and with no character limit. It uses Core Location to view walls at or near your location. This app is downright strange on campus, since the other buildings are close enough to let you read what iPod interns are posting in the Infinite Loop buildings.
• Masyu, by Tim Burks, of Nu fame. A fantastic little puzzle application: there’s only two rules for mapping a route through pieces on the board, so it’s simple to learn. The larger puzzles use a few more pieces to great effect, making it difficult in spite of the inherent simple rules.
• Cubes (gameplay demo here). A very neat reverse Tetris meets a Rubik’s cube puzzle game.
• Sol. A simple display of sunset, sunrise and twilight hours. I’ve had this widget on Dashboard for next-to-forever, so this was an obvious purchase.

I have one suggestion for developers: in the application’s info on the App Store, post a link to a fifteen or thirty second screencast demo of the app. There’s several apps that I was unsure of, such as Cubes, but seeing a gameplay demo made it obvious that I would enjoy it. This goes for all developers, not just game devs: we want to see how the app works, what the flow is like.

All told, I’ve spent 63 dollars on the App Store so far. Most of the money has gone towards the ten dollar applications like Twitterrific and Exposure Premium. I think most developers are leaving gobs of money on the table: I’d have paid more for Cubes, Masyu, and other games, and applications like Instapaper could charge several dollars and I’d buy them. (Instapaper may have a premium version coming out in the future with more features.)

The maxim of Mac development still holds true for App Store apps: charge more now, you can always lower your price later.

(Re-)Designing a Preferences Window

(Edit: My apologies: comments were closed earlier; they closed automatically after 2 weeks. They’re open now.)

CPU History 1.0 was an obvious work in progress. It shipped without multicore support, with a redrawing bug, and with a horrid preference window design. The first two bugs were fixed months ago, when I pushed a beta of 1.1 to a few multicore testers. However, the third bug wasn’t on my radar until Peter Hosey (@boredzo) brought the Apple Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) to my attention.

Without further ado, here’s the 1.0 preference window.

The list of things wrong with this layout is longer than the list of things right. Inconsistent spacing, and no attempt at vertical alignment of labels or controls.

When I added features (namely, multicore graphing) to 1.1, I had to add another control to the preferences. Hence, the 1.1 b1 preference window.

This is the release that compelled Peter to link me the HIG writeup on laying out windows. And rightfully so.

After an hour spent massaging things in Interface Builder, here’s the first 1.1 redesign. (I’ll call this 1.1 b2)

I fixed vertical spacing between elements, horizontal alignment of labels and controls, and a few other tweaks. It was primarily a HIG-compatible spacing fix to the 1.1 b1 layout.

Still, the layout just felt wrong. I visited #macdev on IRC to consult some other developers, and two suggestions surfaced. First, a tab-based layout (from ciaren and ccgus), and a boxed layout (a combination of my thinking and ccgus’s view idea). I set out to implement the tab-based layout first.

That’s tabs one, two and three. I split things based on logical separation: general, floater preferences, and color choices. However, as is evident on tab three, I couldn’t find a good layout in that tab that used the space required by tab one. Onward, then, I ventured, to fix another layout shortcoming.

The separations from the tabs made logical sense, so I wanted to keep those while junking the extra whitespace of the tab layout. So next up was a box-separated (NSBox) layout.

This is the current leader in the window design, and most likely what I’ll be shipping tomorrow. It had the right mix between an all-in-one window, which removed whitespace issues with tabs, and clear splits between controls of different types.

Arrival

Edit: I posted this three days ago, but Google Maps URLs didn’t cooperate, so here it is, better late than never. Apologies for the technical difficulties.

We landed earlier today in Los Altos. I’ll be in a room in a four bedroom house here for about two weeks, doing a short commute to Apple starting on Monday, June 23. Then, it’s relocation to a room in a six-bedroom house in Woodside, further up I-280 from Apple. I’ve got that room from July 1st to mid-September.

Today was spent on The World’s Windiest Road, Rt. 1. Here’s the route on Rt. 1 and 128, but here’s a detail of Rt. 1 at the beginning. We had to stop twice for driver and passenger nausea.

We drove across the Golden Gate Bridge this afternoon as we headed towards Los Altos. Tomorrow morning, we head back north towards Wine Country. Monday will be spent tripping around San Fran, and Tuesday we have a tour of Alcatraz early in the morning, likely followed by another day in the city. Eric flies out of Oakland International on Wednesday morning, and I have a few days before starting work.

5600 miles from DC to San Francisco: certainly a more scenic route than usual.

Another on-the-Road Update

We’ve now traveled over 2500 miles. I haven’t totaled gas receipts, but Eric and I are estimating over 350 dollars so far. Thank god for large credit lines with American Express.

Since the last post, we’ve traversed three more states. The morning of the 27th, we headed north from Omaha, through Iowa and into South Dakota. We spent the night camped out at the Badlands. After waking early for sunrise pictures (forthcoming), we visited the Minuteman site off I-90, swung through the ring road back through the Badlands, and headed west. A trip to Mount Rushmore was punctuated with storms on the way, but as we approached the mountain, the skies cleared. The drive through the Black Hills was quite pretty, and I took several photos out the sunroof of the car.

After arriving in Cheyenne for the night and sleeping there, we spent yesterday on the road, stopping often for photos and gas. We made a quick visit to Radio Shack and an Acura dealer in Denver to work around a burned-out cigarette lighter that happened on day one. The rest of the day was spent trekking across Colorado, over some rather large mountains, and then off I-70 to take a backroads trip to my aunt and cousin’s house near Telluride.

The First Trip Update

It’s the end of day three.

We spent Tuesday traveling to Chicago (a 680 mile haul), and all day Wednesday tagging around the city and watching the Cubs win against the LA Dodgers.

Today was spent traveling to Omaha (480 miles) to stay with a friend of Eric’s. Tomorrow morning, we go north to South Dakota, visiting and camping at the Badlands (low tomorrow night: 50° and breezy). Friday is spent at the Badlands, Mount Rushmore, then south to stay the night in Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Photos will be processed on the road tomorrow, and a large Flickr upload will hopefully happen sometime this weekend when we surface again on someone’s wireless. Best bet for updates between now and then is Twitter and Flickr mobile uploads. Cheers.

Hello/Goodbye

I’d be lying if I said that dating someone as you leave college is a terrible idea. If you hit it off in the final days and weeks of school, then that’s how life played out. Enjoy every last moment you get, and don’t hate yourself or the circumstances for being inconvenient.

While this won’t make graduation any less bittersweet, at least I’ll have some fantastic memories of my final months and weeks here. I can’t think of a better send-off as I leave.

Quote: Good Breakage

From warpedvisions.org » Blog Archive » Quote: Good breakage

“I like an escalator because an escalator can never break, it can only become stairs. There would never be an escalator temporarily out of order sign, only an escalator temporarily stairs. Sorry for the convenience.” Mitch Hedberg