Jason Byck

The Power of Free

2012-06-16T00:00:00+00:00

Recently, my app Tallywag was free for one day.

Kogan Imposing Tax On Shoppers Who Use IE7

2012-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Anyone who has done any professional frontend development knows that a disproportionate amount of time is spent supporting legacy browsers. Rather than end support for IE7 users, Kogan, has decided to tax those users, to make up for the extra cost of supporting them. I’m not sure if it’ll last, or if it’s legal, but I love it.

It also underscores why I enjoy working on native iOS development.

HTML, CSS3 Banner

2012-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

If you are on the index or about pages of my site, you probably see a little banner at the top, suggesting that you hire me. It fades in, and animates into view, from above the screen.

It would have been easy to create an image, and use jQuery’s animate property to achieve this effect, but, it’s 2012 and we have better tools and better browers at our disposal now. (Although, I do use Modernizr to serve an image for older browsers.)

Instead, the banner is pure HTML and CSS, using gradients to style the banner div, the border property to ‘clip’ the section out and CSS3 transitions for the fade and animation. You can see the Sass and HTML markup in a Gist I just posted.

The ‘fadeInDown’ class isn’t included in the Sass file because I just borrowed that from animate.css.

Post to Pinboard in NetNewsWire

2012-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

According to Wikipedia, NetNewsWire was released in 2002, the year I graduated from high school. I’ve only been using it for a couple of months and I’m loving it…partly because it keeps me logged out of Google. I’ve also recently started using Pinboard and I think its great too.

This is a quick guide for saving bookmarks to Pinboard from NetNewsWire, with a keyboard shortcut.

We Kept The Idea Really Small

2012-06-02T00:00:00+00:00

Not a Lot of Words is a great blog by Joost van der Ree that focuses on “designers and the art of building apps”. Yesterday he interviewed Barry, the other half of The Blimp Factory, about the making of Tallywag.

Getting Started With iOS Testing

2012-06-01T00:00:00+00:00

I’m not exactly proud to admit that I didn’t properly test my first iOS app. Of course, I “tested” the app. My partner and I used it for days, on 3 different iOS devices, trying to find and kill all bugs before releasing it. But I didn’t test it. No unit tests. No regression testing. No continuous integration. No software tests at all.

Tallywag is a farily simple app, so we got away with it and haven’t encountered any problems since launch (although thats probably been said thousands of times before…and I do plan on going back to write tests before releasing updates).

We’re currently working on our second app at The Blimp Factory, and I’ve fully embraced testing this time. I’ve been reading a lot of information on various testing libraries and frameworks for Objective-C/iOS and I thought I’d share what tools I’ve been using to test my new app, and some of the resources I read to get started.

OCUnit

There seems to be a consesus that there are really only two unit testing frameworks worth looking at on iOS, OCUnit and GHUnit. There are also BDD frameworks like Kiwi and Cedar if that’s your thing, but I didn’t really look at those.

OCUnit is baked right into Xcode and is extremely simple to setup. Just click the ‘Include Unit Tests’ box when creating a new Xcode project. However, previous versions of OCUnit had major holes which led developers to seek alternatives.

Since Xcode 4 was released, OCUnit has progressed enough to be suitable for most people. Here is a nice post about GHUnit and OCUnit, which compares some of the key features of both. I’ve been using it for about 2 weeks, and don’t feel that I’m missing any functionality that I need. And, the ease of use and setup alone, make it a great choice.

OCMock

If you haven’t heard of mock objects, or used them in another language/framework, you should probably read more about it. Apple doesn’t provide a good way to create mock objects for testing out of the box in Xcode, but this great library provides an easy way to do so.

I found it a little tricky to get installed correctly, but this guide was very helpful in getting it setup.

UI Automation

Another built-in tool (found in Instruments), for which I don’t believe there are any comparable 3rd party alternatives, UI Automation lets you record interaction with your app and write test scripts that simulate real use. Its incredibly useful, and kind of fun to use…although it is a little strange to write JavaScript to test an Objective-C app.

Tallywag, Mobile of The Day, May 27 2012

2012-05-27T00:00:00+00:00

The Blimp Factory won FWA Mobile of the Day today for Tallywag.

Useful Git Command of the Day

2012-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

Sometimes you don’t want to know what content has changed between commits, but what files have changed. Here’s how you can do that:

git diff –name-only #most-recent-commt #least-recent-commit

Another Look At Jekyll Plugins

2012-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

I wrote a post a few weeks ago about my decision to use Stasis to build The Blimp Factory. I said then, about Haml, CoffeeScript and Sass:

Obviously, you could make plugins or edit Jekyll to work with them. But, Stasis, a new-ish static site generator uses these, as well as other templating engines and pre-processors, out of the box and is a breeze to use.

I don’t regret using Stasis. I think it’s great. But, I greatly over estimated the difficulty, and complexity, of making Jekyll plugins. It couldn’t be simpler. Here are a couple (Sass, CoffeeScript) that I’m using for the new version of this site.

There are reasons to use Stasis over Jekyll, but, support for Haml, Sass and CoffeeScript, as I mentioned before, isn’t one of them. Just do it yourself!

Animate.css, Just-add-water CSS animation

2012-05-24T00:00:00+00:00

I started working on a CSS3 animation this morning, when I remembered this great collection of simple and ready to use animations.

There are keyframe animation blocks (with browser prefixes) and class names that you can easily add to your project for quick CSS3 slickness.

I think its important, if you’re into frontend development, to actually learn the syntax, write your own animations and get familiar with CSS3 features. But, if you just need a simple bounce animation, for example, why not just use what’s available?

1140 CSS Grid

2012-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

Speaking of my new design, I’ve starting using this great CSS fluid grid. Its easy to use, flexible and supports responsive websites.

Scrap 1024! Design once at 1140 for 1280, and with very little extra work, it will adapt itself to work on just about any monitor, even mobile.

Working on a New Design

2012-05-22T00:00:00+00:00

Tallywag for iPhone

2012-05-01T00:00:00+00:00

Yesterday, me and Barry, my partner at The Blimp Factory, released our first app: Tallywag.

We got an nice write-up at Creativity that describes it very well:

Here’s an app for anyone who gets a buzz from data vizualisation. Tallywag, created by Toronto-based duo The Blimp Factory, lets you tally, compare and share any statistics, creating graphs you can post to social media.

It’s available now for 99 cents in the App Store.

Reason Number 1029393 Why You Should Be Using CoffeeScript

2012-04-18T00:00:00+00:00

Here are two blocks of code from some work I’m doing this morning.

First, the compiled Javascript code:

Hanatron.prototype.resizeProjects = function() {
  var project, _i, _len, _ref, _results;
  _ref = $('.project-holder-slideshow');
  _results = [];
  for (_i = 0, _len = _ref.length; _i < _len; _i++) {
    project = _ref[_i];
    _results.push($(project).css('height', 
      $(project).children('img').first().height()));
  }
  return _results;
};

Second, the CoffeeScript code that I actually wrote:

resizeProjects: ->
  for project in $('.project-holder-slideshow')
    $(project).css 'height', $(project).children('img').first().height()

Significantly shorter and much more clear.

My CSS3 Image Carousel

2012-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

I linked earlier to a project I’ve been working on. It’s still not finished, but I thought I’d share some code from the work I’ve been doing. It’s a simple image carousel, written completely in CSS3.

The current version supports Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Opera…and maybe newer versions of IE (I haven’t checked). It should degrade gracefully, though, and simply display the first image when CSS animations aren’t supported (thanks, Modernizr).

The GitHub project contains 3 files: a Haml template, Sass stylehseet and CoffeeScript script.

The current version has only one transition (a simple fade) but, it can be very easily customized.

I expect to be sharing more code from The Blimp Factory soon!

PHP, a fractal of bad design

2012-04-11T00:00:00+00:00

This is a long and comprehensive assassination of PHP as a language. Point by point, with examples, the author breaks down the confusing features and design flaws in everything from the standard library and core features, to web deployment and data manipulation.

Virtually every feature in PHP is broken somehow. The language, the framework, the ecosystem, are all just bad. And I can’t even point out any single damning thing, because the damage is so systemic.

I read the entire thing, nodding the whole time.

A Look at What I've Been Doing

2012-04-04T00:00:00+00:00

Some big changes recently…

I’m now freelancing full time. Get in touch for your various development needs…Rails, PHP, iOS development. Javascript, HTML and CSS too.

I’m releasing an iPhone app in the coming weeks…well, The Blimp Factory is. Here’s a screenshot (with absolutely no context):

Static Sites With Stasis

2012-03-27T00:00:00+00:00

I’m a fan of static site generators. This site is built with one. I also like using Sass, Haml and Coffeescript. Obviously, you could make plugins or edit Jekyll to work with them. But, Stasis, a new-ish static site generator uses these, as well as other templating engines and pre-processors, out of the box and is a breeze to use.

I just set up a site for something I’ve been working on with Stasis and was not disappointed.

Deploying Symfony Applications With Capifony

2012-02-23T00:00:00+00:00

Lately I’ve been moving away from PHP and towards Rails/Ruby, but, I still mostly write PHP at work. Specifically, I develop software with the Symfony framework, the best PHP MVC web framework out there.

I recently came across this great Ruby gem, which provides deployment recipes for deploying Symfony applications with Capistrano.

I wish that I had adopted proper deployment procedures earlier in my career, so, heres a protip if you’re just starting out: if you are pushing code changes by dragging and dropping in your favourite FTP client, you’re doing it wrong!

Removing Blogging Friction With Dropbox

2012-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

A few weeks ago, I very briefly mentiond my new Dropbox-powered blogging setup. For more in-depth technical details, you could read the blog post I previously linked to, check the GitHub repository for this site, or search to find various implementations of the same idea.

But, in bullet points, this is what I did:

Moved all of my Markdown source files to a new ‘_posts’ folder in my Dropbox account, and synced that content to my server using the Dropbox Linux client.
Deleted the ‘_posts’ directory from my Jekyll site, and replaced it with a symlink to the ‘_posts’ folder in Dropbox.
Using incron, triggered Jekyll to rebuild the site everytime the contents of ‘_posts’ changes.
That’s it.

Previously, to update my site, I needed to use a computer that had very specific software installed (Jekyll, Ruby, git, etc). Now I can post updates from anywhere I have access to Dropbox … which is everywhere.

I think a Dropbox powered website is cool (in a nerdy way, obviously), so I was happy with the new setup as soon as I deployed it. But the reason I did this was to make it easier for me to update my site. With a stock Jekyll install, from July 23, 2011 to January 9, 2012, I posted 12 updates in 170 days.

In the 42 days since I started using Dropbox I’ve posted 11 times, so I think the new approach is defininitey working.