Behold – The Tentacle Couch!
by paul on March 17, 2010
From Because We Can:
Wow – when you throw out all the rules about interior design, something amazing happens.
Be an Octopus!
by paul on March 11, 2010
From Ryan at Untold Entertainment:
“At the end of his talk, Dan painted a very bleak picture of the Flash games industry, one where ongoing consolidation leads to big, unstoppable companies, and Flash developers serve at the behest of their new overlords. He’s totally right – that’s already happening. But then he started channeling Karl Marx and Sun Tzu, preaching that workers (Flash devs) must own the mode of production, or build their castles on less crowded hills. His advice: be platform-agnostic. Don’t be a Flash developer or an iPhone developer or an Android developer. Be an octopus. Constantly dip your tentacles into many different buckets, pulling out new players and audience members on a variety of platforms, so that you don’t become beholden to the powers that will eventually control any particular platform, given enough time.”
It’s funny, I’ve for the longest time identified myself as a Flash Developer – even now as I primarily do C# development. It seems like the advice is conflicting though – some say to specialize and be the best at what you do and some say to “Be an octopus.” I’m starting to lean toward the octopus camp in a Robert Rodriguez “People are scared when you can do everything yourself” kind of way…
Quote of the Day
by paul on March 10, 2010
From Rework
Ever seen the weapons prisoners make out of soap or a spoon? They make do with what they’ve got. Now we’re not saying you should go out and shank somebody – but get creative and you’ll be amazed at what you can make with just a little.
Julies Baby Shower
by paul on March 5, 2010
Julie just had a baby shower for our son Joshua – here’s the picture I drew for her. Love you Julie! You’re the best!
“I don’t feel like it
What’s it?
Why do you need to feel like something in order to do the work? They call it work because it’s difficult, not because it’s something you need to feel like.
Very few people wake up in the morning and feel like taking big risks or feel like digging deep for something that has eluded them. People don’t usually feel like pushing themselves harder than they’ve pushed before or having conversations that might be uncomfortable.
Of course, your feelings are irrelevant to whether or not the market expects great work. Do the work. Ignore the feelings part and the work will follow.”
From Seth
The latest from FogBugz dev land
by paul on February 9, 2010
This is still pretty rough because I’m still hashing out where this whole thing is going. I figure it’s kinda hard to go wrong with wood and paper right? I keep choosing and un-choosing what language I’m writing this thing with, I should actually do a post on that someday! Just wanted to make sure that you knew that I was still up to something.
Todays Notes
by paul on January 29, 2010
Why Jonathan Ive? I already have one pad, it’s a cheap multitouch drawing pad but it works and it cost $2.79. Why have you shown up with your keen sense of industrial design and apparent need to have everyones money? WHHHHHHHYYYYYYYYY!?!?!?!
You’re supposed to blog about it when Apple releases something right?
by paul on January 27, 2010
I don’t have too much to say about the iPad yet. The thing is darn pretty but if I had to make a choice between this or the iPod touch I think I would still be leaning toward the touch. The big feature for me would be an awesome drawing app but it seems like that already exists for the touch?
Either way, Apple continues to do a great job in devising more clever and nimble ways to try and wrestle more money from our purses…
Fogbugz Day 2
by paul on January 20, 2010
In starting to write a fogbugz app, I thought this might be an ideal time to really start learning how to use Flex 4. Wow, I’m glad I did – although – there’s definitely a learning curve moving from 3 to 4. It’s a good thing though, I see where the developer is given a lot more freedom in creating and styling the components in the Flex framework and it’s nice to see states work in a way that is really useful. Here’s how it looks in my really really early early first stab at creating an item renderer:
<s:states>
<s:State name="normal" />
<s:State name="hovered" />
<s:State name="selected" />
<s:State name="normalAndShowsCaret" />
<s:State name="hoveredAndShowsCaret" />
<s:State name="selectedAndShowsCaret" />
</s:states>
<s:Rect left="0" right="0" top="0" bottom="0">
<s:fill>
<s:SolidColor color="black"
alpha="0"
alpha.hovered="0.4"
alpha.selected="0.4"
alpha.selectedAndShowsCaret="0.4" />
</s:fill>
<s:filters>
<s:DropShadowFilter />
</s:filters>
</s:Rect>
You can see where I’ve cleanly defined the states and how the properties correspond with each state. No more addProperty and removeProperty, just nice clean awesomeness. Yay!
As for the actual app, things went fairly fast today. I already was working on a small base of code but I ended up trashing it so I could start clean in Flex 4. I was able to create models for all of the FB objects and was able to knock out the login, syncing FB details (projects, areas, fixFors, etc) and getting the search to work in a fairly rudimentary way. Tomorrow I’m hoping to really clean up the case list area and start working on the view you see when looking at a specific case. Huzzah!
Adding more fruity treats to FogBugz
by paul on January 19, 2010
I’ve been using fogbugz for a while, we put in place at work to handle issue tracking and after using a slew of different bug tracking solutions (ok it’s like 6 or 7 but that’s slew enough for me) I have really become very happy using fogbugz. Plus, fogcreek sounds like an amazing place where the sofas are made out of donuts and the water fountains have perfectly carbonated mexican coke. The thing I really like about it though is the api. Knowing that there’s a way out in case some feature doesn’t work the way you want it to is a very comforting feeling. And having worked with it a little in the past I know it’s a very capable api that’ll allow you to code up quite a bit of functionality.
Having said all that, there are some things in fogbugz that don’t work well for me. Namely, time tracking. At work, we don’t use EBS, we use the time tracking feature to bill clients. Since we do that, we have to track every minute of our day. So, this takes some discipline to always remember to set the “Working on” which apparently I’m the only person in the world who has issues with this because I’m always forgetting and having to go back to fix it. When I was designing a small app to help me with this, I came across a few other features that I’d like and it started to develop into an actual app. So here I am, writing a fogbugz interface. Here are the features I’m throwing in here:
Phase 1:
1. Quickly list,add,edit, and view cases.
2. Case search
3. Case history (keeping a running tab of the cases you have looked at)
Phase 2:
1. Automated time tracking: What ever the current case is that you are looking at, that is the case that gets time tracked to it. Switch case, new time entry.
It’s totally not a fleshed out attempt and it’s something I’m doing in my spare time so I don’t know what this will turn into – but – in the end I’m hoping to have a solution for me (and people like me) to easily track time in fogbugz. It’ll be an Adobe AIR app and will most likely be coded out in Flex. I’m wanting to really focus on the ui to create something a little slicker that what I usually do so having a Flash desktop app is the way to go. And considering I’m booted into Windows during the day and OS X at night, I need something that will work on both platforms. We’ll see what happens, I’ll keep you updated!
