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October 17, 2013

Is iOS Dying?

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ios7 logo

Apple and Steve Jobs started the smart phone revolution. Just 7 short years ago we had the first iPhone, a technical marvel in its day. The craftsmanship of not only the device but also the iOS operating system was a thing to behold. Apple continued with its excellence in both hardware and software design for years. Unfortunately, the wild ride has ended, at least for the moment. While the hardware has kept up relatively well (although there is not a heck of a lot of innovation), the iOS operating system has, sadly, regressed.

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October 4, 2013

Upgrading Your iPhone App to iOS 7: The New Status Bar

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With the release of iOS 7, there are several changes in how you lay out and customize the appearance of your UI. In particular, the status bar is now transparent, and your views will show through it. Now this is a great opportunity to redesign your app and take advantage of this new look and feel, but what if you aren’t ready and you want to the old iOS 6 status bar back? Well, I’m excited to tell you that there is a way to do this!

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posted

October 1, 2013

Setting screen orientations in iOS

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Recently I started a project which required an iOS app to be locked in landscape orientation. The method mentioned below was always the standard for locking/setting the orientation, but iOS 6 deprecated this method. This post will show and explain some other options that I came across when investigating alternative options for locking the screen.
[code language=”javascript”]
[[UIDevice currentDevice] setOrientation:UIInterfaceOrientationLandscapeRight];
[/code]

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posted

August 26, 2013

Announcing Flipout! 2.0!

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Flipout! Logo

I am very pleased to announce a major update to Grio’s memory matching game:  Flipout!

Flipout! is a game of luck and skill where you need to match pairs of cards… similar to the game of Concentration.  We throw a few twists at you, however, to add to the challenge.  What if suddenly the cards decided to up and swap themselves?  Can you keep track of entire rows moving as one?  And just when you thought you had a handle on things, one of the cards explodes, scrambling all of the cards around it!

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posted

August 6, 2013

Filedart 1.0 Released

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Filedart

Today we launched a new productivity app for Mac OS called Filedart (filedart.com). Filedart allows users to share files and screenshots in seconds. Drag a file or take a screenshot and your file is on the cloud. A URL is instantly in your clipboard, ready to be pasted into chat windows, emails, or sharing tools. On the receiving end, users click on the URL link to access the file or image in their browser. No sign in or registration is required.

This isn’t a new concept, but we think we’ve done it better. We intentionally kept the feature set minimal, focusing on design and usability. As we developed the tool, we made frequent use of Filedart for collaboration. We darted screenshots of the product page, various iterations, of the logo, nightly builds, and marketing strategies. It quickly became apparent that we were settling into a new way of working. After a few tosses, using Filedart becomes as intuitive and natural as Copy/Paste. While you don’t need Copy/Paste to work on a Mac, most of us would hate to go without. Filedart starts to feel the same way.

In terms of privacy, we don’t request user data and promise not to peek at your files. We don’t know who you are, and we are not interested in snooping. Ultimately we hope that the tool we created is useful, reliable, and secure.

We would love to hear your feedback on how to make Filedart better – just email us at feedback@filedart.com. Happy darting!

Brad

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August 2, 2013

In search of a better Image Optimizer

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Web users never like to wait for a website to load. As a software company, a long wait time can result in losing potential clients. One of the tricks that can speed up the loading of your website is the optimization of your images. There are several free tools that you can use for this. Here are five that I recommend.

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posted

July 20, 2013

Generating Static Pages with Rails

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When working on Filedart we wanted some statically served pages, but to use our site template(s) to have them fit the look and feel. Updating our site’s assets (javascript, css, images, etc) should be easy to update in our static pages as well. Here is a brief overview of how I made this happen.

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