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iOS 7 and the iPad

June 19th, 2013 No comments

So, iOS 7 features a brand new “light” interface, with thin fonts to take “full advantage” of the retina displays on new iOS devices. Now, whether or not you like it or agree with the decision (personally I wasn’t a fan to start, but I’m really starting to like iOS 7 now!), there’s one little snag incoming.

Apple didn’t release an iPad version of the iOS 7 beta yet, and I think I might know part of the reason why. There were rumors that iOS 7 was slightly behind schedule, so obviously they focused on the iPhone to get a good announcement and initial beta going. However, I think the iPad mini is an issue that I’m interested to see how they will address. It’s the only non-retina device that supports iOS 7, and since it came out so recently it has to be supported for a couple versions at least. I’m assuming a retina iPad mini will be coming out soon, but even so, how will it work on the iPad mini? I just got mine and don’t want to give it up anytime soon (it’s not so cheap to easily replace 🙁 ). Will the text be legible? I guess they’ll probably just make the font a bit thicker, but I’m curious if they will compromise on their vision of what iOS 7 should look like.

Just a random stream of consciousness post.

Edit:

@joshhinman brings up a good point that the iPad 2 is also supported. That’s even less pixel dense than the iPad mini, so we’ll see how iOS 7 works on those devices. In any case, I think that Apple can drop the iPad 2 in iOS 8 without too much uproar while the mini should stick around a bit longer. I still wonder what they have planned for non-retina screens.

Categories: General, iOS, Thoughts Tags: ,

Starting Web Development

February 3rd, 2011 No comments

I’ve decided to get into web development a bit. I figure it’s a good way to start utilizing my python knowledge in a more constructive manner. I started off playing around with Google App Engine, which was really neat in a lot of ways. It made it easy to quickly publish it, which was pretty neat, and their database management was quite cool. However, I have this domain and software hosting, and I wanted to start with development that I could use in a couple of different locations. That reminded me that I’ve been meaning to learn how to work with Django. I went through their basic tutorials as well and I’m starting to quite enjoy it. It relaly allows for rapid development, which is great. Hopefully there will be some updates soon with different projects I’m working on. Maybe I’ll get around to making my homepage!

Back at school

January 21st, 2011 No comments

It’s been a week of school, and I never really ended up posting any more over winter break. I was pretty busy with work and all, so not much happened. However, back at school now. I do, however, have a minor rant about this whole Facebook issue (where they were going to let Web Apps that use facebook access to users’ phone numbers).

Facebook reminds me of one of those pre-school bullies. They poke and prod you, to see how far they can go before you call the teacher. Then when the teacher yells at them, they claim they didn’t do anything, and they’ll never do it again, and go right back to it. It’s always the same with these privacy issues. They slowly give up more and more of our information, then suddenly all of our purchases are appearing on our wall, and users finally realize that something bad is going on. They complain, facebook apologizes and provides some new security toggle hidden amongst all their other security toggles, and then a couple months later, our phone numbers are being shared. Users realize this is bad again and complain, and facebook apologizes again. But in the meantime the friend feature has become a follow, advertisers have everything, and the user-base only complains about what they can actually perceive as invading their privacy. Everyone knows what happens when their phone number becomes wide knowledge (telemarketers anyone?), but not the rest of the privacy concerns that pop up in between.  I do have a Facebook account still, because it doesn’t actually matter if I delete it or not, the data is still in their system, but I very rarely use it, and do not use my Facebook account to log in to any other website. I hope I never have to. It just tires me to read every couple months about another outrage from Facebook, and wonder when anyone will ever learn.

Categories: General, School Tags:

Winter Break Post 1

December 21st, 2010 No comments

Back home in Chicago for winter break and doing a bit of dev work. I’m working at the same iPhone Development firm I have been for the last couple years for the few weeks of break. I’ve been meaning to work more on the Octopus recently, I just can’t seem to find any motivation. Was catching up on lack of sleep and stress from finals this weekend, and now regular work has started. Hopefully will find motivation soon.

I’ve been thinking of making a level editor, it would be something new and cool to work on and could be helpful to extend the play-length of the game (yay 2 levels so far). But that may just be procrastinating from adding new things into the game itself. I guess part of the problem is while the game is kinda fun to play, I don’t really enjoy it. It isn’t nearly as enjoyable as I want it to be. I do have some highly reusable code so I may scrap the current gameplay and start over, but i don’t know if that’s a better idea. I know on the one hand sticking to it is good, but there’s no point working on a game you don’t like as it won’t be enjoyable. Or I could just be being lazy and making excuses :P. I’m looking forward to having some more time as break continues.

Categories: General Tags:

First Post

October 12th, 2010 No comments

I decided today that I wanted to start writing down what I’ve been working on and what my plans are for future projects, so I decided to set up this blog to track my progress and get my thoughts down. I don’t know exactly how this will go yet, and many things on here may never come to fruition, but I’ll do what I can.

Recently, I have been pretty busy with schoolwork. Nothing has been overly difficult, just plenty of hours of work. I’ve taken an interest in Python and was able to use it on my  most recent assignment for Programming Studio. We were doing JSON parsing and then creating a directed graph out of the data, nothing too exciting. It was a good project to start learning a language though.

I’ve also been looking into the AI Contest, and perhaps using Python on that as well. I made my bot a bit better than the starting bot, but not by much. I haven’t had time to really create a good strategy for that yet. For those of you who are unfamiliar, the contest is creating a bot to control a game of Planet Wars. Check out the link for more information.

One thing I may use this for is project planning. I have a 4 week final project in my Programming Studio class, where I can make whatever I want. I’m currently thinking an iPad game, as I haven’t had a chance to write a game in quite a while, and maybe I can throw it on the app store later. It will be a good opportunity to restart learning OpenGL. Initial general outline would be first 2 weeks making the engine, second 2 weeks working on the actual game. I’m only worried about the work in other classes preventing a lot of progress on it. Maybe I should start early…