Ash Furrow

I'm giving a talk tonight at TACOW, the Toronto Cocoa and WebObjects Developers Group. The talk is on UIScrollView and the presentation materials, including all sample code, is available here. The PDF version is available by itself, if you're on a mobile browser.

Children's author Maurice Sendak passed away today. Among other things, he wrote Where the Wild Things Are, which was my favourite book as a child.

So many times while building the 500px iPad app, Adam (our app designer) would suggest something and I'd hesitate. Not because his suggestion was a bad idea, but because it would be hard to implement.

My friend Tom published an interesting post this morning about copying the wrong part of idea. The post is based on something stupid someone commented on Hacker News, and I want to expand on that a little bit.

Let's talk about people saying stupid things on Hacker News.

It looks like Apple is rejecting some apps which contain Dropbox integration. Why? The mobile authentication page accessible from the app has a link to the normal authentication page, which has a link which eventually leads to a place you can buy a Dropbox subscription (not via Apple's In-App Purchase mechanism). This ostensibly violates Apple's rules, so the apps were rejected.

John Siracusa of Hypercritical has spent the last two episodes, 64 and 65 discussing gaming as an art form. He draws the conclusion that hard-core video games (not, say, Angry Birds) are a form of art but are novel in that they require skill to appreciate. Unlike wine tasting or film appreciation, some people will never have the hand-eye coordination to appreciate games like Portal.

It's an interesting argument, and I agree with him.

After blogging quite a while ago about how much I do not want to get into photography, I find myself a few months into picking up this new and rewarding hobby.

Here's a pretty snazzy infographic detailing the complete lifetime of an iPhone, from design to production to use to waste.

5 weeks ago I was contacted by an Apple recruiter about a job opportunity working on the front-end of Siri. I love to my job at 500px and my life here in Toronto, but when the most valuable company in the history of economics asks if you'd like to chat, it's not really a question. It's a formality.

In a recent blog post I wrote entitled "Society, Health, and the Politics of Being Fat", I made the comparison that fat shaming is going to become the new homophobia. I struggled with this comparison and considered leaving it out. It was admittedly a bit over the top, but I didn't think that it would diminish the struggles and hard-fought victories of members and supporters of the LGBTQ community.