UI Design and the Human heart.

I’ve been thinking a lot about UI and User experience. Like a first date, your impressions of an app happen in the first 10 seconds. So you have to be careful not to pick your nose or fart.

I really like this article:  What Screens Want

Computers, after all, are just shaky towers of nested abstraction: from the code that tells them what to do, to the interfaces that suggest to the user what’s possible to do. 

It’s best to view screens as a material for interaction and interface design. 

Interfaces, graphics design are about communication.   Wish more programmers thought about this instead of adding

“cool”  features.

So programmers

Be a good first date -Kurt Vonnegut

Arc is “Magic … !”

I’ve been stubbornly  avoiding ARC automatic reference counting  for a long while. Feeling like a “real” programmer manages their own memory. But out of desperation; a persistent bug and a bunch of leaks, I finally gave it a try…Man I should have done this years ago !

I used these two sources to walk me through it..

Dave: Migrating to ARC 

Ray: Beginning ARC 

And after a little of shifting things around and changing a few lines, and 45 minutes later I was done.

The hardest part was figuring out that code named: “loadifNecessary”  had to be renamed to “initLoadifNecessary” since it had a reference to self.  After … I went from 8 meg of leaks to 16 bytes !!!

My take away.. ARC is MAGIC !!! use it !!

iOS 7.1 Bug But can’t get it…

So I was at a dinner party and showing Dragon Emperor’s Challenge to some people. And when I hit reset or shuffle it exited the app. I have no idea why and can’t reliably reproduce it.. Which makes nailing down what it is Very difficult !!! So to make it up to you here’s a picture. Shrug.. will try to find fix it soon. Maybe fixing a few memory leaks in the process will help.. apologies !

ps. This is a boxelder bug… for you  Etymology nerds.