Code, Nerdyness, and Nonsense...

Considering Leaving Wordpress For Jekyll

So, after my 6 year relationship with Wordpress, I have been having some strong feelings for another (blog engine).  Jekyll does everything that I want my wordpress to do.

1. Not suck at security
2. Not be bloated
3. Not have a sucky post editor
4. Expense - I have a few blogs hosted on Rackspace and my bill has gotten pretty pricey.  I’m hoping to host my Jekyll site on App Engine for frizzle (free).

That’s about it.  In case you live in a box (which most of us do since most houses are relatively square) and haven’t hear of it, Jekyll is a new blogging engine written in Ruby.  Simply put, you write posts, run a command and it spits out static pages.  You just upload these pages to your server (how old skool right?)  Now you no longer have a dependancies on any server side language, fancy server configs, etc…

Jekyll has no(minimal) features, no comments, track backs etc… and no built-in SEO.  It doesn’t even have an admin (since you are serving up static content).  Sounds like a blast right? I’ll blog a bit about it as I make the migration and you will see, it’s going to be great!

I just finished reading this post from Hacker News, which was pretty much the nail in the coffin.

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Huge Update To Smart Lockscreen Creator + Promo Codes

I have just updated Smart Lockscreen Creator and am giving away 10 copies!

Download It Here

I know you probably aren’t reading this as you race to see if any of the promos aren’t taken but…

Here is what’s new:

Misc
* Added ability to generate a new image on startup. Just turn Auto-Start on in the settings

Weather
* Toggle Fahrenheit and Celsius
* Added missing weather images
* Updated weather icons
* Improved performance and stability of retrieving weather

Customization
* Customize separator color and height
* Customize which day of the week to highlight for a calendar
* Ability to customize the background color of each widget

Minor Bug Fixes

The Promo Codes

METL6KNXW6TL
TWFHLKT7RYWK
J6JXJ7JPNJRN
XLP9FF9RAEA9
L74ATPTYXJ4F
A6KJPTLWE97P
HNWP6L7F6JW9
XEHNFKJPMR6Y
MFH3MNHKXF3A
FENRH4M9PAEA

Please leave a 5 star review :)

Download It Here

Original Article

Free App Idea: Drop Tunes

Perhaps this already exists, if so, please link me to it.

The idea
Drop music into your Dropbox folder on your computer. Then open up the app which presents you with an iPod like interface for this music.

The genius
What’s great about it is, you have all of you music on your iPhone without using up disk space. Of course you may need to upgrade your Dropbox account to something greater than 2GBs to see any real value.

Original Article

Smart Lockscreen Creator Released + Promo Codes

My latest iOS app, Smart Lockscreen Creator has just released on iPhone for $.99.

Download It Here

The Idea

Currently your lockscreen on your iOS device is nothing more than a pretty watch with a background.  Jailbreakers have solved this issue with an incredible application called intelliscreen, which adds lots of interesting information to it.  However, you and I are Apple fanboys and won’t violate our precious iPhones with jailbreaking.  Enter Smart Lockscreen Creator.

Smart Lockscreen Creator allows you to build a completely custom (and smart) lockscreen image within the application.  You then set this image as your lockscreen background.  The following items are currently supported by the app.

* Current weather, condition, high and low for any city/region in the World
* Weekly forecast for any city/region in the World
* Monthly calendar
* Custom text
* Blank space (useful when customizing the look of your lockscreen)
* Line separator
* Many more in the works!

Here are some promo codes.  If you fail to grab one and have some interest in reviewing the app on your site, I would be happy to email you one.

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Tweet Press 3.2 Update - Sidebar Widget

I have recently had an overwhelming number of requests for a sidebar widget that displays your recent Tweetpress photos. Well, it’s finally here! The update was actually quite trivial to make. If I had known how simple it would be, I would have made it months ago.

Make sure you update to the latest version: tweetpress 3.2

How to use it
In the Wordpress admin, click on Appearance and the Widgets from the sidebar menu. If your theme supports widgets (which is should), you will see a Tweetpress widget in the available widgets list.

Next drag that widget into the sidebar area and modify the settings.

You can configure the title of the widget as well as the number of photos to be displayed. Please comment here or shoot me an email if you experience any issues with it. I’m also open to suggestions.

Original Article

Case Of The Mondays

[caption id=”attachment_1421” align=”alignright” width=”320” caption=”Mondays…”][/caption]

The other day, I was faced with an interesting programming challenge and wanted to share my solution.  I just submitted a pretty interesting app to the app store that does a number of things (more details soon).  Among those things is the ability to generate a calendar.

The Problem

Generating the calendar was the easy part, however when displayed, I wanted it to highlight every Monday of the month.  This turned out to be a bit trickier than I imagined.

Really the main challenge here was to determine which day contained the first Monday of the month. After that, we just loop incrementing by 7 and are done.

Looking At The Date Helpers

Looking at what I had to work with in NSDate, NSCalendar, and NSDateComponents, I really found only 2 things that could help me.  From NSDateComponents, I could figure out the current day (numeric) and the current day of the week (numeric).  Knowing this information was very important.

The Solution

Having the current day and day of the week allowed me to find the date of the Monday on the current week.  This was the first challenge as demonstrated below. Assume weekdayComponents is the NSDateComponents generated from the current date.

[objc]
NSInteger weekday = [weekdayComponents weekday];
NSInteger day = [weekdayComponents day];

// First, find how many days we are from Monday
int daysAwayFromMonday = weekday - 2;

// Now resolve the monday of this week
int mondayThisWeek = day - daysAwayFromMonday;

// Check if monday this week falls in last month
if(mondayThisWeek mondayThisWeek = day + (7 - daysAwayFromMonday);
}
[/objc]

mondayThisWeek will now contain the day number of the Monday of the current week. If that Monday falls on the previous month, mondayThisWeek will be negative. Line 12 resolves that by carrying it into next week.

Finally, we just loop subtracting 7 from that Monday until mondayThisWeek is less than 7 to get the first Monday of the month.

[objc]
while(mondayThisWeek > 7) {
mondayThisWeek -= 7;
}
[/objc]

And there you have it. mondayThisWeek (improperly named at this point) will contain the day number of the first Monday for the current month.

So, this was quite a round-a-bout way to find this value. If you have a better solution, please feel free to trash on mine in the comments ;) .

Original Article

Farewell (For Now) iDevBlogADay

Hey guys,

I wanted to thank everyone for letting me be a part of the iDevBlogADay community.  You guys have been super supportive and I really appreciate all of the commenting, retweeting, and upvoting of my iDevBlogADay articles.

I have found myself in a position with life (work + family) where I may no longer be able to consistently write a post per week.  So, after 2 months of writing, it is time for me to pass the torch to the next blogger on the list.

I will still continue to blog (and continue my Twitter For Mac Series), so I really encourage you to subscribe to my RSS feed (or Twitter feed).

Thanks again and Happy Coding!

Original Article

AppBlogger: A Tool For iOS App Developers And Bloggers

Imagine that you have just found the coolest app in the world and just can’t wait to tell all of your followers about it.  So, you head to the admin panel of your blogging engine (hopefully Wordpress) and begin to write your review.  Now, you want to insert some screenshots, icons, descriptions, app store links, etc… So, what do you do?  You head on over to Bing and type in google.com.  Next, you search your app name and hopefully find the iTunes URL so that you can slowly grab some information about the app. #Fail

Dum duh dum duh (trumpet noises)!

Enter AppBlogger.  AppBlogger is a little tool that I have been working on that uses “Instant Search” technology (jquery fanciness) to allow you to instantly search the app store and quickly get the information you need.

How Does It Work? (you say)

As you start typing, AppBlogger makes an asynchronous request to the iTunes web service and pulls a list of applications that match your search terms.  This list is presented as a bunch of icons.  You will then click on one of these icons to pull of the details page of that application.

The details page (see above screenshot) then contains everything you need to write a stellar blog post about that application.  It provides text fields (for easy copy and paste) with icon URLs, download URL, and screenshot URLs.

I have some plans to integrate this in the near future with my Link Share tool to auto generate shortened URLs that contain your affiliate code (so you can make $).  If you have any other suggestions for it, I would love to hear them.

I know many of you are heartbroken and were expecting the next iteration of my Twitter Client For Mac series.  I want you to know, you are not forgotten and I will continue the series next Thursday.  So Stay Tuned!

Check out AppBlogger!

Original Article