SMS Bubbles

Posted on September 18, 2009 by MXH

bubblesTalking with Benoit Cerrina (of ShinKanji) about a related issue, I started to wonder how you could render “bubble” text, as for instance in the SMS application. It turns out to be pretty easy; all you need is a little source art, and some tuning parameters.

Continue reading →

Posted in iPhone | Comments Off

Fitted Labels

Posted on September 17, 2009 by MXH

A recent problem required me to find bounding boxes for text on the iPhone. While this problem is neither typical nor particularly hard, I did spend some time digging though the documentation until I found an approach that I was happy with. Therefore, I thought I’d share what I found. (The short version is that the sizeToFit method of UILabel does the trick.)

Continue reading →

Posted in iPhone | Comments Off

Not Indicative

Posted on September 14, 2009 by MXH

“Past Performance Is Not Indicative of Future Results.” This little piece of boilerplate, or some variation on it, will be familiar to anyone who’s ever heard a pitch for an investment or a mutual fund. What I think it worth reflecting on is just how odd a phenomenon this is, and how disorienting it can be.

Continue reading →

Posted in Jack Handy | Comments Off

Let Me Please Introduce Myself

Posted on September 13, 2009 by MXH

Several people have been nice enough to link to items from this blog, and, in so doing, have brought it to my attention that it’s a little hard to figure out who, exactly, I am. Let me address that now.

Continue reading →

Posted in Jack Handy | Comments Off

Core Data

Posted on September 11, 2009 by MXH

One of the developer-side enhancements included in iPhone OS 3.0 was Core Data. Core Data is basically an ORM layer, which one could either take or leave; it’s nice to avoid writing all that SQL, but you’re always taking on a lot of baggage by adopting a big ol’ framework like that. It does, however, offer at least one feature that strikes me as really neat: NSFetchedResultsControllers. I explain more below.

Continue reading →

Posted in iPhone | Comments Off

Private Information

Posted on September 10, 2009 by MXH

A few days ago, Godin made the interesting points that:

  • On the internet, some people are more influential than others
  • It would be valuable to know how influential someone is
  • Quantitative metrics for influence could be developed and computed

So far, so good. Where I think he goes astray is in his claim that “the web knows” who the influential people are. This, it seems to me, is a deeply misleading metaphor.

Continue reading →

Posted in Jack Handy | Comments Off

Labor Day

Posted on September 7, 2009 by MXH

Since it’s Labor Day in the U.S. today, and since I just did an upgrade of WP to 2.8.4 (please do write if you see anything wonky) I though I’d do something short: A quick check on bandwidth pricing, which we last updated back in March. Not much has changed, although it looks like there’s a good deal to be had on unmetered bandwidth.

Continue reading →

Posted in Web stuff | Comments Off

Adventure Games

Posted on September 6, 2009 by MXH

Things I Learned From Adventure Games:

  • 90% of the time, you can solve the problem in front of you right away
  • … and the solution is (almost) always obvious in hindsight
  • … but there’s always another hill to climb
  • … and cheating won’t make you happy

Continue reading →

Posted in Jack Handy | Comments Off

Fixed-Width

Posted on September 4, 2009 by MXH

bad alignmentgood alignmentThis one is a little personal. I have an idiosyncratic, and probably ill-advised, interest in getting ASCII art to display properly on the iPhone. (This was actually one of the first things I experimented with on the platform.) My efforts have been hampered by the fact that the iPhone’s “fixed-width” fonts aren’t; whitespace is assigned a different width from everything else. Today, I discuss a small function that uses Quartz 2D to draw proper fixed width fonts.

Continue reading →

Posted in iPhone | Comments Off

More Choices

Posted on September 3, 2009 by MXH

I want to follow up on Monday’s post about my ChoiceMenu class; that class contained one particular line of code that made it a lot more useful and flexible. Perhaps I’m inordinately proud of it, but I think it’s worth a mention, and I didn’t have time to discuss it before.

Continue reading →

Posted in iPhone | Comments Off