August 2010
7 posts
UX/UI: Heuristic Evaluation on Deadball Specialist... →
thomasdavies:
Recently I conducted a very short heuristic evaluation on Full Fat Games‘ Deadball Specialist HD (iTunes Link) for iPad.
View the results document on Scribd.
View the methodology and results document on Scribd.
Sneak: Fixing the background 'bleed' →
I recently came up against an issue in Safari where the background colour of an element seemed to ‘bleed’ through the edge of the corners when applying both borders and a border-radius (see the image above). After seeing David Cole tweet about the same issue I resolved to find a solution,…
"CSS3" and its place in today's world
I’m sure by now we are all very much aware of “CSS3” and what it means. However it seems the definition of its place in todays world has become a muddy puddle.
I myself use certain CSS3 additions in my work to help further an elements visual appearance or behaviour, this being of course a common use for style sheets in general. But it seems many people, mainly those who...
Flic.kr Short URL Safari Extension
Many of you will know, a while back I wrote a small webpage that shortened flickr.com urls. [http://tmdvs.me/flic.kr/]
I’ve finally had the chance to turn this into a Safari 5 native extension! Simply visit a photo on flickr and hit the tool bar button! It couldn’t be any simpler! The button will only be active if you’re viewing a photo on flickr.com.
This extension is...
WatchI created my first Safari 5 Extension. It creates short URLS with the tmdvs.me domain using AJAX calls.
Ads begone!
A quick note to say I have pulled ads from the site. A larger company joined the ad network I was with and now profits are less than $4 a month.
When an ad company starts up sporting the values of design and development themed ads hosted on design and development themed sites it would be silly not to expect them to sell out at some point. It just all went down hill rather quickly.
July 2010
3 posts
2 tags
Sh*t My Dad Says, a humble book review...
At first glance Im sure many people will assume this book is just a collection of all the tweets the author originally tweeted. I wont be the first to admit I assumed the exact same thing.
However. This book is much more than a few funny one liners from an a sharp witty old man. No. This book also contains the story of growing up in an average home, except you’re living with a high class...
3 tags
Web Development Environments
I recently scoured the internet in the search of the “perfect framework for me”. I work in web design and development so spend a lot of my time either designing or building web applications and decided it was time to look into the different ways I could approach doing so.
I started by researching what big web apps where written in, and the results where as I expected. The big three...
The development of Twiba
For those who don’t know Twiba (pronounced Twee ber) is an iPhone twitter client with a sexy UI and extra goodness from software magicians YummyCocoa LTD. I recently decided we’d hold off on release and focus heavily on developing the application to be compatible with the new iPhone 4, and iOS 4.
What I’d really like is user input. It seems many iPhone apps on the market seem to...
June 2010
1 post
How the iPad changed my reading habits
A few weeks ago I purchased an iPad along with many other thousands of people. It’s everything i expected and more. Its always in my hands. What I didn’t expect the iPad to do was change my reading habits.
I was never a big reader. Parents would buy me books when I was younger. I would then just watch the films and pretend I had read these books. When I studied English literature I...
May 2010
3 posts
April 2010
13 posts
3 tags
GitKey: a small OS X Utility
After we had a discussion about the possibilities of slowly transitioning to Git for revision control at work, it became apparent that due to people having different grasps on Terminal/UNIX commands that setting up SSH key sets for use with remote repositories in git could be quite tedious and frustrating for the less experienced user. To solve this I wrote a small utility to aid those users and...
3 tags
Creating Custom iPhone User Interfaces
I recently decided to create and iphone user interface in photoshop that demonstrated a different approach to iPhone UI. I then decided to prove the concept by putting it together in XCODE.
I have now published the project on gitHub for other developers to learn from and see how I put this UI together in IB and in objc.
The Project Repository on GitHub
WatchThis is the UI concept I produced all coded up and running under iPhone OS 4.0. That really is a UINavigationBar. All the UI elements are extensions of the official APIs no cut corners here folks!
“Whenever I get gloomy with the state of the world, I think about the arrivals...”
– Love Actually (Hugh Grant)
4 tags
Apple, wake up and smell the cocoa…
It would seem Apple has lost its grasp on the world of Consumer Electronics. This is a market place where electronics manufacturers compete to provide the consumer with the best possible device for the task at hand. Apple used to do this with great result. Just look at the iPod for example. With the iPod Apple rocked the portable music player market. Why? Because with each new iteration of the...
3 tags
Twitter for iPhone →
Twitter buys Tweetie.
3 tags
4 tags
tumbljack: Subtle effects with CALayer →
CALayer has some nice new features available in 3.2
Shadows have become a key element in creating realistic user interfaces for Mac, iPhone and now iPad software. The desktop version of Core Animation shipped with shadows built right into CALayer, making it easier than ever to add them to…
2 tags
“I hate looking back over really old code. My variable naming scheme was...”
– Dan Cunningham (http://dcunningham.net/)
5 tags
The pricing of iPhone and iPad apps…
It would seem several large editorials have published stories moaning about the price of applications on the iPad app store. This bitching must cease. People often forget the people publishing these stories are simply typical end users with a large audience for their poorly founded opinions.
The majority of people pay a pretty penny when it comes to desktop applications, but why not a fully...
3 tags
Categories: expanding existing Cocoa classes…
A lot of people ask how do I change the background of UINavigationBars or how I use methods that aren’t part of the class in UIKit/AppKit. This my friends is called a category!
I don’t wish to natter on about categories as they’re extremely simple to use. However I shall show a quick example of how they work for those who don’t already know.
@implementation...
3 tags
Cloud App has been released… →
CloudApp allows you to share images, links, music,videos and files. Here is how it works: choose a file, drag it to the menubar and let us take care of the rest. We provide you with a short link automatically copied to your clipboard that you can use to share your upload with co-workers and friends.
Additionally you can view, track and delete files right from your menubar.
4 tags
How I create iPhone video demonstrations
When showing people my iPhone applications I want to show them off in the best possible manner. Many people contact me asking “How did you make you video look so nice!”.
The solution is two programs. Program one is a small open source application from the creator of tweetie @atebits called SimFinger (A link to the git repository can be found at the bottom of the article). SimFinger...
March 2010
8 posts
4 tags
WatchSimple RSS for all, only on iPhone…
4 tags
WatchSearching in Bulletin makes finding the right article a sinch.
1 tag
“People always ask why I’m never sleeping. The avarage human spends 25+...”
– Tim Davies
4 tags
4 tags
WatchTinyGrab for iPhone gets a facelift (subject to change) view full quality .MOV here - http://dznr.org/gh2e
2 tags
4 tags
“Some people would pay more for a mars bar than an iPhone app”
– Tim Davies
4 tags
Project Bulletin, an iPhone RSS reader
Firstly. RSS feeds are everywhere, no matter the scale of the source be it the BBC news website or a friends blog the majority of online content publishers supply their readers with RSS feeds.
I noticed while perusing the iPhone’s AppStore the other week that the majority of RSS feed readers for the iPhone require you to have a google reader account. I myself don’t use google...
February 2010
5 posts
3 tags
“Theres only us, theres only this, forget regret, or life is yours to miss. No...”
– Jonathan Larson
1 tag
“Be who you are and say what you feel, because those who mind don’t matter and...”
– Theodor Geisel aka Dr. Seuss
1 tag
Seventy miles per hour…
On the third of may two thousand and nine I became the victim of a car crash, I always promised myself I would write about the incident as some tool to help ease any prolonged anxiety and stress steaming from the incident, however I have only just found time to do so. Here, and now.
I was unfashionably late for work. At the time I was a chef’s assistant for a small local restaurant, nothing...
1 tag
“We obtain understanding of a theory through study and revision. However we can...”
– Tim Davies
4 tags
TDHUDProgressBar
Progress bars are something we witness as computer users on a daily basis. However. Over the last few weeks I had noticed; every progress bar I encountered jumped progress and didn’t really animate. This isn’t wrong or an issue. Its just down right ugly…
Enter TDHUDProgressBar. This progress bar class is built from two CALayers which would animate to the next progress value instead of...