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frankPants

51 karma · joined September 14, 2011

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frankPants··on Xcode, GCC, and Homebrew
This is indeed great news. Thanks to everyone who was involved in making this happen, it's fantastic news.
frankPants··on Apple unveils iTunes U for iPad
So write it.
frankPants··on Apple unveils iTunes U for iPad
Well, there's no other alternative at the moment. The only thing students are bound by is the curriculum and recommended texts. I for one, hope Amazon get onto it too. It's just a shame it's always Apple innovating and the rest left catching up. How and why did Amazon not see this as an opportunity years ago? They must sell thousands of text books each year and ship them everywhere.
frankPants··on Apple unveils iTunes U for iPad
Mircosoft is also working towards launching it's own walled garden with a 70/30 split, from what I hear, due in late 2012. So then, they'll be a double stab
frankPants··on Microsoft’s Visual Studio gets badges, achievements and leaderboard
Wow. Thanks Microsoft for cluttering up yet another product with more UI Craptastic.

Honestly I know it's all done in fun but really, people using the product are trying to concentrate, they're trying to solve really hard problems and you're going to pop up some crap telling them they achieved some stupid "award".

You morons, this is akin to the marketing joker in the office that annoys alls the programmers by interrupting them all day with stupid jokes, you know the guy, he's the one you want to punch in the face everyday.

And to the guys that actually coded this up, learn to say no. Put your job on the line; fuck it it's not worth making the world a worse place by adding this kinda crap to a developer tool.

frankPants··on This photograph is free
And here is the reason I left photography and became a programmer. It's a great hobby and a shit profession.
frankPants··on Why I switched from Ruby back to C++
cough ObjectiveC
frankPants··on Why I switched from Ruby back to C++
This post should be titled, "Why I fucked up by choosing Ruby to write a game." - Or "What the fuck was I thinking"

I love Ruby, I spend a lot of time writing it. I also write kids games for iOS. I would never consider Ruby(in it's current state) a good language to write a game in. Anyone who would has clearly; never written a game before; or never used Ruby for anything serious before.

I agree with the other posters, you should investigate ObjectiveC though. You can get ObjectiveC packaged and running on Windows BTW, don't worry about that.

frankPants··on Zucchini iOS testing framework
Ohh using a screenshot as a reference point. Nice. I like the idea of using screenshots as a test assertion.
frankPants··on CoffeeScript is not a language worth learning
I mean really, all abstraction is just taking a step further away from the real problems and optimisations right! Let's all just write Assembler specific to the given chip architecture we're running on. What's with all this high level language abstraction about anyway, I think it's a fad...
frankPants··on Touchscreens have no hand
I'd go with either Mondrian, or Pollock myself. Impressionists, such as Monet began working towards abstraction for sure, but for Monet, it was more about capturing the fleeting nature of light on a canvas, however still within the confines of a landscape.

Surely painting as a pure form of expression, unbridled by anything more than simply paint, reached it's high point with the likes of Mondrian, Pollock, Kandinsky etc during the early 20th century. When composition, colour and form were key and principle elements of the canvas, not nature, and the natural world around. They may have drawn inspiration from the world around but they did not seek to visual represent it on the canvas per se.

frankPants··on Touchscreens have no hand
I am at odds to argue with Tufte but I will. The issue with touch screens is not that they lack the same surface texture as the objects they're imitating. It's that they're imitating real world objects in the first place. I think most people would agree with sculpture and painting, that the high point of those media was reached during the point of pure abstraction. When paint was allowed to simply be paint. Painting stopped being a way to represent the real world on a canvas and was allowed to be itself, the real advantages of paint came out.

Well, let's stop pretending that the tablet is a representation of the real world, and let pixels be pixels. Why pretend they're anything more than that? "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" as Magritte so eloquently put it in '28-29.

Pixels, while not having the 3 dimensional qualities of the real world, surely have many of their own unique qualities; that while we attempt to copy the real world, remain unexplored.

frankPants··on I want to pay for TextMate 2
He should start a donation fund to pay for the development of TextMate2. I'd happily throw a few hundred $$$ into that. I own TextMate 1, so I get the update for free.

Problem for him is, he'd open himself up to litigation if he tried to charge for TextMate 2. However I'm also of the opinion that the lack of release is due to the lack of cash. If he could see money rolling in via "donations" maybe he'd be more capable of paying his bills and continuing to develop his great editor.

frankPants··on The Great Lie - Lorem Ipsum
That's great, now you've got another crap looking website to add to your portfolio. Eventually you'll stop being paid. Just because the client's paying doesn't mean they've got a clue. It's our job to steer them towards great software, not take their money and produce mediocrity.
frankPants··on The Westfield’s iPhone app privacy smorgasbord
bingo! I'll be my life that's exactly what's happened.
frankPants··on The Westfield’s iPhone app privacy smorgasbord
There's no need for encryption of anything. Send the service a number plate, it returns you an image, tick if that's you're car, and it'll tell you where it is. If it's not it goes to the next one in the list. The issue here, is that the server team haven't tailored the API for the app. They've just dumped everything out to the app via a queryable url string, and let all the logic in there.

/api/v3/plate_search?plate=ABC123 and it can return you the closest match. Search it again from the same phone, get the second mate(track the cookie). It's not that hard, it just takes some thought, and the Westfield, and the vendor have tried to cut corners.