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wlue

635 karma · joined August 3, 2010

Canadian Software Engineer. http://wenhaolue.com

Co-founder of Sesame (Imagine K12 F15). http://sesamehq.com

[ my public key: https://keybase.io/wlue; my proof: https://keybase.io/wlue/sigs/cKwqz0__l_EqCTAV9BYFpcYkNj-DNV8gqlCkMXE1eeM ]

submissionscomments
wlue··on Last day to apply to YC Hacks
Aw man, is there any way to still apply? I had the form filled out in my browser, and I was waiting for a friend to fill out his application, but I ended up forgetting to submit the form before 12:00am PST.
wlue··on Show HN: Social Bar - A branded bar that follows links you share on social media
Looks like Visibli (http://visibli.com), if you haven't seen it before.
wlue··on Show HN: UXArchive - How the best iPhone apps handle userflows
Reminds me of pttrns (http://pttrns.com/). Being able to look at a lot of apps can be a source of great motivation if you're having designer's block.
wlue··on Great HN parody
On OS X, you can use KeyRemap4Macbook (http://pqrs.org/macosx/keyremap4macbook/) to turn on the feature with a bit of hackery.

I have not figured out how to do it on Windows, but I imagine that it might be possible with AutoHotKey.

wlue··on Great HN parody
The funny thing is that I know a few people who do this. (Holding Caps Lock = CTRL, tapping Caps Lock = ESC)
wlue··on NUI: style your iOS app with style sheets
A strategy that I found works really well to quickly style everything is to create a category on UIView that defines a block property decorated with UI_APPEARANCE_SELECTOR, then on the setter, invoke the block. Then set the appearance proxy on app startup:

  [[UILabel appearance] setStyleBlock:^(id view) {
    UILabel *label = view;
    label.backgroundColor = [UIColor clearColor];
  }];
The advantage is that you can style properties that aren't supported by UIAppearance natively, since a block just gets run when the view is ready to be styled. You also can style subviews from the same block (ie. title label inside of a warning view should be red and bold).
wlue··on What was the strangest coding standard rule that you were forced to follow?
I worked at a start-up whose engineering lead brought familiar coding style to a project that was inherited. We were imposed a combination of C89-esque and Microsoft kernel coding style on an Objective-C source code. Things like defining all variables at the beginning of the function definition in alphabetical order in CamelCase, having instance variables prefixed with the class abbreviation, and other inane rules. It went something like this:

  - (void)
  doSomethingOnObjectAndNumber:
    (NSObject *) MyObject :
    (NSInteger) MyNumber
  
  /*++
  Some unstandard doc format.
  --*/

  {
    
    ...
    return;
  }
Before I started, I was told that the project migrated from git to svn to "make branching easier". I do not work there any more.
wlue··on Show HN: Status page for Balanced - Payments for Marketplaces
This is awesome. I wonder if there any free open source projects that would let developers implement this sort of front-end for their own services.
wlue··on Show HN: Mantaphrase, an app that lets you converse in a foreign language
The app works in landscape when in a conversation. This makes the text a bit bigger.
wlue··on Show HN: Mantaphrase, an app that lets you converse in a foreign language
We have had a bunch of beta testers use it in China and Japan. It was also fun to pretend to not know English and use it at a restaurant.
wlue··on Show HN: Mantaphrase, an app that lets you converse in a foreign language
Yes! This is something that we're really excited about, and is definitely on our pipeline.
wlue··on Show HN: Mantaphrase, an app that lets you converse in a foreign language
Thanks for your comments! The idea of the conversation interface is that the user is driving the conversation. We wanted to make it extremely simple for the other person to see and respond. We don't have a good solution for the flip-side yet. It's one of the issues we found with certain translation applications that have user interfaces meant for two people. One person is probably not going to know how to use it.

I definitely do see value in this kind of interaction though, but we're going to have to be careful about how we implement it so we don't make the interface confusing for the person you actually want to communicate and not confuse!

wlue··on Show HN: Mantaphrase, an app that lets you converse in a foreign language
Exchange rate info right now is just an approximation that's stored offline. In a next release, we're going to be sourcing information like that more often.
wlue··on Show HN: Mantaphrase, an app that lets you converse in a foreign language
Yes, it's something we're seriously considering for sure.
wlue··on Chrome DevTools could do that?
Nice to see a PonyDebugger mention here. :)
wlue··on PonyDebugger: Chrome Developer Tools for Native iOS Apps
Definitely getting paid. Square treats us interns well. :)