There is an arms race at our office. This is my contribution (Click for full version).
Apparently it’s suitable for children over the age of 8, but I doubt an 8-year-old would be able to even lift it. It has a tripod and thanks to the position of my desk I can cover the door to the lobby from my seat.
My latest project is now available for download: Life Dial.
Life Dial is a simple companion app for Magic: The Gathering players that tracks your remaining life as well as poison counters. It uses a dial control as the input for changing the life and poison totals, which I believe to be more usable than a slider, +/- buttons, or swipes/flings. All changes are made in a single gesture whether large or small. Big changes can be quickly approximated with fast rotations, but fine adjustments can still be made by simply slowing down.
The UI is as simple as I could make it. Life and Poison totals are displayed at the top left and top right respectively, and an extra gesture total appears to help you keep track of the current change you’re making. The menu button reveals a reset function that sets the totals back to the standard 20/0. I’m very happy with it as it stands, but I have plans to add a few extra features to track stats in special game-types such as Commander.
Life Dial on the Android Market
(This post is also available on Inflatable Apps)
Getting business cards makes me feel like I’ve leveled up professionally. Now I can introduce myself to clients/friends/attractive women with style!
One of the popular ways to unwind at the office is a quick round or two of Street Fighter IV on our XBox 360. Street Fighter is serious business at Shopify, we have fight sticks and everything. Unfortunately for me, most people have been playing it for way too long and trounce me every time I play. To rectify this, I’ve bought my own copy of the game to play on evenings and weekends.
Learning the basics of a new video game is a lot like learning a new programming framework. In fact, getting to grips with Street Fighter has been a lot like my experience learning Rails. Rails is all about ‘convention over configuration’, and SF is no different. Special moves vary between characters, but there are common themes that run through the controls: Moves requiring you to swing the thumbstick in quarter-circles, half-circles and zig-zags are everywhere. Even if you’ve never played a character before you can usually guess one or two of their moves based on these conventions.fKnowing these gives you a good head-start and provides a base for developing more complex strategies. Further down the line, mastering these shapes results in the ability to pull of crazy combos. I’m not at that stage yet.
If you want to get really good (just as in software development) you need to do more than just fiddle around. After playing with a few of the characters I decided to do some background reading. Unfortunately the second-hand copy of SF I bought only came with a French manual, so I picked up a strategy guide from Chapters and got reading. Beyond the basic ‘punch and kick til the opponent stops moving’, there’s definitely an underlying framework that can be learned and taken advantage of. Once again, the parallels with programming are apparent. Moves all belong to one of several primative types, and characters can be classified by their play-style.
Speaking of playing styles, watching people play is an interesting experience. There are two dominant schools that I’ve observed. The aim of the first seems to be to press buttons as fast as possible, and the second instead values frugality. It’s funny to watch the two battle it out, one person tapping buttons at machine gun speed, while the other seems to move in slow motion by comparison. I’m not sure which is the ‘better’ method, and I suspect at this stage that there are characters that cater to each.
After playing about 6 hours of the game over the last two weekends, I’m pleased to say that I managed to beat the game’s arcade mode. Online play is still looking pretty scary, so I think I’ll test my mettle against my co-workers over the next few days and see if my research and practice stands up to human opposition.
Last week, Mark Jaquith posted an article entitled ‘How to write a WordPress plugin that I’ll use‘. It occurred to me that a similar document about Android apps would be a useful and fun thing to write. A lot of his points carry over, but there are some Android-specific points that I’d like to expand upon.
One of my favourite things about Android is the ability to re-use functionality from other apps. Some of these are no-brainers: If you need the user to select a picture, use ACTION_PICK. Email? Use ACTION_SEND. This extends beyond the standard system intents. OpenIntents has a whole slew of intents that you can use to accomplish any number of tasks. Before you write a given feature into your app, go there and see if someone has already done it. You’ll save time, effort, and won’t have to maintain the extra code. As a concrete example, Omnivore uses Zebra Crossing’s barcode scanning intent to read barcodes.
My first point wouldn’t be possible if developers didn’t make their features available for reuse in the first place. You should do this. Take a look to see if your app performs a function that has an existing intent and if there isn’t one, create it yourself. Omnivore doesn’t do this yet, but eventually I want other apps to be able to access the food list for other purposes (e.g. creating shopping lists, finding recipes).
I was once in the market for a chess clock app. The most popular one at the time asked for both internet and location permissions. Sorry, what? How are either of those going to improve the application for me, the user. Advertising doesn’t count as a valid reason for including a permission by the way. I’m fine with apps that make calls to ad-servers on the back of legitimate internet access, but including permissions for the sole purpose of showing ads isn’t on.
When I press the menu button in an app and nothing happens, I get sad. Similarly, whenever I see an iPhone-esque back button in the top left I shake my head in disappointment. Users (myself included) expect certain things to function certain ways. Imagine installing a desktop app that didn’t use the default keyboard shortcuts for copy/paste, undo/redo or save/load. Everything still works, but it feels out of place and wrong.
Webhooks are an emerging feature in many great APIs. They allow you (or rather, your applications) to avoid polling a service for data by pushing events to you as they happen. However, this aspect makes them tricky to test outside of a production-ready environment. Fortunately, there is a really simle method that makes consuming webhooks in a development environment a breeze.
Whereas most API calls are initiated by your application, webhooks originate from the API provider’s own servers. Because of this role reversal, an app’s testing environment must be publicly accessible if webhooks are being used and tested. One solution is to use a free hosting solution such as a single Heroku dyno or App Engine to temporarily run the app while you test. I did this for a while but it didn’t suit my iterative development process as every time I made a change I had to re-deploy the app. So how does one test features that require a publically visible server from behind a firewall or network gateway?
Enter localtunnel. Localtunnel is a free service that creates an SSH tunnel from your machine to the outside world using a custom url on their site. All this is done behind the scenes by a Ruby gem so you don’t know the first thing about SSH in order to get it working. Here’s how you set it up:
Prerequisites: You’ll need ruby and rubygems installed to take advantage of localtunnel.
gem install localtunnel
ssh-keygen
Accept all the defaults. On Windows it’s a bit trickier but your best bet is to install PuTTY and follow the instructions here: http://kb.siteground.com/article/How_to_generate_an_SSH_key_on_Windows_using_PuTTY.html
localtunnel -k ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub 3000
localtunnel 3000
Port 3000 is now publicly accessible from http://44ea.localtunnel.com ...
That’s it! You can now test webhooks or other push features to your heart’s content. When you’re done, just terminate the localtunnel process to close the connection1.
I picked up a new addiction at PAX East: Magic the Gathering. I dabbled briefly back in high school, but never had the money to really get into it. Now I have a job, that restriction has been lifted somewhat. Uh oh.
There is some software-related news to go with this. Firstly, I was bored one night earlier this week and decided that none of the existing Magic-related Android apps worked quite how I wanted to. Naturally, the solution was to write my own.
I’ve wanted to put together an app using Carson Brown‘s DialView component (which is based on work by Ivan Memruk) for a while. It’s a really intuitive interface for number selection on a touchscreen, and it turns out that it’s way better than a slider if you need a precise number. It’s basically the touch-screen version of the click wheel found on the iPod Classic.
The app I’m writing is a simple Life tracker. Right now it’s just the DialView with an attached label for displaying your life total. You turn the dial, the total changes. That’s it. All that really needs to be added is a poison total and some polish and I’m done.
The other thing that I acquired recently for work is a business card scanner. The software is pretty neat, it does OCR on the text and then intelligently assigns it to fields in a contact card (e.g. email, address, job title). However, I have another use for it. I’m going to scan my Magic collection, and write a script that auto-generates a card library for me. I was quite excited when it arrived…
A good friend of mine named Carson Brown just released his first app on the Android Market under the Inflatable Apps umbrella. Called Run On, it is designed to read out text messages (and who sent them) as they arrive if you’re doing something else such as running, cycling, or driving. Here’s the homepage for the app, go check it out!
For my new job I was given a brand new Macbook Pro. This caused both joy and trepidation. I’m always excited by new tech toys, but the last time I used a Mac was in secondary school when the iMac looked like a giant piece of neon fruit. Since then I’ve been primarily Windows-based with occasional Linux use. So how have I been dealing with this new environment?
My new job is keeping me extremely busy, but I want to collect my thoughts after working my first week at Shopify. Here’s a quick breakdown of things that happened over the last 7 days:
This post probably sounds like a recruitment pitch for Shopify, but I’m honestly having a really great time working there. The Reddit thing seems trivial, but I’m finding that my actual work is more interesting than reading rage comics1.