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chrisdroukason Amazon Fire TV

The same is (sorta) true of Apple TV. You can use an iOS device as a remote via WiFi.

chrisdroukason iOS 7 only is the only sane thing to do

Which is pretty lame considering xcassets supports an image 'subtype' called R4 that's designed for 4" screens.

chrisdroukason Time Person of the Year 2013

>Francis is merely extremely conservative...

I think it was sarcasm.

chrisdroukason Build Tools for iOS

How does Travis CI stack up against the builtin continuous integration new to Xcode 5?

chrisdroukason The Food-Truck Business Stinks

>>(I forget ther name)

Uber.

chrisdroukason Airport Security Is Killing Us

It's relative to the population size in a few cases, though. Here in DC the homicide rate was 21.9 per 100,000 in 2010. We also have a extremely restrictive firearm policies - city law prohibits carrying guns either openly or concealed.

Despite policy, DC also had the highest rate of homicide by firearm: 35.4 per 100,000 in 2005.

http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/05cius/data/table_05.html

chrisdroukason Icon fonts and their usefulness in iOS development

   Hinting and the Web
   Webfonts are not currently offered.

chrisdroukason Today's XKCD: Microsoft

And Fa¢ebook doesn't have the same impact.

chrisdroukason Tons of iPhones deactivated, is this a sneaky way to force us buy an iPhone 5?

Sure, the dialog iOS provides is not particularly friendly. To fix this issue:

   Download iOS 6 GM from developer.apple.com/ios
   Restart your device is DFU mode
   Option click 'Restore' and select the iOS 6 GM .ipa from its download location
   Restore.

chrisdroukason Tons of iPhones deactivated, is this a sneaky way to force us buy an iPhone 5?

No, the iOS6 beta (3 and 4) expired on September 30 at 8PM EST.

Massively inconvenient, but not a 'sneaky way to force us to buy an iPhone 5'.

chrisdroukason The Lowest Fare? Ask the Crowd

ITA Software (by Google) — would it be reasonable to guess that this flight tracker is built into http://flights.google.com?

chrisdroukason Firefox 18 Gets Support for Retina Display

Preferably it would be CSS.

   .upArrow {
   width: 0; 
   height: 0; 
   border-left: 6px solid transparent;
   border-right: 6px solid transparent;
   border-bottom: 6px solid #828282;
   }

chrisdroukason For crisp edges, use anything but crispEdges

Interesting.

If I'm reading this right, the result shouldn't be surprising (though maybe inappropriately named?). Consider:

  {shape-rendering: crisp-edges;}
  Indicates that the user agent should attempt to emphasize the contrast between clean edges of artwork over rendering speed and geometric precision. To achieve crisp edges, the user agent might turn off anti-aliasing for all lines or possibly just for straight lines which are close to vertical or horizontal. Also, the user agent might adjust line positions and line widths to align edges with device pixels.

Would a circle not be a graphic you'd want to be geometrically precise, making {shape-rendering: geometric-precision;} the most appropriate choice?

chrisdroukason The Flat Design Era

> Civilization IV voice-over guy

That would be Leonard Nimoy - best known for his role as Spock in the original Star Trek.

chrisdroukason Show HN: The App Design Handbook

That was a very easy link to miss (even though you can click the image of the book as well to display the sample PDF) — maybe consider elevating the download text?

chrisdroukason A Faster Facebook for iOS

Is it me, or is line spacing on the iPad really tight?

chrisdroukason Designing for A Retina Web

Very true, handling accessibility issues is a challenge when using icon fonts. In certain browsers, the ARIA specifications suggest you could do something like

  <button aria-label="Close">X</button>

to deal with screen readers to an extent. There's also the (pretty much completely unsupported) ACSS property

  {speak: none;}

in conjunction with

  <aria-hidden="true">

and then describe the icon with an offscreen span, pretty much as described here: http://css-tricks.com/html-for-icon-font-usage/#jump-alone. Still not even close to a good solution, though. If you have any insight into better handling icon fonts, I'd love to know.

chrisdroukason Designing for A Retina Web

I can't speak toward the other icon font resources the article mentioned, but IcoMoon did a great job taking SVG files and turning them into a font. The app supports custom character mapping and comes with a sample icon library.

App: http://keyamoon.com/icomoon/#toHome

Sample library: https://github.com/Keyamoon/IcoMoon--limited-

chrisdroukason Feast Your Ears On Fresh Jams From Musicians You Love At Hipset (YC S12)

I'd love to check it out, but it's crashing the page in both Chrome 22.0.1229.6 dev and Safari 6 on Mountain Lion.

chrisdroukason Show HN: Weekend project, Thankst. Thank and be thanked

Really well done.

Just an FYI: When you're using the Facebook API to get profile photos, specifying ?type=large gives you a photo with variable width and height.

What you're then doing with CSS to display it (giving it a fixed width and height of 128px with a 64px border-radius) is distorting the picture.

chrisdroukason Uber Boston Has Been Served

It seems they're referring specifically to measurement systems, as in a taxi service. The preceding sentence in the ruling is:

"The major problem at this time is the fact that there are no established measurement standards for its current application and use in determining transportation costs similar to that of approved measurement systems for taximeters and odometers."

chrisdroukason Introducing Pulse for Web

Super high information density for browsing followed by a clean and simple reading experience.

Well executed, congrats to the Pulse team.

chrisdroukason 3D slider jQuery plugin

Strange, I had the opposite experience on an iPad 3. The 3D animations performed way better than the 2D ones - a bit of tearing on the sliders.

chrisdroukason Unsupervised Billboard Detection

Watch Google incorporate this into Street View to deliver billboard advertisements.

chrisdroukason Apple Releases Final Mac OS X Mountain Lion to Developers

Eh. OS X has been on somewhat of a tick-tock update cycle since Leopard. Add features then refine them.

Also, it's twenty bucks.

chrisdroukason The iPhone and Disruption: Five Years In

True, but those points don't yield the PC an inherently superior computer from a utility standpoint.

Despite what you've said, non-PC devices are for core tasks (email, web browsing, messaging, etc.,) a highly-refined, elegant and convenient experience for many end users. Given a person who uses their computer almost entirely for the tasks I've mentioned (and there are plenty of this type of user), would it not be right to recommend them an iPad or other tablet?

What, exactly, would that user be gaining from a full-fledged desktop or notebook PC? That question is getting increasingly difficult to answer.

chrisdroukason Die Zeit Uses Six Months of Mobile Data to Profile Green Politician

To be clear, Malte Spitz released this data voluntarily to Zeit. The accompanying article is available here:

http://www.zeit.de/digital/datenschutz/2011-03/data-protecti...

chrisdroukason Facebook forces all users over to Facebook.com e-mail addresses

There has to be a corollary floating around about sufficient user bases.

chrisdroukason Microsoft. Kicks. Ass.

Moreso, there aren't any specifications released with the announcement as far as I know.

Before anyone says 'specs don't matter anymore! End-users don't care!' — knowing nothing about a device is far worse.