rizwan

Honest question: How is it that so many of my fellow developers find the time and motivation to build side projects?

What draws you to work on something on the side? Is it more satisfying than what you do in your Real Job™

I often feel guilty for expending additional mental energy on a project other than what I'm working on. Like it takes away from what I should be doing. Is that uncommon?

Dell 3007WFP (2560x1600) to the right of a (raised up) 15" retina MBP (effectively 1440x900)

"The best way to learn something is to teach it to someone else."

I learned that in college, and it's held true for many of the things I've tried to learn.

I think that's why it's so useful to talk through a difficult problem with another developer. You often arrive at an answer as you're discussing it.

Screenshots for the lazy?

Very very cool. First feature request: Support for Objective-C syntax highlighting :)

The page states that ARC is not yet ready, but keep in mind this article was written in Sept 2011.

I think ARC is definitely ready nowadays, given the number of libraries and projects using it.

Shouldn't the positive choice (Yes) be on the right? Otherwise, great visuals!

FWIW, this is one of the things that Big Nerd Ranch makes you do when learning iOS development (probably all their programming classes).

It is one of the key things that helps you get a "feel" for writing code, imo.

And yet, Google's Objective-C style guide (adopted by many) is uncompromising in its 80-character line length:

http://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/objcguide....

Anyone care for a synopsis? I read the first 2 posts, but couldn't do the other walls-of-texts. Perhaps later.

Looks like http://www.treater.com/

For folks thinking about using Socket.IO for websockets, it works very well, but remember that most open-source implementations ONLY implement WebSockets and NONE of the other fall-backs that are in the Socket.IO spec. So without some work, these libraries are often useless for mobile development, for instance.

Being WebSocket-based only has the unfortunate consequence of not working well on cellular networks, because some like Verizon will often blackhole WS connections.

This means that if you are building a real time app that has any chance to be used on mobile, you'll always need a fallback.

tweiss, by actually building the full-stack (front-end to back-end and deployment/ops), you've compressed the "out-of-comfort-zone" feeling all programmers eventually face from years to a few months. Bravo!

Once you're in "signature crosshairs", you can actually click anything that looks like a horizontal line (like signature lines), and a properly-sized signature will be drawn.

Isn't this what the new Do Not Disturb feature in IOS6 addresses? http://www.apple.com/ios/ios6/

Also, all iPads have the switch above the volume button as a mute button already for notifications like this.

(Note: yes, I know most people have changed this setting (back) to be an orientation-lock, but this guy's new to iPads so I'm assuming he didn't change the setting)

That neon bright light that shines when it's on is about the only thing that seems distracting from the design.

Would be curious to see real world photos of it, because that light has the potential to cheapen the rest of the design (i'm thinking of lights like this: http://www.chelseadeals.co.uk/product_info.php?cPath=27&...)

Great demo, and I'm glad we are starting to explore web apis outside of http, but let's not forget that Websockets generally fail over mobile networks due to the use of invisible proxying by carriers, etc.

One of the very real issues with WebSockets is that they don't work often over mobile networks, with invisible proxying, etc.

Unless you go with something like Socket.IO, WebSockets alone would never be a viable solution.

So this is a native web app wrapper?

BTW, the viewport size for the page is in logical pixels, the page currently looks shrunken in retina iPad :)

The TL;DR version:

The developer is responsible for a lot of the screen dimension differences using flexible layout and progressive enhancement/degradation.

"Retina" scaling is fixed at 1.0, 1.4, and 1.8 (100%, 140%, 180%).

Yeah, the issue seems to be that, when an iPhone loads the page containing the video, PBS does some user agent checking to determine what video source to provide.

When iPhone goes to AirPlay, it provides the AppleTV with the only stream source it received.

Ideally, either the HTML5 video tag could define multiple streams based on size (similar to how it can provide different streams based on video format), but since that's not in the spec, I suppose we have to conjure up a "standardized" convention.

> This is why I don't believe in computer science degrees.

Computer science degrees aren't about learning a computer language; they're a ramp to learning about and practicing programming.