world according to ack ~ adam karas » apple

Learning to program for iPhone/iPad

ack — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 21:18:51 +0000

So after a long hiatus on this blog, I will be starting to post again by documenting some of my fun with learning to program for the iPhone and iPad. This should be interesting since I have never been a programmer but have some experience with “light programming” like HTML, Perl, and some PHP. My experience has mostly been on the markup language side and mostly related to hacking away at existing code, QA tweaking etc. I am very interested to see if this old dog can learn any new tricks.

So I am starting with the Apple Developer Videos and this book:

Wish me luck!

(And somewhere along the way I need to clean up this blog template.. ugg)

Afro Samurai Resurrection iPhone wallpaper

ack — Tue, 10 Feb 2009 17:51:26 +0000

It’s been quite awhile since I’ve blogged, but I couldn’t resist this little bit of promo for something very cool, as well as rant against some poor implementation. But recently, Afro Samurai’s long awaited return has been released, Afro Samurai Resurrection. If you have not seen the original SpikeTV animated manga/cartoon, you really should rent it/netflix it.

So along with Season 2, there is a PSP3 and Xbox game, and a music album, and of course quite a few marketing downloads. Afro Samurai is wonderful eye candy so this is all good, and these guys have even gone so far as to create iPhone downloadable wallpapers… which gives me all sorts of warm and fuzzy feelings inside. So what do I do as a well conditioned consumer, I jump on my trusty iPhone to download said images, what could be cooler. And what do I discover, the site navigation is all based on Flash, and as anyone who uses an iPhone or maybe read mac news, Flash does not yet work on the iPhone (don’t get me started on this one). Ok, fine, I think, easy to click on a news article and see the house ad for the wallpapers… which I do. And lo and behold, what do I discover, the downloads page (for iPhone wallpapers and desktop wallpapers only) is totally Flash based. I give this a big FAIL. Does no one actually try and test a website anymore. Did no one actually think, “hey, let’s actually download this onto an iPhone from the site!”. Alas, these guys couldn’t be bothered with a non-Flash version, or gasp, text navigation links on the bottom, so here are the images for those of you that happen to land here.

Plaxo on a Mac Mini Causes Screen Freeze

ack — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 03:21:36 +0000

The short answer is… don’t install it. Spent the last couple of days trying to figure out why my Mac Mini looked to be freezing / crashing. Finally figured it out when I killed Plaxo and my machine lag disappeared. I have an older Mac Mini running an Intel Core Duo, and even the max 2 Gb ram was no match for the system+network hog.

So if your system seems to be frozen, but your mouse still moves, it might just be Plaxo 3. Plaxo used to be a much better app, but it seems so useless and annoying now. Good luck Comcast.

iPhone Home Screen Custom Icon

ack — Wed, 07 May 2008 22:32:56 +0000

It’s so easy it’s trivial. All you need to do is save a 45×45 pixel png file as “apple-touch-icon.png” in your web root.

Thanks to ADT.

WordPress for iPhone

ack — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 00:06:06 +0000

Just added the iWPhone Plugin for WordPress, that creates a really nice looking version of this blog if you are using an iPhone, like I am prone to do.

Totally easy to install and looks painless so far, took all of 2 minutes and didn’t require me to touch my current theme… beautiful.