Articles

Many of the times we find ourselves in a meeting room with a team discussing about the product plans. People discuss about existing features, new features, ways to pull more traffic to the site, upcoming SEO processes etc. Everything to make a product more successful and valuable. How do you measure success or value? Everyone uses different perspectives and merits for measuring these. Marketing team would think of it in terms of total traffic home page is generating, number of likes on social media. Management would think of it in terms of number of registrations, downloads. Anything and everything that…

If you have placed all git repositories in single parent folder like me. This is for you. Update all your repositories in single command. find . -type d -name .git -exec sh -c "cd "{}"/../ && pwd && git pull" ; and then wait for a long time… 

We typically use one of the following text search predicates with costs in terms of performance, Beginwith, Endswith ($) These are the cheapest queries that are possible in case of text  comparisons. In these cases first or last few characters are checked with the text and if the match is not found, code exits.  Equality ($) We can consider this query as similar to that of Beginswith, which checks all the characters in text. Contains ($$) This is bit more expensive as it keeps checking for a match in whole text length. Matches ($$$) This is the most expensive query in case…

Fetch only what is required. Your UI can not show all the data that exists in the table anyway. Don’t put extra pressure on core data to fetch data what you are not displaying on the screen. Every app has a different requirement for performance. You need to test the performance of your app by experimenting with batchSizes and fetching objects as faults. If you are not going to update or read managedObject relations, try using NSDictionaryResultType for fetchRequest result type. Specify which properties needs to be fetched. Use attribute types smartly, don’t use string for all. Numerical operations are always…

Saw this amazing example of bad UX today, the directory of pantaloons shop! Its supposed to be a simple map of the floors. why does ground floor is at the top and top floor at the bottom? Directional arrow next to ground floor suggests that if you go down, you reach the first floor! How can people mess up such a simple thing?

Upgraded my Mid 2009 MacBook Pro 15” to 8GB DDR3 RAM and 64GB OCZ Octane S2 drive… Faced few issues initially, system wasn’t booting up from new SSD. Tried to downgrade EFI firmware from 1.7 to 1.6. It didn’t help much. Then updated SSD firmware to latest using firmware tools… And know what, it just works!  Currently running ML 10.8.3 with EFI Firmware 1.7 without any issues. Here is the link that helped a lot…  http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?104990-NEW!!-OCZ-Bootable-Toolbox-Mac-Edition

Really??? Whats bad with these apps? Bad Types, not at all readable on the device. Specially Kings XI punjab app! Almost none of the apps really do follow UI guidelines F**ked up tab bars F**ked up control alignments Ok I understand about having brand colour apps but still like this??? Look at RCB app, I mean really? You really want me to install that shit on iPhone?

I personally think if something needs a walkthrough maybe its time to redesign the interaction. It generally means the app is over-designed, i.e. instead of solving the problem, we are trying to delight the user more.  Ofcourse delighting the user is must, but it should come through better usability and interaction first, and then through UI. I feel by adding walkthrough we try to make user feel that its rocket science, when it really should not be. Mailbox app gestures originated from app… Clear. Mailbox guys took it one step further. I loved the app at first look and kept…

Few days back, I had this awesome wallpaper on my iMac of Crysis 3 Hunter holding a gun, nicely made wallpaper with lot of thought given to detailing. Our graphic designer was passing by happen to see the wallpaper, He came towards the screen touched the screen where there were scratches on the gun, and admired the detailing…. “look at those scratches!” The other day, I found my old iPod classic while cleaning a drawer, first ever Apple product I bought. It has a dent on the side. First thing I did was touching that dent and remembering how that…

Command to find out how many lines of code you wrote in a folder tree… Following example is for ObjC iOS projects. find . -name "*.[h|m]" | xargs cat | wc -l

Everyone knows the application DrawSomething and the kind of quick success this application has seen is beyond imagination. This is the application where users can draw doodles and share with friends live. It is something very different and subtle the way you communicate with your friends live. There is human factor involved in this application. This is what i think is the key point of success. There are applications that allow you to create drawing on devices and also to share with your friends over various social networks. This just clears your table and puts a simple idea of sharing…