My new iPhone App: Parks Three Step

I just released a new app to the App store, and is now available to download. It's a Park's Three Step app, similar to the one I have on the EyeDock website. 

It's been a long time since I made a new iPhone app. I wrote the original EyeDock and CLCalcs on a very early version of iOS (it was iPhone OS at the time). Back then, iPhones only had 3.5" screens and iPads didn't exist.

I've opened up XCode and modified those apps a few times since their inception, but mostly just to fix things. It usually worked like this:

1. new version of iOS comes out
2. Crap, my app doesn't work!
3. Hurriedly,  with a thin sheen of sweat on my brow, try to fix app before I got too many complaints

My apps were pretty much like an old watch: I fixed them when they broke, but I broke out in a cold swear whenever I opened them up and looked at the insides.

I decided a few months ago I really need to make some changes to the EyeDock app. I don't like the way it downloads its data, it's not optimized for the 4" iPhone screens, and I really need an iPad version. 

I'd stayed tuned to the developments in iOS and knew that things were evolving rapidly. In light of Apples has added or changed their APIs, in conjunction with the major changes I wanted to make to my old apps, I thought it might be best to relearn the ropes. What better way to do this than to make a new app from scratch.

In conclusion, I bring you the Parks Three Step app. It's my first universal app (it works on both the iPhone and iPad). I too advantage of many of the new things that have come along with the last 3-4 versions of iOS, including parallax, blocks, autolayout, and ARC.  These things may not mean a lot to my non-iOS-developer readers, but this essentially means I'm caught up on the modern way of doing things.

Now time to rebuild that watch.

Bragging ... or marketing

This quote from Matt Gemmell hit home for me:

“It feels cruddy to share your work. it feels like you’re asking for a pat on the back, like the person who posts a selfie remarking on how ugly they are. it feels adolescent and needy, coupled with being exhibitionist and opening you up to ego-shattering pushback. It gets very slightly easier over time, but (in my experience), never really easy per se.”

— Matt Gemmell

I hate marketing. For one, I'd much rather spend my time making something. For two, I always feel like a braggart when I people's attention to something I've done. For three, promoting your creations always opens yourself up for criticism, some of which is hard to swallow.

Still, it's a necessary evil. I'm envious of people who can build things and keep it to themselves  For me the process of creation is very rewarding in itself, but I have to admit the good job!s and "way to go!'s are what keep me going. Furthermore, if you hope to make (or supplement) a living on your work you need to tell someone about it.

Matt's advice?

“Here’s the only piece of advice I can give: you just have to push past it. Ultimately, you have to write for yourself, not anyone else. What I mean is that you have to feel good about the work itself. Can I stand behind this? Am I glad to put my name to this? If you can answer “yes” to those questions, all the other things at least have a chance of following afterwards naturally.”

— Matt Gemmell

The Martian: A Novel

I just finished the novel The Martian, and I enjoyed it. The title may be a little off-putting to people who aren't fans of science fiction, so you'll have to accept my reassurance that this book is science-y and fiction-y, but is for the most part very grounded in reality.  That is, of course, if you can suspend any disbelief regarding mankind's ability to put together a manned mission to Mars.

The title character, Mark Watney, isn't a little green guy, he's an astronaut that suffers an accident during a Martian storm. His crew mates believe he is dead and are forced to evacuate the red planet while they can. However, Mark survives his injury and wakes up all alone. To make matters worse his communications equipment is also destroyed in the storm and no one even knows he's alive.

The good news (for him and us) is that Mark is a resourceful guy. He was the mission's botanist and, like all astronauts, well versed in engineering and chemistry. The book describes in great detail the science behind Mark's method's of tackling the problems that arise. The first problem? Find a way to grow enough food to keep him alive until the next Mars mission visits ~2 years later.

In the end, this book is a bit of a cross between Apollo 13 and The Castaway. If you enjoyed watching the engineers in Apollo 13 pull out their slide rules to solve problems you'll like this book. The author obviously gave a lot of thought to how things would work on Mars, what problems would arise, and how they could be solved. Some may be critical of the detailed technical descriptions of what Mark Watney is doing, I liked it, and the book is definitely a page turner.

The quest for orderly charging cables

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Like everyone else, my family has acquired more and more mobile devices. We each have an iPhone 5, we have a iPad 1, a Kindle, and I have a Samsung Galaxy phone through work.  Unfortunately we need at least 3 different types of cables (lightning, 30-pin, USB) to connect these gadgets. When we try to charge them our countertops look like the snake pit scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark. 

I kept trying to buy different devices to resolve this problem. Power strips. Outlet covers with USB jacks built in. The list goes on. However, these things did nothing to solve my problem: I still had a lot of long cables going everywhere. 

Then it hit me that the mess was due to having a lot of LONG cables. If the cables were short things would be a lot tidier. After some brief Amazon searches I found the perfect hub for me, the Anker 25W 5-Port USB Desktop Charger. 

It has a nice 5 foot cord, so I can have one single cord that allows me to place the hub out of the way against a wall. It has specific ports for iPhones and iPads as well as Android devices. Most importantly, this means that the iPad port has the higher (2.1) amperage for faster charging (if you've ever tried to charge an iPad with an iPhone plug you'll notice that it charges very slowly).

To complete my quest for cable orderliness I bought some short USB lightning, micro-USB cables, and 30-pin (old iPad) cables from Amazon and Monoprice.. Below is the result.

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The "Rate this app" controversy

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There's been a lot of buzz in the iPhone developer world about Rate this App dialog boxes. You know the ones I mean, the ones that pop up and say would you like to review this app? and give you some buttons like yes no or later.
The controversy started with a John Gruber link to a post saying that we should all give one star reviews when they have one of these dialog boxes in the apps. Instapaper developer Marco Arment jumped in with his thoughts, which essentially came down to "don't do it". They continued with some discussion on their podcasts The Talk Show and Accidental Tech Podcast.
However, I think they slightly missed the point on why developers do this. They seem to be under the impression that developers were trying to get as many reviews as possible in an effort to gain the ranking systems in iTunes. 

I am now a little embarrassed to admit it, but I have one of these rating dialogs in my app. My goal, however, was never to get more ratings. My goal was to get good ratings. And by good I don't just mean positive, but also well-thought-out. One of the great things about these popups is that you can choose to show them to the people who are actually using your app by only showing the dialog box after the app has been opened a certain number of times. That way you you'll hopefully get a review from someone who is finding your creation useful. As the app store ratings are riddled with ridiculous comments like "I'm giving this dictionary app 2 stars because it doesn't stream live music", hopefully some informed reviews from experience users will balance things out.

On the other hand, I definitely see the points behind these rants against "rate this app" dialogs. It's a bad user experience. When someone opens your app it's to DO something, and that something is being interrupted. When I added this this "feature" it wasn't a very common practice at the time. Furthermore, I set it to only pop up when the user opened a the new version of the app for the 30th time or so. Since I have made very few updates over the last three years my users have seen this popup at most 2-3 times over the last 3 years.

However, this practice has become a lot more prevalent. Now that so many apps are doing it the cumulative effect is annoying. I think I'll remove this in my next update, but no promises when that will be . . .

Year Zero

I finished Year Zero last night and I thought I'd mention it here because I found the premise to be pretty amusing

In short, humans are really really good at music. For some reason our position in our galaxy makes us really good at recognizing what makes great music. Mind you, these aliens are supposedly "refined", and they're good at everything else. They just suck at music.

Year Zero: A Novel

By Rob Reid

Anyway, at some point in the 70's they discovered Earth music and, well, they became obsessed. Quickly every alien in the universe had the entire Earth's library on their little-green-guy version of their iPods.

However, in their delirious excitement, they didn't pay for it. And, as refined species, they are honor bound to obey the native planet's laws. Unfortunately for them Earth's recording industry somehow thinks pirating a song justifies a $150K penalty. Multiply this by all the aliens in the universe and you get a pretty big number. Then, multiply that number by all the songs produced by all the countries on Earth (except in North Korea) and you get an inconceivable number.

As a result, the aliens are indebted to the Earth for more money than exists in the universe. So, a rogue alien labor union decides to surreptitiously help Earthlings find a way to destroy themselves.

Enter an mid-level music industry attorney and his love interest and, well, hijinks ensue.

Oh, a bit of a spoiler, but it turns out a retired CEO of a huge company that makes operating systems for the majority of the computers in the world is an alien. And he's single handedly responsible for creating a drastic slowdown in the technological advancement of humankind. I'd be lying if I said I hadn't suspected that . . .

CLs and EMRs: A better way

I wrote a post on EyeDock about how I feel contact lens modules should work in EMRs, complete with an interactive mockup. Please go there to check it out, but I'll include the video walkthrough here. 

EyeDock's new soft lens searches

Well, I've been pretty quiet lately. Things have been a little busy at home, and I've been spending what free time I have finishing up my new soft lens searches for EyeDock. It's taken me about 18 months (way too long!), but I'm pleased with the results. 

I've written a short page on EyeDock about the new features in these searches so I won't repeat here. I will, however, include the screencast I made introducing the new searches.  

I'd love to hear your feedback! 

A new feature for EyeDock's soft lens searches: Enter a refraction and EyeDock will take care of vertexing to the corneal plane, transposing (if needed), and will find appropriate lenses. Even more helpful, it will find the closest available power for the chosen lens and give an estimation of the best potential VA.