I am proud to announce that Weatherwise and Photomash received honorable mentions in the annual Best App Ever Awards for 2011 in the following categories for Android devices:
In its fourth year, 148Apps bestows the Best App Ever Awards to promote apps that are “truly the best, not just the best-selling,” as chosen by 148Apps readers.
At Local Wisdom, we strive to deliver great design utilizing the latest technology. Weatherwise and Photomash are certainly testaments to that mission. If you haven’t had the chance to download Photomash, visit the iTunes App Store or the Android Marketplace. The Weatherwise app for iOS and Android can be found there as well.
Zepto.js is a minimalist JavaScript framework for modern web browsers*, with a jQuery-compatible syntax.
The goal: a 5-10k library that handles most basic drudge work with a nice API so you can concentrate on getting stuff done.
Zepto’s primary focus is on mobile devices, where small file sizes and tapping into the latest browser features matter most for fast loading and optimal runtime performance.
*Zepto supports Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Opera and any mobile WebKit-based browser, including iOS Mobile Safari, Android browser, HP webOS browser, Blackberry Tablet OS browser and others. Zepto does not support Internet Explorer.
One of the toughest obstacles when debugging your code is not being able to update it live on your browser and see what is going on when it is going on. If you are a developer, you most likely heard of the life saving tool called Firebug – a plugin for Firefox (and Chrome also has a Lite version) where you can inspect, debug and change code on the fly. But did you know that you can use firebug on your iPad and iPhone? Martin Kool shares his technique for using a javascript bookmarklet to open Firebug right on your Safari browser. I believe that web development debugging for the iPad just got easier.
Here is how you do it (from martinkool.com):
Surf to this page on your iPad or iPhone and bookmark it
Rename the bookmark to “Firebug”. As you can see, the URL is uneditable right now
Tap on this textarea
Tap it again, choose “Select All” followed by “Copy”
Edit the Firebug bookmarklet, remove the URL and paste the bookmarklet
Choose “Done” (on the virtual keyboard) and you’re all set
Opening the bookmarklet on any webpage should bring up the familiar plugin at the bottom of your screen.
It compares some aspects of developing natively for Android from the perspective of an iOS (and Windows Mobile) developer. Very well done and ties in a bit of the history of some of the differences. For example some UI consequences of changing from a smart phone OS that is more like a Blackberry to something that would compete with an iPhone.
Some nice tidbits for those developing native apps for both platforms.
This was a blast from the past. Just found out about this
from joystiq.com. Sarien.net has a bunch of
Sierra adventure games that are playable on the iPad. You can play
Space Quest, King’s Quest, and Leisure Suit Larry. These kids don’t
know how good they have it with their Wii’s and PS3s on hi-def
TVs.
Eric Williamson showed me the demo of this earlier this week and this is a great use of augmented reality, unbelieveable!
“A new iPhone app known as Word Lens will translate Spanish or English phrases instantly on the screen when you point your device’s camera lens at the foreign language words.”
It’s been a few years now that Apple Keynote has taken over as my presentation software of choice. Now the bar is being raised where it might also be my wireframing tool of choice.
Enter Keynotopia a place where you can buy very affordable Keynote templates (or stencils in OmniGraffle) for wireframing an array of apps and devices.
Since Keynote is a presentation tool you can create links to other pages of the document.
This will be tested the next time we do wireframes!
For those of you who know me and my DJing past, this will be no surprise. As I was going browsing through the app store I came across Baby Scratch.
It’s basically a turntable with a break beat and sound effects record playing. You can fluidly scratch the record. You can add a beat in the background so you can scratch over it. You can also record your own voice and scratch that. Best of all the app is f-r to the double e (free).
I’ve had the itch to scratch for a long time so I pulled out the iPad and put the app to work. Unfortunately, you can’t scratch your own songs. This is where Flair Scratch comes in.
Flair is a similar app made by the same company. This time you can pick songs from you iPod library to scratch as well as play in the background. Flair is for the OS4. Flare Scratch is $4.99 in the app store.
I wouldn’t DJ a party with these, but it’s a fun time waster!
The new stuff coming out in Cascading Style Sheets and HTML is amazing. What required mounds and mounds of code can now be done in a few lines of text. What required graphics can not be done programmatically on the browser. Here are three great examples:
Alex Girón and his Solar System
Alex is a Web Developer and Graphic Designer out of Virginia. He is the creative director from nclude. He set out to explore the border-radius features and came up with something interesting. This working model of the Milky Way Solar system shows the planets using border-radius and their orbits and revolutions using –web kit animation properties and transform.
Jeff Batterton and his iPhone
Jeff is a User Interface designer and he’s coded an iPhone with a working world clock with NO IMAGES WHATSOEVER. Click on the image to see what I’m talking about. Its all carefully crafted markup and CSS. Keep in mind that this will only display correctly on a webkit browser and has only been tested in Google Chrome. It seems to look fine on Safari 5, but not FireFox 3.6 (definitely not Internet Explorer).
I am proud to announce that Weatherwise and Photomash received honorable mentions in the annual Best App Ever Awards for 2011 in the following categories for Android devices:
